A Piece of Life

The book “A Piece of Life” by Nadezhda Teffi (1872–1952) includes stories about Russian Paris. The playful diminutiveness in the title conceals an inner tragic undertone: the sharp irony found in works by the “queen of Russian humor” is often intertwined with tenderness and pity. The book’s characters are emigrants—“odd, motley creatures, completely alien to each other, perhaps, from the very start, by their nature, mutually hostile”—who “come together and call themselves by the common name ‘we’.”

In addition to works from Teffi’s lifetime collections, the book also includes stories unknown to modern readers from emigrant periodicals, Teffi’s memoirs about her contemporaries, and recollections of the writer herself.