The daughter of a well-known lawyer and professor of criminal law, Teffi was born Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya (and later added Buchinskaya by marriage). Her sister was the poet Mirra Lokhvitskaya, and her brother was the general in command of the Russian Expeditionary Corps in France during World War I.
Poet, prose writer, and playwright, Teffi took her nom de plume from a story by Kipling. Her work first appeared during the 1905 Revolution in the satirical journals Zarnitsy, Krasnyi smekh, Seryj volk, and Signal and in the newspaper Novaya zhizn'. Her poetry often combines erotic themes with Eastern mysticism, blending two popular elements of the Silver Age. Her stories, for which she was most celebrated, are both delicate and humorous, somewhat in the manner of Chekhov.
