The Story of a Life

INTRODUCTION

Konstantin Paustovsky: Life and Work of a Forgotten Master

In June 1964, having just alighted from her plane in Moscow, Marlene Dietrich was mobbed by reporters. The actress had arrived in the Soviet Union for a concert tour, and the press was in a fever over the chance to interview the Hollywood legend. Bombarded by questions, Dietrich replied that there was only one thing she had to say: tell me all you know about Konstantin Paustovsky.

Dietrich had recently read a French translation of Paustovsky’s novella The Telegram and could not stop thinking about it and its author. For the next hour the reporters told her everything they knew about Paustovsky before Dietrich finally had to end the conversation and leave for her hotel.

On the night of the 13th, Dietrich performed for a gathering of writers, artists and actors at Moscow’s Central House of Writers. Before going out on stage, her interpreter came to the dressing room to tell Dietrich that Paustovsky was in the audience. She couldn’t believe it. ‘That’s impossible,’ she gasped, seized by an attack of nerves. She was unhappy with her performance that night, for she overexerted herself trying to make the best possible impression on the one man in Russia she had most wanted to meet.

After taking her final bow, Dietrich was instructed to wait a moment. Before she realised what was happening, there was Paustovsky slowly mounting the stairs onto the stage. Dietrich recalled later that she was so overcome with emotion she was unable to speak. All she could do to express her admiration for Paustovsky was to fall at his feet and bow her head. Paustovsky gently took her hands in his. The hall erupted in applause. A photographer captured the scene.

Paustovsky started to help Dietrich back up when his doctor ran to the stage. ‘Don’t even think of lifting her!’ he ordered. Paustovsky, now in his early seventies, had come to the concert straight from his hospital bed where he had been recovering from his second heart attack. The gentleman in Paustovsky wrestled with the voice of his doctor telling him to leave Dietrich on her knees and not strain his weak heart. He stood there for a few awkward moments until help arrived and Dietrich was returned to her feet.

The two spent the next several hours together talking about literature and art. ‘He is the best Russian writer I know,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘I regret that I did not meet him earlier.’ The following year Dietrich told the BBC that if she were cast away on a desert island and could bring only one book with her it would be Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life.fn1

At the time of her visit, Paustovsky was nearing the height of his fame. Four years later, upon his death at the age of seventy-six, he was not only Russia’s most treasured writer of the twentieth century but, according to his obituary in The Times, perhaps the most popular and admired living Soviet writer in both Britain and the United States.fn2

It is hard to exaggerate Paustovsky’s stature in the 1960s. Over his long career, he wrote dozens of short stories, novels, screenplays, dramas, fairytales and children’s books. Many of these works were made into films, and his stories served as the inspiration for three operas and a ballet. In 1941, he wrote the script for the film Lermontov, with a score by Sergei Prokofiev. The work that brought him the greatest fame, however, was his epic six-part memoir, The Story of a Life, published in the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1963. His memoir was devoured by generations of Russians, and Paustovsky himself became the object of intense fascination among his devoted fans. In his later years he settled in the town of Tarusa, south of Moscow, where he would write the final volumes of his memoir in a small hut perched on a high bluff. When word of Paustovsky’s writing shed got out, crowds began gathering in a nearby field in the hope of observing the master at work. Paustovsky soon found it impossible to concentrate and had to plant a long row of trees to afford him the necessary privacy to write.fn3

But it wasn’t just the writing that so endeared Paustovsky to his fellow Russians. It was his character as well. He was one of the few honest and uncompromised writers of the Soviet period. He managed not to join the Communist Party, to sign his name to any denunciation of another writer, or to sell out his talent to curry favour with Soviet officialdom. Paustovsky somehow found a way not only to survive the bloody horrors of twentieth-century Russia, but to live a life of basic decency and to preserve his inner freedom against the monstrous force of totalitarianism.

Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky was born in Moscow in 1892. His father, Georgy, a descendant of Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, the brilliant seventeenth-century military commander and hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, served as a statistician for the Russian railway. His mother, Maria Grigorievna Vysochanskaya, came from an impoverished noble family. Her father was employed at a sugar factory. Paustovsky’s grandfather on his father’s side had been a chumak, travelling back and forth between central Ukraine and the Black Sea with his oxcart hauling goods to market. One of his grandmothers was a Turk, the other a Pole. Like so many Russians, Paustovsky was a product of empire.

