An Analysis Of Teffi’s Novels In The Visual Field Of Existentialism

Teffi（Тэффи,1872-1952）is a famous humorous satirist who is form Russia.She spent her life exploring human’s nature.Meanwhile she is a diaspora writer.She left home and went into exile in Paris.The experience of witnessing the First World War and the Second World War was very important in her mind.She had a lot of ideas in the face to troubled times and she composed story with these ideas.She drew a complicated social picture in her novels.She focused on the reality of the individual’s existence.What’s more,she paid attention to the alienation of human’s nature in the materialistic society.She had thought through perverse relationships in the individual’s daily life.Her novels reflected a situation that is nowhere to complain and to be free.Besides,she entered individual’s heart with compassion touch.She not only described loneliness hopelessness and so on,but also revealed the individual’s spirit crisis.Existentialism is one of the famous philosophical trends in the 20^thcentury.The philosophical trend was born in the crisis era.In this times,Nietzsche made a point that God was dead.Form then on,the individual lost the spiritual support.And the previous ethical code and value system could not restrain people’s behavior.Therefore,the human-centered Existentialism that advocated freedom emerged at the right moment.With the rise of Existentialism,the research on existentialism occurred in many fields.When Existentialism entered the literary field,it provided a new perspective for literary criticism.The richness of Teffi’s novels provides plenty of place for literary criticism.Therefore,this paper analyzes Teffi’s novels in the existentialist perspective.This paper takes the individual’s living circumstances as the breakthrough point and tries to make a detailed analysis about existence in Teffi’s novels by means of textual close reading and summarize.This paper is composed of four parts:The first part introduces the research actuality of Teffi’s novels and the view of existentialism philosophy and some representative personages viewpoint.Furthermore,this paper sorts out existentialism in Russia literature at the end of 19^thcentury and the beginning of 20^thcentury and expounds the significance and limitation of the topic.The second part discusses the factors of existentialism in Teffi’s novels form three aspects.The first aspect describes that people could not find spiritual support in perverse relationship.The second aspect reflects the individual’s questioning of his existence in the situation in which he has nowhere poured out his troubles and got free.The third aspect reveals the emotional experience of existence,such as loneliness nihility and so on.The third part discusses the profound thought of the absurd scenes created by Teffi in her novels,including Teffi’s investigation of the individual’s survival dilemma,the alienation of human nature and the problems of life and death.The fourth part discusses the meaning of the existentialism in Teffi’s novels.