The Story of a Life

Note on the Translation

I first encountered The Story of a Life in the spring of 1982 in a bookstore in Burlington, Vermont. I was a freshman at the university there and had begun studying Russian the previous autumn. Prior to that I had not read a single Russian author and knew almost nothing about the country, but my language studies had introduced me to a fascinating world that I was eager to discover.

For some reason I don’t recall, the book caught my eye, and after reading the impressive endorsements on the back cover, I decided to give it a try. From the opening lines, I was enthralled. If most readers fall in love with Russia by way of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Chekhov, for me it was Paustovsky. I inhaled the book in a few days and started pressing my copy on everyone I knew, insisting with all the fervour of a proselyte that they read it. A year or so later I put the book into the hands of an acquaintance, who then lent it to a friend. I never saw the book again.

Decades passed and I found myself one day walking through Moscow’s Kuzminki Park. I came upon a wooden blue-grey house tucked in a growth of trees off the main allée. Curious, I approached and was surprised to see it was a museum to Paustovsky. I went inside and found myself transported back to 1982 and my discovery of him and his work. Now able to read The Story of a Life in the original, I bought a copy and experienced a similar sensation of amazement, although deepened by the knowledge of the language, people and their history gained over the years.

After some research, I learned that The Story of a Life had long been out of print in English and contemplated coordinating the publication of a new edition. First, however, I decided to compare the Russian text against the existing translations. I had read Joseph Barnes’s translation published by Pantheon Books in New York in the spring of 1964 and reissued in paperback in 1982.fn1 Reading Barnes’s rendering again I recalled my initial amazement at Paustovsky’s work, but was disappointed by how flat-footed, awkward and frustratingly literal the translation was. Nearly every page contained an error or two and it was obvious that in many instances Barnes had misunderstood the Russian original and ended up producing sentences that either were wrong or distorted Paustovsky’s meaning. And Barnes had nearly always ignored the many instances of verse quoted by Paustovsky and left them out of his translation.fn2

A few months after the American publication in 1964, Harvill Press in London published The Story of a Life: Childhood and Schooldays, the first volume of Paustovsky’s hexalogy, in a translation by Manya Harari and Michael Duncan. Harari, the translator (with Max Hayward) of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, as well as works by Ilya Ehrenburg and Yevgenia Ginzburg, was a co-founder of Harvill. Together with Duncan and then Andrew Thomson, Harari translated the next three volumes – Slow Approach of Thunder (1965), In that Dawn (1967) and Years of Hope (1968). After Harari fell ill in 1967 with the cancer that would take her life, Harvill commissioned Kyril Fitzlyon to translate the final volumes, published as Southern Adventure (1969) and The Restless Years (1974).

The Harvill translations are superior to Barnes’s work, but they are not without fault. Like his translation, the first three volumes were done when Paustovsky was still alive and there was the hope that he might win the Nobel Prize. Speed was of the essence, and in the rush to complete the translations as quickly as possible, a great many errors and omissions made their way into the Harvill publications as well.

Clauses, sentences, paragraphs and even an entire chapter – ‘Here Lives Nobody’ in volume two – have been omitted. Names are incorrectly rendered (an Ivanov becomes a Karavaev in the chapter ‘Artillerymen’), animals change species (‘clouds of fry’ become ‘a flock of water birds’ in ‘The Zone of Silence’), places are muddled (Kobrin becomes Brest in ‘Treason’), numbers get scrambled (the consumptive Glasha loses eight years of her life and is made seventeen instead of twenty-five in ‘The Suburb of Chechelevka’). Errors like these appear throughout.

One also notices in the Harvill translations a tendency to tone down the emotional colour of Paustovsky’s prose, as if the translators feared his intensity and range of feeling might be a bit much for British sensibilities. Perhaps out of a concern not to offend against good taste, certain elements, such as Pan Kturenda’s gonorrhoea in ‘The Violet Ray’, are silently omitted.

It became obvious that a new, improved translation was warranted. Initially, I planned to do an abridged translation of all six volumes, something that has been done before with other massive works, such as Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.fn3 But I decided against this for two reasons. First, I found it impossible to decide which sections or chapters could be deleted without denying the reader the pleasure they afforded or without needing to add extensive notes and commentary to fill in the gaps caused by these redactions. Inserting my voice alongside Paustovsky’s would only diminish the text. Second, after examining the publication history of The Story of a Life, it became clear that volumes five and six had been thoroughly bowdlerised by Paustovsky’s Soviet editors and never did appear in print as he had wished. Any future translation of the final volumes should be undertaken only after a complete study of Paustovsky’s manuscripts held in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow.

