Nadezhda Teffi has not been on my radar of Russian literature. Like most readers, I am well aware of Chekhov, Tolstoy and Gogol, but that’s where my knowledge stops. I feel that getting to know Teffi through her anthology of short stories Other Worlds – Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints has opened my eyes to entirely new possibilities of reading. Her stories are funny, yet heartbreaking. Light to read, yet dark at the core. Simply told, yet beautiful. Teffi’s powerful writing has gained her fans as different as Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin, secured her a place at the top of the Russian literary scene at the beginning of the 20^th century and has now brought her back to a well-deserved spotlight.

Other Worlds brings together stories originally published in several collections, and which center mainly on mysticism, the supernatural and the uncanny. On the surface, that is. Because Teffi writes how Russian folk tales barge into daily life, of blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy, of existential anxieties plaguing the lives of women. Not very much unlike modern Western writers such as Virginia Woolf and Shirley Jackson, whose understanding of the disquiet of women’s lives shines through their writing. Woolf is more on the political side and Jackson more on the domestic, while Teffi uses the supernatural, sure. But their stories uncover the same hauntings, which are weaved into the fabric of everyday experience. Teffi uses the supernatural to paint a world where the past sweeps into the present and where memory and perception ring truer than what might be perceived as “objective” reality.

wild evening (the book of june, 1931)

Everything was frightening. Night – a wild night – was setting in. There wasn’t a living soul anywhere. The wind howled. And I was alone in the world, calling out in a deep voice from the top of a black scaffold.

An unnamed female narrator who can be assumed to be rich is buying a tarataika, “a miniature English charabanc”, from a peddler. Some days later she has her horse, Raven, harnessed to the carriage and goes on a visit to Gorushka, a nearby estate, which she finds deserted. On the way back, it’s dark and the horse gets unsettled. The lady finds herself in need to take shelter at a monastery guesthouse, but she can’t seem to find a way to communicate with the other patrons. Someone thinks she’s actually dead and “a long-haired being” is believed to be the plague itself. Reality seems to split between belief and superstition.

The story plays with the idea of perception – how fear often emerges not just from the supernatural itself but from human psychology, suggestion, and expectation. The supernatural element does not overwhelm the story, it is actually barely visible. The people in the guesthouse believe the young long-haired man to be the personification of the plague, an effect which is intensified by the unrest of the narrator and of her horse.

water spirit (witch, 1936)

The town was just thirty versets from the railway station, and it was forest, bogs, and more forest all the way. Rickety wooden bridges dancing across wild streams. Backwoods. The back of beyond. Dreary, dreadful, godforsaken.

Because of her husband’s job, Klaudia Petrova and her husband move to a remote village in the back of the woods. Her husbands is away on business and leaves Klaudia with only Marya, the old maid, as company. A few days later a new maid appears, whose name is also Klaudia, and tells Klaudia that her husband sent her. The old and the young maid don’t really get along and each of them starts telling Klaudia stories about the other. The mistress of the house soon loses trust in both of them and finds herself increasingly mistrusting everything she hears.

The story blurs the line between folklore and psychological unease, using the supernatural to reflect deep anxieties. Marya shows the mistress of the house how the young maid is bathing in the river, but Klaudia sees only an old man by the river. The atmosphere is eerie, and the reader is left unsure who to believe. The mistress, stranded in the middle of nowhere? The old maid, who is said to have killed her husband? Or the young maid, who apparently bathes in the river at night? That depends of course on which side of reality the perceptions of the reader lie.

yavdokha (the lifeless beast, 1916)

It was a long time since she had seen her son. He was working in the city, far away. And now this letter from the army. Which meant her son had been taken to the war. Which meant he wouldn’t have sent her money for the holiday. Which meant no bread.

Yavdokha is an impoverished old woman living alone in a shabby house which shares a wall with a shed where she keeps her boar. Her only son has been taken to war and one day, when she receives a letter from the army, she needs to find someone to read it to her. Yavdokha can’t read and the village is celebrating a wedding. Everything is loud and confused and nobody really has time for the old woman and her letter. When somebody does in the end read the letter to her, the news of her son can’t reach her understanding.

The story immediately brought Chekhov to mind. The directness, the lack of decorative description, the immediacy of the pain which hits when you, as reader, understand what Yavdokha can’t understand. And the ending. Falling hard, final and merciless like the shot of a gun. There is no ambiguity and no supernatural in this story. But there are other worlds and facts of life.