In 1898, the Paustovskys – little Kostik, as he was affectionately called, his older sister Galina (Galya), and his brothers Boris and Vadim – moved to Kiev, where Georgy took a job with the South West Railway. In 1904, Paustovsky was admitted to the prestigious First Kiev Gymnasium. Among his schoolmates was Mikhail Bulgakov. The idyll that had been Paustovsky’s childhood came to an end two years later when Georgy left Maria for another woman. Devastated by the betrayal, the family began a downward spiral. In 1909, Maria, no longer able to make ends meet in Kiev, took Galya and Vadim to Moscow and sent Kostik off to live with her brother, Nikolai Vysochansky, and his family in Bryansk. From then on, Paustovsky began what he would call his ‘wandering life’, forever on the move, never settling down in any one place for long.fn4

The following year he managed to return to the gymnasium in Kiev by supporting himself as a private tutor. After graduating in 1912, Paustovsky enrolled in the Imperial Kiev University and published his first story, ‘On the Water’, in the journal Ogni (‘Lights’). He had been writing for three years by now – poems and short sketches – and was fully consumed by the dream of becoming a writer.

Two years later Paustovsky found himself back in Moscow. He had planned to continue his studies at the university there when the First World War began and his brother Vadim left for the front. Soon after, Boris joined the army as well. Paustovsky quit his studies and got a job as a tram driver to help support his mother and sister. His poor eyesight, plus the fact that he was the youngest of three sons, two of whom were fighting in the tsar’s army, saved him from the bloody savagery of the war. Both Vadim and Boris were killed in action in 1915.

By then Paustovsky was serving as an orderly on a hospital train at the front. Wounded by a German shell, he returned to Moscow and found work in an arms factory and began writing his first novel, The Romantics, eventually published in 1935. It wasn’t long before he was off again – first to Yekaterinoslav, then Yuzovka, then Taganrog, where he laboured in a series of factories, before being taken on as a fisherman in a small village on the Sea of Azov. By 1917, he had returned to Moscow and started working as a newspaper reporter, which would become his main occupation for the next decade. All the while Paustovsky continued to write. That same year he gathered up his courage and sent a few of his poems to Ivan Bunin, his literary idol. Amazingly, Bunin replied: ‘I think your future lies in prose, it is here I see your true poetry. If you are able to show enough persistence, I am certain you can achieve something significant.’fn5

On a dangerous journey to reach his mother and sister, now living in the Ukrainian countryside, Paustovsky found himself trapped in Kiev by the raging violence of the Russian Civil War. Stranded there for a year, he survived off piecework for a few publications before being conscripted first into the army of Ukrainian hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi and then a convict regiment in the Red Army. At the first opportunity, Paustovsky escaped Kiev for Odessa in 1919. He would remain here, making numerous excursions around the Black Sea region and Caucasus, for the next several years, and become part of a lively group of writers which included Isaac Babel and Ilya Ilf.

In 1925, Paustovsky published his first book of stories and short works – Sea Sketches – followed by another collection, titled Oncoming Ships, two years later. The editors of this second book refused to include one of the stories, however, because they felt it amounted to nothing more than ‘a romantic episode, completely devoid of social significance’.fn6 The ideological criticism of his writing was to grow in the coming years.

Paustovsky’s 1929 novel Shining Clouds was denounced by one critic as having the potential ‘to disorganise the class consciousness of the proletarian reader’ and was placed on a ‘blacklist’ of works to be removed from all Soviet libraries. The Communist Party’s Central Committee debated confiscating every copy of Shining Clouds as being, in the words of one speaker, ‘very ideologically harmful, particularly for young readers’. In the end, no action was taken, but Paustovsky now understood that he was being watched. ‘Apparently, they’re going to be keeping an eye on me as a writer. I find this business extremely stupid and typical of the times,’ he wrote in a letter that summer.fn7 All this was happening as Stalin’s ‘Revolution from Above’ was getting under way. It was a dangerous time for a writer to be suspected of ideological deviance, and as Paustovsky would later remark, it was pure chance that he survived Stalin’s terror.fn8

