Before embarking on a brief outline of the story of the story “Life and the Collar” by Taffy Nadezhda, I should tell you a little about herself - a wonderful creator of satirical masterpieces. As it turned out, the Petersburg poetess and writer Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya was printed under this pseudonym. She lived a rather long, interesting and fruitful life. Nadezhda adored Russian classics in the person of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Gogol. The years of her life - from 1872 to 1952. Nicholas II himself was a fan of her talent. After the revolution, she emigrated to Europe, lived in Germany and in France. The writer was buried at the Russian cemetery in Paris.
Creative features and works of Teffi
So, one of her many comedy stories is called Life and the Collar. Teffi will write it in 1910, but more on that later. Nadezhda Aleksandrovna gained popularity thanks to her satirical poems and feuilleton, because she was one of the regular employees of the St. Petersburg weekly magazines Satyricon and Rosehip. It was systematically published in such authoritative French publications as The Link, Coming Russia, Modern Notes, etc.
The writer Teffi was affectionately called the “Queen of Russian humor” of the 20th century. However, she was not a man of banal amusing humor. Her works lead the reader into the world of irony, diluted with sadness and witty observations of the everyday life of an ordinary person. Her literary arsenal contains such works as “Seven Lights”, “Humorous Stories” in two books, “Carousel”, “Smoke Without Fire”, “Black Iris”, “Evening Day”, “Silent Creek”, “All About love "," His strangers "," Life and the collar ", etc.
But by the 30s, Teffi began to get involved in the memoir genre. After emigration, satire and humor gradually begin to be useless for her in a sense, and then in creativity she turns more and more to philosophy. Out of her pen are essays about the great and influential people of their eras: Rasputin, Lenin, Kerensky, Kolontay, Repin, Kuprin, Bunin, Merezhkovsky, Meyerhold and many others.
“Life and the Collar” Teffi: review
Having become acquainted with this work, one would think that the fiction in it is somehow very implausible and even pretended. Well, can any inanimate object in the form of an ordinary collar completely subjugate and even change the life of its owner? Meanwhile, in real real life there are still examples that clearly show that very often people go about circumstances. This is precisely the main idea of ​​the work “Life and the Collar” by Taffy Hope. Just these unusual circumstances happened with the modest, honest and very weak-willed heroine Olga, who bought herself a new collar. Since then, she has been replaced, and she has become not her own. Collar took power over her, began to control her, and her life led to a sad outcome.
In this amazing work, there is indeed some exaggeration and grotesque, which makes realism too dubious.
"Life and the Collar" Teffi: a brief summary
Only a naive person thinks that he can always ultimately rule over his things. And sometimes it happens that some nondescript little thing rushes into his life, so everything will spin, turn upside down and, most terrible, not at all where it is needed.
The main character Olechka Rozova has been married for three years, she is a quiet, faithful and loving wife of an honest and decent person. And she is very modest and docile, not pretending to anything and always content with the smallest in life. However, she was like that until she accidentally ended up in the Gostiny Dvor manufactory's shop and bought herself a starchy ladies' collar with a drawn yellow ribbon.
Sharp turn
At home, she turned for a long time in front of the mirror, trying on her purchase differently. She tied the collar ribbon at the front or at the side. And then she realized that a new blouse suggests itself for this purchase, since she no longer looked at the old collar. Olya tormented herself with this thought all night, and in the morning she went to Gostiny Dvor and acquired a blouse with household money. But this does not end with a brief summary. “Life and the collar” Teffi fills even more intrigue.
When Olechka tried on everything, it seemed to her that the skirt does not fit into the style of clothing, and the collar definitely requires a pleated skirt, but Olechka no longer has money. But halfway through, she did not want to stop and laid down a bracelet and silver. Her soul was restless and creepy. She cried all evening, lying in bed, because the collar ordered new shoes.
The very next day she was left without a clock, but in new shoes. That very evening, pale and nervous, she stuttered and asked her grandmother for the money that she allegedly needed to rub her sick husband with cognac; the doctor prescribed this expensive procedure for him. The kind grandmother took pity and gave money. The next day, Olga added a new hat, belt and gloves to her stylish collar.
Debauchery
Then she ran around her friends asking for money to buy a striped sofa. In the end, he stood at home and annoyed her, her decent husband, and even the thieving cook. But all this was required by the ill-fated collar. Strange as it may seem, Olya ceased to live her life and completely subjugated herself to the collar.
We continue to retell the summary of the book “Life and the Collar”. Taffy specifically leads the reader to the fact that the collar, as it turned out, was sewn in an incomprehensible and confusing style, and the heroine, to please him, was completely baffled. “If you're English, then why do you need a yellow bow, what kind of debauchery,” she thought. Then she resisted the collar a bit, and then, as a weak and spineless creature, completely gave up, dropped her hands and began to swim with the current, which carried her away from a decent human life.
Olya cut her hair, began to smoke, and laughed out loud if she suddenly listened to all kinds of ambiguous speeches somewhere. Sometimes she received insights about the monstrous situation, especially at night, then she began to pray and cry. This mainly happened when the collar was erased. Day after day things began to go worse and worse, and then she decided to honestly confess her husband to everything, but he simply did not believe it and took it as a good and good joke.
Olga started the struggle with the collar, but she couldn’t throw it away, psychiatrists, for example, know that for nervous and weak people some of this kind of suffering and torment is simply necessary, they will not exchange it for any health and tranquility.
Whole life to smithereens
This does not end the summary of the book “Life and the Collar” by Taffy. Once, the heroine completely crossed the line of what is permitted for a married woman, finding herself with a collar on her neck at a party, who behaved very untied and forced her neck to turn left and right.
At dinner, a young student drew attention to her, shaking her leg under the table. And already further she found herself with a collar and a student in a cab, where the collar wanted to kiss and drop in a restaurant to drink liquor, listen to Romanians and all sorts of vulgarities. In general, Olga returned already in the morning. Her faithful husband was waiting for her at home and he opened the door for her. He looked nervous, his face was pale, in his hands he held pawnshop receipts. And then her husband began frantically asking her where she was, why she had pledged things and borrowed money from friends. Olga, with her hands in her pocket, whistled loudly, which she never knew how to do, and said: "I’ve profiled!"
As a result, an honest husband abandoned her and transferred to another city. And just the very next day, the collar in the washing of the washerwoman had lost somewhere.
Now the meek and modest Olga continues to serve in the bank and blush at the word "omnibus", because it looks like the word "hug."
Conclusion
Now you know the main idea of ​​the book and its summary. “Life and the Collar” by Teffi is really an amazing work that leads to different thoughts, but everyone can recognize themselves in Olga, and it’s good, if only at a certain stage.