Nadezhda Alexandrovna Teffi (; , Saint Petersburg – 6 October 1952, Paris) was a Russian humorist writer. Together with Arkady Averchenko she was one of the prominent authors of the magazine Novyi Satirikon. Biography Teffi was born as Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya into a family of gentry. Her year of birth is variously reported in the range 1871–1876. Her father, Alexander Vladimirovich Lokhvitsky, a lawyer and scholar, was prominent in Saint Petersburg society. Her mother, Varvara Alexandrovna Goyer, was of French descent, a lover of poetry, and familiar with Russian and European literature. Teffi was first introduced to literature when, as a young girl, she read Childhood and Boyhood by Leo Tolstoy, and the fiction of Alexander Pushkin. Her own first published poetry appeared in the journal The North in 1901 under her full name. In 1905 her first story, The Day Has Passed, was published in the journal The Fields, also under her full name. It had been written in 1904 and first submitted to the journal God's World, which had turned it down. In the years surrounding the Russian Revolution of 1905 she published stories with political overtones against the Tsarist government. In an answer to a questionnaire given to writers in 1911, Teffi said the following about her early literary work: Teffi married Vladislav Buchinsky, a Polish lawyer and judge, but they separated in 1900. They had two daughters and a son together. She was a contributor to the first Bolshevik journal The New Life, whose editorial board included writers like Maxim Gorky and Zinaida Gippius. Her best work appeared in Satiricon magazine and the popular journal Russkoye Slovo (Russian Word). In Russia she published many collections of poetry and short stories, and a number of one-act plays. She first used the pseudonym "Teffi" with the publication in 1907 of her one-act play The Woman Question. She provided two separate explanations of the name; that it was suggested to her in relation to a friend whose servant called him "Steffi", or that it came from the English rhyme "Taffy was a Welshman/Taffy was a thief." Initially a supporter of the October Revolution, she rapidly became disenchanted with the Bolsheviks, going so far as to refer to Lenin as "the mother-in-law of the Russian Revolution". In 1918 she left St Petersburg, and on the pretext of a theatrical tour, travelled with a group of actors across Russia and Ukraine, eventually