Out of step with the main currents of Soviet literature, Paustovsky next wrote two novels inspired by the crash industrialisation of the First Five-Year Plan. Kara-Bugaz (1932) took as its subject the construction of an industrial salt extraction plant along the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, while in Kolkhida (1934) Paustovsky recounted the development of a gargantuan chemical facility at Berezniki in the Ural Mountains, one of the largest industrial projects of the time. Although both works received an enthusiastic response, including from Maxim Gorky,fn9 Paustovsky chafed at the prospect of continuing to write works in the Socialist Realist mode (attentive readers noted that at its core Kara-Bugaz was in fact an adventure novel) and he was growing disgusted with life in Moscow.

Under Stalin the literary world was becoming increasingly bureaucratised, constrained and smothered by censorship and Party control. What Paustovsky dubbed ‘an army of hack writers’, together with talentless timeservers and vulgar functionaries, were suffocating the last remaining voices of truth and honesty, and he longed to leave the capital for the provinces, to be away from this deadening milieu, off and on his own surrounded by the beauty of the Russian countryside. Finally, in the autumn of 1931, he quit his job with ROSTA, the Soviet press agency, and left Moscow for the village of Solotcha near Ryazan. He wrote at the time that it was ‘pointless’ to remain in Moscow any longer. He had at last become, in his words, ‘a true writer […] The time has come to speak “at the top of my voice”.’fn10 When not off travelling, Paustovsky spent most of the next decade in Solotcha writing several books inspired by Russian history and nature, most importantly The Land of Meshchëra (1939), works that while cherished by readers placed his oeuvre even further outside the literary mainstream.

With the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Paustovsky was sent to report on the fighting near Tiraspol and Odessa. He was embedded with Soviet forces on the front lines and experienced vicious combat and aerial bombardments for six weeks running before being recalled to Moscow, where he continued to write pieces on the war effort for the Soviet press.fn11

In an interview in 1959, Paustovsky said:

Everything that I have written before [The Story of a Life] was a step on the way to this book, on which I continue to work even now. I dream of bringing it up to the current day, but fear I won’t manage. Only now do I realise I that started on this project much too late.fn12

He began writing a still ill-defined autobiographical work in Solotcha in May 1943. Its roots, however, went back much further. While still a gymnasium student in Kiev he wrote a story about his experiences of a visit to Polesia that would become the basis for ‘The Inn on the Braginka’ in The Faraway Years. In the early 1920s, he wrote ‘The Village of Kobrin’, which he later reworked and included in Restless Youth. Additional chapters in The Story of a Life also started out as parts of other books.

In October 1945, Paustovsky published ‘The Faraway Years: A Story of Childhood’ in the journal Novyi mir (‘New World’). This included roughly half of what would grow to become the complete first volume, which was published in book form late the following year. At this point, Paustovsky had no plans for continuing his memoir beyond his early youth and didn’t return to the project for several years. The official reaction may have had something to do with this. The Faraway Years was met coldly by Soviet critics, and the publisher, Molodaia Gvardiia, even halted production of a second edition of the book just as it was about to go to print after powerful voices raised objections to the fact that ‘this book is filled with lots of liberal kindliness and very little revolutionary wrath’.fn13

Readers, however, embraced Paustovsky’s story. None more so than Ivan Bunin. Now the leading light of the Russian émigré community in France, Bunin, who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933, stumbled upon ‘The Inn on the Braginka’ in the journal Vokrug sveta (‘Around the World’), where it had been published as a stand-alone piece in 1946. Bunin had long forgotten the budding writer who had sent him his early poems thirty years before, but he was so profoundly moved by Paustovsky’s story that he sent him a postcard care of his publisher in Moscow to let him know of the ‘rare joy’ it had given him and that he considered it to be ‘among the best stories in all of Russian literature’.fn14 If he needed encouragement to carry on with his memoirs, Paustovsky could not have wished for more.

