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Books

The Russian literary celebrity who begged Tolstoy to spare Prince Andrei

A review of Subtly Worded, by Teffi. Her remarkable short stories, full of characters that teeter on the edge of an abyss, deserve to be better known

19 July 2014

9:00 AM

19 July 2014

9:00 AM

Subtly Worded Teffi

Pushkin Press, pp.240, £12, ISBN: 978-1782270379

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous, and because it was the kind of name a ‘lucky’ fool would have; in Russia, fools were held to tell truths, albeit obliquely. ‘Teffi’ wrote for newspapers, most notably the Russian Word.

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