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