Restless Youth appeared in several instalments in Novyi mir in 1955. It was only now, a full decade after he began The Faraway Years, that Paustovsky came to see his memoir as a much bigger project. He wrote in Novyi mir that Restless Youth was part of a ‘large autobiographical tale, the subject of which is the formation of a man and a writer’, and that he intended to write two more books that would bring his life up to the present day.fn15 In late 1955, Sovetskii pisatel’, the publishing house of the Soviet Writers’ Union, issued volumes one and two together as The Story of a Life, the first time this title was used. Paustovsky completed the third volume in Tarusa over the course of 1956.

‘This is a story,’ Paustovsky wrote in 1958, ‘not history. I am writing my autobiography adhering strictly to the principle of setting down only what I have witnessed myself. And so, in this story it is not possible to include descriptions of everything that happened in the particular place and time described in this book.’fn16

Paustovsky’s choice of title, Povest’ o zhizni in Russian, is significant – he was not writing a traditional autobiography or memoir, nor was he writing a history; rather, he was writing his story. The Russian word povest’ has conveyed different meanings over time. If, for example, in the twelfth-century Tale of Bygone Years – Povest’ vremennykh let – it signifies a historical chronicle of Kievan Russia’s past, in more recent usage povest’ implies a level of artistic creativity, licence even, that history, autobiography and memoir generally do not permit. A povest’ in the modern meaning also refers to a literary work shorter in length than the typical novel. Thus, Tolstoy’s novella Death of Ivan Ilyich is a povest’, as is Gogol’s short story The Overcoat. In choosing the word povest’ Paustovsky is signalling where his work is to be placed in the taxonomy of Russian literary genres, in terms both of the length of its constituent parts – povesti, in the plural – and of its debt to the deep structures of narrative that give shape to this reconstruction of his past.

‘For all its naked autobiographism,’ the literary scholar Lev Levitsky noted, ‘this is not a documentary work but an artistic one, whose entire plan and every last detail are dictated by its overarching conception.’ The Story of a Life is not a pedantic accounting of all the things Paustovsky experienced or the people he knew (indeed, his wives and children are not mentioned), rather it is a ‘painstaking selection of material and its artistic generalisation’. The work moves forward less by the dictates of chronology and more by the power of memory, which gives it its episodic nature, what Levitsky has called ‘a chain of recollections’.fn17 The mysterious interworkings of experience, memory, and meaning that shape Paustovsky’s Story of a Life are beautifully captured by a line from Gabriel García Márquez in his own autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale: ‘Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.’fn18

The appearance of each new instalment of his magnum opus provided further proof of Paustovsky’s ideological heresy. In 1956, Vasily Smirnov, a prominent official in the Soviet Writers’ Union, denounced Paustovsky as a ‘counterrevolutionary’ in a meeting with a group of writers.fn19 Two years later he was publicly attacked on the pages of the literary magazine Zvezda (‘Star’) in an article titled ‘Notes on one Master’s Party Spirit’. Paustovsky’s writing was criticised as overly individualistic, lacking in partiinost’ – full-throated support of the Communist Party, in other words – and as offering proof that much still needed to be done ‘in the battle for ideological purity’ in Soviet literature.fn20 The criticism was neither unfair nor inaccurate: Paustovsky didn’t care in the least about ‘party spirit’. He never joined the Communist Party, or any other political party for that matter.

The attacks, however, frightened Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of Novyi mir, who refused to publish the fourth volume in 1958 unless Paustovsky made major changes. Tvardovsky wanted more heroic workers, politics and the glories of the early years of the Soviet Union and less ‘poetic solitude, nature’s beauty and the sea, and art for art’s sake’. He detected in Paustovsky’s writing an unwarranted ‘pride’ on the author’s part, as though he were ‘spitting upon “world history” from on high’. And he was especially upset at the many pages devoted to Babel. There was simply no way Tvardovsky would permit Paustovsky’s ‘apologetic’ defence of Babel, who had been arrested and executed as a spy and enemy of the people in 1940, to appear in his journal. When Paustovsky received Tvardovsky’s comments he was furious. He wrote to Tvardovsky that his remarks were motivated entirely by political rather than literary concerns and that his objection to the sections on Babel and his tragic death could only be explained by Tvardovsky’s anti-Semitism. As this was a ‘matter of conscience’, Paustovsky refused to make the changes and instructed Tvardovsky to return the manuscript to him immediately.fn21

