But it wasn’t just the writing that so endeared Paustovsky to his fellow Russians. It was his character as well. He was one of the few honest and uncompromised writers of the Soviet period. He managed not to join the Communist Party, to sign his name to any denunciation of another writer, or to sell out his talent to curry favour with Soviet officialdom. Paustovsky somehow found a way not only to survive the bloody horrors of twentieth-century Russia, but to live a life of basic decency and to preserve his inner freedom against the monstrous force of totalitarianism.
Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky was born in Moscow in 1892. His father, Georgy, a descendant of Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, the brilliant seventeenth-century military commander and hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, served as a statistician for the Russian railway. His mother, Maria Grigorievna Vysochanskaya, came from an impoverished noble family. Her father was employed at a sugar factory. Paustovsky’s grandfather on his father’s side had been a chumak, travelling back and forth between central Ukraine and the Black Sea with his oxcart hauling goods to market. One of his grandmothers was a Turk, the other a Pole. Like so many Russians, Paustovsky was a product of empire.
In 1898, the Paustovskys – little Kostik, as he was affectionately called, his older sister Galina (Galya), and his brothers Boris and Vadim – moved to Kiev, where Georgy took a job with the South West Railway. In 1904, Paustovsky was admitted to the prestigious First Kiev Gymnasium. Among his schoolmates was Mikhail Bulgakov. The idyll that had been Paustovsky’s childhood came to an end two years later when Georgy left Maria for another woman. Devastated by the betrayal, the family began a downward spiral. In 1909, Maria, no longer able to make ends meet in Kiev, took Galya and Vadim to Moscow and sent Kostik off to live with her brother, Nikolai Vysochansky, and his family in Bryansk. From then on, Paustovsky began what he would call his ‘wandering life’, forever on the move, never settling down in any one place for long.fn4
The following year he managed to return to the gymnasium in Kiev by supporting himself as a private tutor. After graduating in 1912, Paustovsky enrolled in the Imperial Kiev University and published his first story, ‘On the Water’, in the journal Ogni (‘Lights’). He had been writing for three years by now – poems and short sketches – and was fully consumed by the dream of becoming a writer.
Two years later Paustovsky found himself back in Moscow. He had planned to continue his studies at the university there when the First World War began and his brother Vadim left for the front. Soon after, Boris joined the army as well. Paustovsky quit his studies and got a job as a tram driver to help support his mother and sister. His poor eyesight, plus the fact that he was the youngest of three sons, two of whom were fighting in the tsar’s army, saved him from the bloody savagery of the war. Both Vadim and Boris were killed in action in 1915.
By then Paustovsky was serving as an orderly on a hospital train at the front. Wounded by a German shell, he returned to Moscow and found work in an arms factory and began writing his first novel, The Romantics, eventually published in 1935. It wasn’t long before he was off again – first to Yekaterinoslav, then Yuzovka, then Taganrog, where he laboured in a series of factories, before being taken on as a fisherman in a small village on the Sea of Azov. By 1917, he had returned to Moscow and started working as a newspaper reporter, which would become his main occupation for the next decade. All the while Paustovsky continued to write. That same year he gathered up his courage and sent a few of his poems to Ivan Bunin, his literary idol. Amazingly, Bunin replied: ‘I think your future lies in prose, it is here I see your true poetry. If you are able to show enough persistence, I am certain you can achieve something significant.’fn5
On a dangerous journey to reach his mother and sister, now living in the Ukrainian countryside, Paustovsky found himself trapped in Kiev by the raging violence of the Russian Civil War. Stranded there for a year, he survived off piecework for a few publications before being conscripted first into the army of Ukrainian hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi and then a convict regiment in the Red Army. At the first opportunity, Paustovsky escaped Kiev for Odessa in 1919. He would remain here, making numerous excursions around the Black Sea region and Caucasus, for the next several years, and become part of a lively group of writers which included Isaac Babel and Ilya Ilf.
In 1925, Paustovsky published his first book of stories and short works – Sea Sketches – followed by another collection, titled Oncoming Ships, two years later. The editors of this second book refused to include one of the stories, however, because they felt it amounted to nothing more than ‘a romantic episode, completely devoid of social significance’.fn6 The ideological criticism of his writing was to grow in the coming years.
Paustovsky’s 1929 novel Shining Clouds was denounced by one critic as having the potential ‘to disorganise the class consciousness of the proletarian reader’ and was placed on a ‘blacklist’ of works to be removed from all Soviet libraries. The Communist Party’s Central Committee debated confiscating every copy of Shining Clouds as being, in the words of one speaker, ‘very ideologically harmful, particularly for young readers’. In the end, no action was taken, but Paustovsky now understood that he was being watched. ‘Apparently, they’re going to be keeping an eye on me as a writer. I find this business extremely stupid and typical of the times,’ he wrote in a letter that summer.fn7 All this was happening as Stalin’s ‘Revolution from Above’ was getting under way. It was a dangerous time for a writer to be suspected of ideological deviance, and as Paustovsky would later remark, it was pure chance that he survived Stalin’s terror.fn8
Out of step with the main currents of Soviet literature, Paustovsky next wrote two novels inspired by the crash industrialisation of the First Five-Year Plan. Kara-Bugaz (1932) took as its subject the construction of an industrial salt extraction plant along the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, while in Kolkhida (1934) Paustovsky recounted the development of a gargantuan chemical facility at Berezniki in the Ural Mountains, one of the largest industrial projects of the time. Although both works received an enthusiastic response, including from Maxim Gorky,fn9 Paustovsky chafed at the prospect of continuing to write works in the Socialist Realist mode (attentive readers noted that at its core Kara-Bugaz was in fact an adventure novel) and he was growing disgusted with life in Moscow.
Under Stalin the literary world was becoming increasingly bureaucratised, constrained and smothered by censorship and Party control. What Paustovsky dubbed ‘an army of hack writers’, together with talentless timeservers and vulgar functionaries, were suffocating the last remaining voices of truth and honesty, and he longed to leave the capital for the provinces, to be away from this deadening milieu, off and on his own surrounded by the beauty of the Russian countryside. Finally, in the autumn of 1931, he quit his job with ROSTA, the Soviet press agency, and left Moscow for the village of Solotcha near Ryazan. He wrote at the time that it was ‘pointless’ to remain in Moscow any longer. He had at last become, in his words, ‘a true writer […] The time has come to speak “at the top of my voice”.’fn10 When not off travelling, Paustovsky spent most of the next decade in Solotcha writing several books inspired by Russian history and nature, most importantly The Land of Meshchëra (1939), works that while cherished by readers placed his oeuvre even further outside the literary mainstream.