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.
Book One
THE FARAWAY YEARS
My life, or did I dream you?
Sergei Yesenin
1
The Death of My Father
I was in my last year of school in Kiev when the telegram came saying that my father was dying on the farm at Gorodishche, near Belaya Tserkov. The next day I arrived at Belaya Tserkov and stopped at the house of my father’s good friend Feoktistov, head of the local post office. He was a short-sighted old man with thick glasses and a long beard and wore a shabby old official’s jacket with the brass insignia of the postal service, crossed horns and lightning bolts, on his lapels.
It was the end of March. Rain was coming down in a steady drizzle. Naked poplars stood shrouded in fog. Feoktistov told me that the ice on the swiftly flowing river Ros had gone out the night before. The farm where my father was dying was on an island in the middle of this river, twenty verstsfn1 from Belaya Tserkov. A stone causeway across the river led to the farm. Flood water was now pouring over the causeway in waves, and no one, of course, would agree to take me to the island, not even the most reckless of coachmen.
Feoktistov thought for a long time, contemplating which coachman in Belaya Tserkov was the most reckless. In the half-light of Feoktistov’s drawing room his daughter Zina, a schoolgirl, sat diligently practising the piano. The music caused the leaves on the ficus to tremble. I stared at a pale, dried-out piece of lemon on a small dish and kept silent.
‘Well, let’s call Bregman, the old rascal,’ Feoktistov finally decided. ‘Nothing frightens him.’
Soon, into Feoktistov’s study, overflowing with volumes of The Planted Field in their gold-tooled covers, walked Bregman the driver – ‘the biggest rascal’ in all of Belaya Tserkov. He was a dwarfish, thick-set Jew with a scraggy beard and the blue eyes of a cat. His weather-beaten cheeks were the red of heavenly apples. He twisted in his hands a small whip and listened, sceptically, to Feoktistov.
‘Oy, what a misfortune!’ he said at last in a falsetto voice. ‘Oy, what bad luck, Pan Feoktistov! My carriage is light, and my horses are weak. Gypsy horses! They won’t pull us across the causeway. We’ll all drown – the horses, the carriage, the young man and the old driver. And they won’t even bother so much as to print a word about it in Kievan Thought. Well, that’s just unbearable, Pan Feoktistov. Go? Well, of course, we can go. Why not? You yourself know a driver’s life is worth no more than three silver roubles – or maybe five, or let’s say ten, I won’t argue.’
‘Thank you, Bregman,’ said Feoktistov. ‘I knew you’d be willing. You’re the bravest man in Belaya Tserkov. For this I’ll buy you a subscription to The Planted Field for the rest of the year.’