In the end, Paustovsky published this volume, A Time of Great Hope, and the next, Southern Adventure, in the journal Oktiabr’ (‘October’) in 1959 and 1960, but only after its editors forced him to make considerable changes, albeit not to the extent demanded by Tvardovsky.fn22 Nevertheless, he carried on with what had become his life’s work, desperate to see it through to the end and unwilling to allow the critics or frightened editors to stop him.

‘To be frank, we must admit that among us remain dour writers of memoirs, who look more to the past than to the present and the future,’ observed the literary hack and Party loyalist Vsevolod Kochetov at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961. ‘With their twisted outlook and with a zeal worthy of a better cause, they poke around in the refuse of their well-frayed memories to unearth mouldering literary corpses and present them as something that still lives.’fn23 It was obvious to the audience who Kochetov had in mind.

By the late 1950s, Paustovsky’s health was in serious decline. He suffered from what was then diagnosed as severe asthma but was possibly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, brought on by a lifetime of heavy smoking. In August 1960, he suffered the first of a series of heart attacks. He could barely manage more than a few hours of writing a day and worried he would never see his work through to the end. After the monthly Znamia (‘Banner’) refused to publish A Book of Journeys, the sixth and what would be the final volume, Paustovsky swallowed his pride and offered the manuscript to Tvardovsky. Novyi mir published it in 1963, but only after removing everything Paustovsky had to say about the barbarism of the Stalin years. Paustovsky’s original text was cut in half.fn24

As a man and a writer who belonged to no camp, Paustovsky found himself attacked not only by the Soviet literary establishment but by dissidents as well. Varlam Shalamov, author of Kolyma Tales, who spent seventeen years in the Gulag, maligned Kara-Bugaz and Kolkhida for their silence about the use of convict labour in the construction of these industrial projects. Paustovsky, he wrote, had been blind to the horrors playing out right before his very eyes.fn25 Setting aside the fact that Shalamov only thought to criticise Paustovsky the year before he died when he was far too ill to respond, there is an element of truth in his criticism. Paustovsky never was a dissident or an active foe of the Soviet state; nor did he ever claim to be. He had never been motivated by politics. As he himself admitted numerous times, he was a dreamer, an observer, a romantic, an individual who insisted on living according to his own terms. In his 1984 commencement speech at Williams College, Joseph Brodsky said: ‘The surest defence against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even – if you will – eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated.’fn26 This was Konstantin Paustovsky.

Paustovsky was not blind to the nature of the Soviet system, however. As early as 1920, he wrote in his diary:

When the Civil War ended and the period of ‘peaceful construction’ began, everyone immediately saw that ‘the emperor had no clothes’ and the only power he had was to destroy and wage war. […] The entire country has been turned into one of Arakcheev’s military colonies. A new era has begun – the tempting of the intelligentsia, the academicians, the artists and the writers … Lord, let this cup pass me by.fn27

The lyrical romanticism of Paustovsky’s prose blinded critics like Shalamov to just what it was he was saying in The Story of a Life, but the clues are unmistakable to the careful reader. Consider Paustovsky’s handling of the two revolutions of 1917. The collapse of the Romanov dynasty is depicted as the great national liberation from centuries of autocratic oppression that it truly was. All of Russia came together to celebrate this new beginning and a wave of hope and possibility swept over the land. But, he writes, ‘The idyllic generosity of the first days of the revolution faded. Entire worlds crumbled and collapsed into dust.’ The Bolshevik seizure of power in October is not treated as the next step on the road to a better tomorrow, but as the brutal and senseless victory of an armed mob. There is nothing heroic in Paustovsky’s passages about what he saw in Moscow that autumn. Rather, these pages are filled with accounts of wholesale theft, vandalism, anarchy, brutality and destruction. Paustovsky himself was caught in the violence, captured by Bolshevik forces, and nearly executed as a suspected supporter of the Provisional Government. The politics of the new Soviet government are characterised as ‘harsh’ and ‘pitiless’. An aura of ambivalence hangs over his chapters recounting the first years of the regime. Even this volume’s title – The Dawn of an Uncertain Age, the adjective being the key signifier here – leaves no doubt as to Paustovsky’s attitude to the Bolshevik Revolution. He admits to being disturbed by the Bolsheviks’ ‘contempt for the culture of the past’. He refused to pick a side during the years of the civil war and not until 1920, with the collapse of the White armies, ‘did I realise that there was no other path forward than the one chosen by my people’.