Paustovsky conceived of each volume of his memoirs as a discrete work and so excluding the final three volumes in no way violates the author’s intentions. Moreover, as has been noted before, the first three volumes form a clear trilogy that follow Paustovsky’s life from childhood through the revolution and civil war, ending with the Soviet victory, while the second trilogy is set in the early years of the newly formed Soviet state.fn4

Paustovsky revised his memoir throughout his life, and it has been published in Russia many times over the past fifty years in various editions. This translation is based on the latest and most authoritative text of The Story of a Life, published by TERRA in Moscow in 2017.fn5

The names of the streets, villages, towns, cities and even countries mentioned in The Story of a Life have in many instances changed from the time when Paustovsky lived and wrote. The multinational empire Paustovsky was born and grew up in collapsed in 1917. It was then reconfigured in the early 1920s, only to collapse again in the 1990s. The successive waves of political and social upheaval brought with them linguistic changes as well. This poses challenges for the translator. What, for example, is one to do with a street that has had four different names? Paustovsky writes about Kiev’s Bibikovsky Boulevard, as it was called from 1869 to 1919, but before that it was known as Bulvarnaya Street from 1834 to 1850 and Shosseiny Boulevard from 1850 to 1869, and was only given its present name, Taras Shevchenko Boulevard, in 1919. Kiev is now Kyiv, Gorodishche is now Horodyshche, Yekaterinoslav is now Dnipro. The list goes on and on.

Instead of updating geographical place names to reflect current usage, I have chosen to use the ones Paustovsky gives in his memoir. Although this may offend some readers, my decision to stick with the Russian names is not in any way intended as a slight; rather it is driven by the desire to best capture the author’s voice, which, after all, is a Russian one, and to most accurately reflect the world he so evocatively describes in his work.

Paustovsky would have been the first to acknowledge that Ukrainians, Belorussians and Poles had different names for the places he wrote about, and his choices were in no way intended as signifiers of some insistent Russian nationalism; they simply express his own personal lived experience. Readers curious to know the current spelling of locations mentioned in the text should consult the appended ‘Guide to Place Names’.

In transliterating the Russian, I have used a modified Library of Congress system, ignoring hard and soft signs and simplifying most endings (e.g., –sky, not –skii). The letter ë signifies an iotated o that sounds like the yo in ‘your’.

All notes and translations, including song lyrics and verse, are my own, except for the line from Igor Severyanin’s ‘Trait upon Trait’ in Restless Youth, which was generously provided by Boris Dralyuk.

The help of many friends, colleagues and institutions made this translation possible. It is a pleasure to thank Paustovsky’s stepdaughter Galina Arbuzova, Valentina Pimneva, Angelika Dormidontova, Irina Pakhomova, Dmitry Bak, Alexei Nevsky, Alexander Bobosov, Anya Babenko, Nikita Sokolov, Tatyana Safronova, Helen Rappaport, Joshua Yaffa, Andrew Solomon, Mariana Markova, Shaun Whiteside, Peter Pozefsky, Wolfgang Mieder, Ronald Vroon, Hilde Hoogenboom and Andrew Kahn. I owe a special thanks to Boris Dralyuk, who has been a constant source of encouragement and help throughout this project. The support of the University of Washington’s Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies and the university’s Suzzallo and Allen Libraries proved invaluable. In Russia, I am grateful to have had the assistance of the K. G. Paustovsky Museum, the State Literary Museum, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and the K. G. Paustovsky Memorial House-Museum in Tarusa.

My literary agent, Melissa Chinchillo, and the diligent staff at Fletcher and Company tracked down the English language rights to Paustovsky’s works and skilfully negotiated the publication of this new translation. At Vintage Classics UK, I thank Frances Macmillan and Nicholas Skidmore. Jonathan Wadman did a masterful job copy-editing the text, as did Anthony Hippisley with the proofread. My work was funded in part by a generous fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

As always, my greatest debt is to my family – Stephanie, Emma and Andrew. I wish to dedicate this translation to them in the hope they might experience some of the joy Paustovsky’s masterpiece has provided me.