How to Be an Exile: Place and Internality in Teffi’s ‘Istanbul in the Sun’

• In Event: Writing and Reimagining the Silver Age

Abstract

I am – improbably, unexpectedly – an exile. I left Russia (where I’d lived almost constantly since graduating from college in 1978) with nothing but a suitcase and my dog and arrived in a country I’d never been to (Latvia), where I did not know a word of the local language, and where I was acquainted with exactly one person.
But one of my first jobs here was a translation of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya’s (Teffi’s) marvelous piece “Istanbul in the Sun,” about her arrival as an exile in a place she’d never been to before. In six short chapters she describes her acquaintance with the city, its people, its life. And as she succumbs to the city’s magic, her tone and language changes from rather contemptuous and comical to lyrical and lush.
I would like to examine the internal process of emigration and how it is reflected in her language. Over her life she wrote prolifically, first about her life and the life of the country before she decided to leave; then about the long and harrowing road out of Russia; then the arrival, impressions, and adjustments in the several cities and countries she lived abroad. Her oeuvre is something of a study in how to be an exile.
I propose to look at all her “emigration” works and track, through her changing use of language, the stages of exile and the (changing) role that memory plays in the process.

Author

• Michele A. Berdy