This is a shocking, and brave, admission for a Soviet author to make in 1956, especially for one who for years had been criticised for his ideological deviance. Questioning Stalin’s cult of personality at the time was one thing; questioning the revolution itself, however, was taboo.

Paustovsky’s disgust at the ‘brutality, violence and sudden unreason of the twentieth century’ reverberates throughout The Story of a Life, regardless of the regime, army or political party responsible. Children’s skulls bashed in by men wielding rifles; women raped; Jews flayed alive by Ukrainian gangs; a monastery burned to the ground, the monks shot dead for a bit of silver; an orphan crushed by a frenzied crowd of starving refugees; the sugar-white bone of a young soldier’s amputated leg. Such were the horrors Paustovsky experienced and described with unflinching honesty. He reminded readers of ‘how thin was the veneer of civilisation that separated us from a bottomless sea of dark savagery’.

That savagery touched Paustovsky in the most personal of ways. Among the happiest moments in his life were the days spent with Uncle Nikolai and Aunt Maria at their home in Bryansk and then summers at their dacha in Rëvny. After Georgy Paustovsky left his family, Uncle ‘Kolya’ became a surrogate father to young Kostik. Paustovsky’s love for his uncle flows from the pages of his book. In August 1919, Nikolai took his family to Moscow to escape the advance of General Anton Denikin’s army. There he spent the next decade working in the Soviet arms industry until his arrest on 26 March 1929 as a foreign spy. He was executed on 21 October. The death warrant was signed by Genrikh Yagoda, deputy chairman of the OGPU, the Soviet secret police.fn28

In the Stalin years, ‘enemies of the people’ became non-persons. They disappeared and ceased to exist. Families burned their executed loved ones’ letters and diaries, they removed their pictures from their photo albums, and if they still mentioned their names, then only in a whisper at night in the safety of their room when no one else might hear. And yet here is Paustovsky writing an effusive tribute to his beloved uncle, murdered as a traitor to his country, while the Soviet Union was still at war with Nazi Germany. Other victims of Stalin’s terror are memorialised in these pages as well – the eccentric bibliophile Mikhail Shchelkunov, who was arrested as a Trotskyite and perished in the Gulag in 1938; the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, executed as an enemy of the state in 1940. One could add more names.

It’s one of the remarkable things about Paustovsky that despite the horrors he witnessed, he never became cynical or bitter or defeated; rather he maintained his faith in humanity and his ability to appreciate life’s infinite beauty. He referred to this as ‘my tendency to see the good in all things’, a trait others sometimes saw as a weakness. But Paustovsky couldn’t help himself. It was who he was. He writes that while still a youth,

I began to notice that the worse reality appeared, the more fully I could find all the good that was hidden inside it. I was beginning to realise that in life the good and the bad lie side by side. The good can often shine through a fog of lies, poverty and suffering, just like at the end of some rainy days the fire of the setting sun can pierce the grey clouds with its rays. I tried to find signs of the good everywhere.

He often found these signs in the most unexpected of places and people, like the poor old man in torn overalls he met in Moscow in the hungry year of 1918. The man tended a small kitchen garden that produced just enough to keep him alive, yet he was happy. ‘So, you see, my friend,’ he said to Paustovsky, ‘it just so happens that this too is a way of life. There are all sorts of ways to live. You can fight for freedom, you can try to remake humanity or you can grow tomatoes. Everything has its own price, its own dignity and its own glory.’

Not sure he understood, Paustovsky asked him what exactly it was he was trying to say.

