The 38 books I read in 2008 included Barnaby Rudge, The Brothers Karamazov and Vanity Fair, but what I most wanted to re-read from that year is more obscure: Konstantin Paustovsky’s In That Dawn, the third of his multi-volume autobiography, Story of a Life. Why so? It all goes back to the early 1970s, when I happened to pick up a second-hand copy of the first volume in the Oxfam shop in Marylebone High Street, opposite where I was working. Not only was it a nicely produced hardback, as many of the Harvill Press translations from Russian were fifty years ago, but it was a delight to read. Acquiring – and reading – subsequent volumes has been a long and haphazard process, though: I now have five second-hand hardback volumes, found variously in Oxfam shops, on a Dublin market bookstall or through the Abebooks website. I see from my records that I read Paustovsky’s second volume, Slow Approach of Thunder, in 1988. But it wasn’t until 2008 that I got round to reading volume 3, In That Dawn. Since then, I’ve read his fourth and fifth volumes, Years of Hope and Southern Adventure, but I still haven’t acquired what appears to be the final (sixth) book, The Restless Years.
Who, then, was Konstantin Paustovsky? Born in 1893 in Moscow, he grew up in what was then Tsarist-ruled Ukraine. His early life seems to have been remarkably peripatetic – working as a medical orderly near the Polish front in the First World War, spending time as a journalist in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, and later travelling further south to Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast. Apparently in 1927 he gave up journalism for “writing the novels, collections of short stories and critical essays that has earned him the position he has today among Russians” (a quote from this volume’s informative dust-jacket). He died in 1968.
The translation of In That Dawn came out in 1967; there’s no indication of when the original Russian version was published, although we are told that Paustovsky “started his autobiography” in 1947. Did he publish any of it in the 1940s, or was it one of those books that had to wait for Stalin’s death before coming out? One would like to know. (I ought of course to mention that the fluent translation is by Manya Harari and Michael Duncan. Harari had earlier co-translated Doctor Zhivago).
In That Dawn covers the years 1917 to 1920, when Paustovsky witnessed significant historical events: he describes travelling through disputed territory, being trapped in his Moscow house as Bolsheviks and Provisional Government forces battle it out in the streets, and working for a paper whose contributors have only “a vague idea of its highly indefinite programme”. Chapter 1 opens pretty abruptly: “In the course of a few months, Russia spoke out everything she had kept to herself for centuries.” In some places there may be a feeling of writing to order, though, in phrases such as “The long, stern era of creating a new world order”. Paustovsky is more interesting when, characteristically, he focuses on small details: take his chapter where he joins a crowd of demobilised soldiers listening to a speech by Lenin. Sure, Lenin’s “quiet, simple words … were giving these embittered, inarticulate men the answers to their unspoken questions”, but two paragraphs later the narrative comes to life when a “young recruit with a broad, almost bloodless face bristling with fair stubble” shows him a photo of his wife, who had died in childbirth: “There was so much tenderness in her smile that it went straight to my heart” (p62).
Like the best Russian novels, this book has plenty of atmospheric effects:
I was particularly fond of [the journalists’ café] at twilight. Outside, beyond the bell tower of the fire station and the stone pedestal from which Skobelev’s statue had been removed, the warm glow of sunset faded in the golden dusk. The noises of the city – or rather its conversation (there was very little traffic in those days) – gradually died away. …
More and more often at this hour, I remembered with nostalgia that out there, beyond Brest station, beyond Khodynka, where the sun had slowly set, the birch woods were already covered with dew … (pp. 56-7)
More trees a few pages later:
The lime trees were in blossom. Their strong scent seemed to me to come from some distant southern country in spring. I pictured it to myself and felt more than ever fascinated by the world. There was nothing to do with such stray thoughts except put them down. Occasionally I made a few notes, nearly always losing them without regret.
I was ashamed of my writing. It was out of keeping with our time. (p.72)
Paustovsky has moments of despair, as when he is in a Kiev temporarily taken over by White Russian forces:
[W]e were living in a legendary, fantastic time – sometimes it seemed more like a nightmare or a grotesque travesty of reality – but all I could see was the same grey sky over the tumbledown suburban hovels as twenty years before …
When I crossed the street, I looked neither left nor right. I was sick to death of the circus-show of politics and war, and anger robbed me of all sense of danger. (p129)
In this volume he ends up in Odessa, were he waxes lyrical about, of all things, the fog:
I loved the smell of the fog – a faint smell of coal and steam. It was the smell of railway stations, ports, decks, of travelling, of long sea and land routes, of distant pink islands floating past in the violet-blue light of the Aegean, the wind faintly scented with lemons … (p202)
These quotes may not do the author full justice, since as well as these “atmospheric” passages, there are plenty of sketches of people he meets – though he notes that “With all the changes in my life, I lost friends almost as soon as I made them” (p91). But I hope I’ve written enough to convey my enjoyment of this and other volumes in his series.
There’s a longer blog about Paustovsky at the American-based Neglected Books website here – it was written over a decade ago, and like me the writer hadn’t got to the end of the series; but she/he had read enough to opine that “with Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, [it was] perhaps the sunniest Russian book ever written”. How different from my April re-reading of the “gloomiest” nineteenth-century Russian novel. …
I’ll just conclude with one more thing discovered via the internet: Marlene Dietrich, when she appeared on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, chose Paustovsky’s Story of a Life as the book she would most like to be stranded with.
I also read last month: the stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies; The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal; William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow; and one more translation: Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih.
Old geezer re-reading 