the owner of a Chinese restaurant in a Thunder Bay curling rink
shed the past like a skin
Instead they hit home with elegant accuracy – as well as enough cutting sarcasm to make pops step aside
The landscape is cold and bleak with few landmarks
as the coming disaster slowly starts to unfold
Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi Social Science the owner of a ChineseEarly in her literary career Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In prerevolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and 30s, she wrote some of her finest stories in exile in Paris, recalling her unforgettable encounters with Rasputin, and her hopeful visit at age thirteen to Tolstoy after reading War and