Teffi

(1872 - 1952)

The pen name of Nadezhda Buchinskaya, Teffi is best known as a chronicler of Russian émigré life in Paris. Born into an esteemed St. Petersburg family in 1872, Teffi and her three sisters became writers. In her one-act play of 1907, The Woman’s Question, the author offered two possibilities for the origin of her name—a variation of a friend who was called “Steffi” by his servant, and the Rudyard Kipling verse: “Taffy was a Walesman / Taffy was a thief.” Teffi was so popular in prerevolutionary Russia that candy and perfume bore her name. Endowed by the critics with a reputation as a humorist, she countered the impression by saying she possessed “two faces, one laughing and one weeping.”