For a long time after I could not shake the haunting impression that I had already witnessed this epic flight in a painting by some pitiless artist: those mouths, twisted in cries for help; eyes bulging from their sockets; green, deeply etched faces gripped by the fear of death; the blind terror when people can see only one thing – the rickety ship’s gangway with its handrails snapping under the crush of human bodies; rifle butts crashing down on heads; mothers holding up their crying babies in outstretched arms over the crazed human herd; a woman trampled underfoot, still writhing and screaming on the quay …
People were literally destroying each other, preventing even those who had reached the gangway and grabbed the railing from saving themselves. I saw one lucky man take hold of the railing only to be immediately clutched at by many hands. He inched his way forward, dragging these people along with him up the gangway, but then lost his hold and fell together with the others still clinging to his body into the sea. Unable to free himself from this terrible human load, he went down into the water and disappeared.
All the roads leading to the port were jammed with crowds of people. The throngs seemed too big for the roads to handle, and it looked as though the fences and houses might be crushed at any moment. That would have helped to save lives, but the houses were all made of heavy stone and didn’t give way. Instead, one heard the constant breaking of glass and splintering of timber as people were squeezed through windows and doors.
Crushed suitcases, bundles and baskets slithered downhill underfoot like grotesque living creatures. Clothes were spilling out and winding themselves around people’s feet. Women’s lace and nightgowns, children’s frocks and ribbons trailed behind the fleeing mass, and the sight of these homely things made their flight seem even more tragic. Cold clouds of dust hung over the roads.
Groups of officers and soldiers scattered and were lost in the crowds of civilians, and only the felt cloaks of the men from the Caucasus stood out in the crowd, swinging like black bells and making it difficult for them to run. The men tore off their cloaks and threw them in the air, where they hung for a moment, caught by the wind, as though gliding on their own like so many flying carpets down to the port.
A jet of steam spurted up into the murky sky over the bridge of one of the steamers, followed by a heavy, shuddering whistle. Immediately taking up the sound, all the other ships began whistling in various keys. This was the chorus of departure. It sounded like a prayer for the dying, for those who were departing their homeland and their people, leaving Russia’s fields and woods, her springtimes and winters, renouncing their share in our common suffering and joy, in our past and present, in the genius of Pushkin and Tolstoy, and in that great filial love we all feel for our beautiful land.
Soviet cavalry had by now made their way into the city. Several of the horsemen had ridden out to the end of the breakwater, where they now sat motionless on their horses. A minesweeper, convoying the ships, fired two pointless rounds that exploded over the city with a thin crack. This was their parting gift. The Soviet guns did not return fire.
Silent crowds stood on the breakwaters, the boulevards and the bluffs over the sea, watching the heavy hulks of the departing ships grow dim in the smoke and dusk. The silence of the victors conveyed a painful reproach. Before long, the ships disappeared in the mist. The winter wind was blowing again from the north-east, as though turning over a new page. On it was to be written a heroic story of Russia – long-suffering, unique and beloved to our dying breath.
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.