‘That we need to be tolerant and understanding. As I see it, that’s the only real path to freedom. All of us should devote ourselves to the work we like best, and no one should try to stop us.’

Tolerance, understanding, respect for the individual. These were dangerous notions in Paustovsky’s world.

News of a forthcoming English translation of The Story of a Life appeared in 1961 in the Sunday Times, which described Paustovsky, then little known outside the USSR, as ‘a great storyteller, a stylist of the rarest poetic beauty, and a man of simplicity and truth’.fn29 When the first volume appeared three years later the praise was ecstatic. The Sunday Times again likened the writing to that of Gogol, Turgenev and Chekhov for its ‘freshness of response’. The Times Literary Supplement dubbed Paustovsky the ‘Russian Proust’. The Observer called The Story of a Life ‘one of the supreme examples of autobiography […] a small masterpiece […] a classic of childhood’.fn30 Reviewers praised the ‘sense of the numinous wonder and delight’ in Paustovsky’s writing, ‘its lyricism [and] the immediacy of the portraits of persons, places and events’, and its ‘limpid style […] that is simple, unforced and self-effacing’. The Times noted how ‘Everything he writes is stripped to the bone until nothing is left except what is vivid and necessary’.fn31 (Indeed, Paustovsky laboured over his writing, producing draft after draft by hand, trimming, revising and cutting every unnecessary word, as his supremely illegible manuscripts reveal.fn32)

The Story of a Life met with a similar reaction in the United States. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Helen Muchnic called the book ‘profoundly moving, sometimes humorous, often horrifying’ and singled out its ‘passages of lyric beauty’.fn33 The reviewer for the New York Times said it was one of the finest books by a Russian author he had ever read and highlighted the ‘deceptively simple’ quality of Paustovsky’s prose that ‘captures superbly the emotional atmosphere of a situation and an era’. As if that were not enough of an endorsement, the review went on to declare that the greater response to Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago than to Paustovsky’s masterpiece could only be characterised as a ‘cosmic literary injustice’.fn34

Similar comments could be heard on the Continent. When Gallimard published the first four volumes in Paris in 1966, Le Monde praised its ‘lyrisme délicat’ and called Paustovsky ‘un génie du coeur’ – a genius of the heart.fn35 The same year Heinrich Böll said that his entire family was reading the German translation and they were all utterly swept away by it. Discovering Paustovsky had been for Böll ‘a true revelation’.fn36

Paustovsky’s name was first raised in connection with the Nobel Prize in Literature in the Swedish press in 1962. The voices in support of Paustovsky inside the Swedish Academy grew, and by 1965 many in the literary world considered him to be the favourite to win. But the Swedes had their concerns. The previous year Anders Österling, permanent secretary of the academy, had been in favour of awarding the prize to Paustovsky when he was instructed by Gunnar Jarring, Sweden’s ambassador to the USSR, that this would be viewed as a provocation by the Soviet government, which was still angry at Pasternak’s win in 1958. Paustovsky, Jarring warned, was deeply unpopular among the Soviet leadership. As recently as April 1963, at a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev had gone on a tirade against Paustovsky over an article he had written years earlier for Pravda arguing against industrial development around Tarusa. The academy heeded Jarring’s warning, and the 1964 award went to Jean-Paul Sartre instead.

Paustovsky was put forward again the following year, and once more voices were raised within the academy that giving the prize to him would cause an international scandal that Sweden ought to avoid. At the same time, the Soviet government was working frantically behind the scenes to convince the academy to give the prize to its approved candidate, Mikhail Sholokhov, best known as the author of The Quiet Don.

Paustovsky was in Rome in October 1965 as the world awaited the Swedish Academy’s decision. The Italian press was busy trying to secure interviews with the man almost everyone assumed would be the winner. Paustovsky, however, harboured no illusions. Politics, not literary merit, would determine the matter. He told a friend that in light of the Pasternak affair the Swedes wouldn’t give the award to ‘another non-conformist Soviet writer’. Paustovsky was right. Days later Sholokhov was announced as the winner.

