"It is not unusual for a writer to be pigeonholed, but few great writers have suffered from this more than Teffi. Several of her finest works are extremely bleak, but many Russians still know only the comic and satirical sketches she wrote during her first years as a professional writer, from 1909 until the First World War. Few critics and scholars have recognized the full breadth of her human sympathy, her Chekhovian ability to write equally convincingly about people from every level of society: illiterate peasants, respectable bourgeois, monks and priests, eccentric poets, bewildered émigrés and public figures ranging from Lev Tolstoy to Rasputin and Lenin"--