One of Paustovsky’s biggest supporters in Sweden was the poet and critic Artur Lundkvist. He and his wife had met Paustovsky in the summer of 1962 when he was recovering from a heart attack outside Moscow:

Marvellously dressed and well mannered, he met us on the veranda of the sanatorium. His sincerity was striking. He was open but at the same time uncommonly tactful, unlike the typical Soviet man. He had the defined, expressive features of someone who had gone through a great deal, although without a trace of cruelty. He had the eyes of a dreamer and a poet, yet clear and perceptive. Despite his heart trouble, he looked strong and youthful for his age, as though he would be more at home walking in the woods or in the thick of things rather than at his writing desk.

Although Paustovsky would be considered a finalist for the prize a total of four times, he never did win.fn37

On his famous visit to the Soviet Union in September 1962, the American poet Robert Frost insisted on meeting Paustovsky. He had quickly tired of the ‘Intourist Russia’ that was being paraded before him by his official hosts (thrumming factories, bountiful farms, technological marvels and so on) and wanted to sit down with a real writer for an honest, open conversation. From the moment Frost and his American guide, F. D. Reeve, arrived at Paustovsky’s Moscow apartment, they were struck by ‘an immediate sense of tranquil, cultured excellence’. Frost and Paustovsky recognised in each other kindred souls. When Frost told him about his need for freedom and isolation to write, Paustovsky replied that just like Henry David Thoreau, he had a small house in the woods to which he retreated to commune with nature. They traded stories of their youth when they had wandered about the country from one odd-job to the next. Frost tried to impress Paustovsky by telling him how he had even jumped freight trains and ridden in open boxcars. Paustovsky smiled and went him one better – he, too, he said, had jumped freight trains, although he had often been forced to ride on the tops of the boxcars. Frost laughed. The evening proved to be one of the highlights of his trip.fn38

By the last decade of his life Paustovsky had become one of the elder statesmen of Russian letters and a champion of artistic and intellectual freedom. Time and again he spoke out to defend writers against censorship and state oppression, from the attacks on Vladimir Dudintsev and his 1956 novel Not by Bread Alone, to the campaigns against Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel, and Yury Galanskov and his colleagues in the so-called ‘Trial of the Four’ in 1968. He called for the passage of strict laws to protect Russia’s natural environment, so terribly degraded by the Soviet regime, and when he learned that local officials in Karelia were planning to raze over a hundred ancient Russian Orthodox churches, he wrote a letter to Khrushchev insisting that this barbarism be stopped.fn39

Just as he had done in the 1930s when he defended the work and reputation of the officially unapproved writer Alexander Grin,fn40 Paustovsky helped to publish the writings of Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelshtam, and encouraged the careers of younger writers such as Bulat Okudzhava and Yury Kazakov in two influential and popular anthologies – Literary Moscow (1956) and Pages from Tarusa (1961) – publications that were denounced by the Writers’ Union and Soviet officialdom as ideologically dangerous and quickly suppressed.fn41

Paustovsky was back in hospital in May 1968, for the last time. Nevertheless, he refused to remain silent. When official pressure was being exerted on the experimental Theatre on the Taganka and its brilliant lead director, Yury Lyubimov, Paustovsky telephoned Alexei Kosygin, first deputy premier of the Soviet Union: ‘This is the dying writer Paustovsky on the phone,’ he said. ‘I implore you not to destroy our country’s cultural treasures. If you fire Lyubimov, his theatre will collapse, and the great work they’re doing there will perish.’ Lyubimov kept his job, and the theatre was saved.fn42

In the last year of his life Paustovsky worked on the seventh volume of The Story of a Life. He died in Moscow on 14 July 1968 without managing to complete it. A brief testament was found in his writing desk: ‘We lived on this earth. Don’t entrust it into the hands of the destroyers, the barbarians and the ignoramuses. We are the heirs of Pushkin, and we will have to answer for that.’fn43

At the end of Restless Youth, Paustovsky wrote of his life in March 1917:

I didn’t know what would come next. But I knew that I would continue to strive with all my strength to become a writer. This would be my way of serving my people, of loving our magical language and our remarkable land. I would work as long as I could hold a pen and my heart, overflowing with the beauty of life, was still beating.

He had kept his word.