In the end, Paustovsky published this volume, A Time of Great Hope, and the next, Southern Adventure, in the journal Oktiabr’ (‘October’) in 1959 and 1960, but only after its editors forced him to make considerable changes, albeit not to the extent demanded by Tvardovsky.fn22 Nevertheless, he carried on with what had become his life’s work, desperate to see it through to the end and unwilling to allow the critics or frightened editors to stop him.
‘To be frank, we must admit that among us remain dour writers of memoirs, who look more to the past than to the present and the future,’ observed the literary hack and Party loyalist Vsevolod Kochetov at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961. ‘With their twisted outlook and with a zeal worthy of a better cause, they poke around in the refuse of their well-frayed memories to unearth mouldering literary corpses and present them as something that still lives.’fn23 It was obvious to the audience who Kochetov had in mind.
By the late 1950s, Paustovsky’s health was in serious decline. He suffered from what was then diagnosed as severe asthma but was possibly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, brought on by a lifetime of heavy smoking. In August 1960, he suffered the first of a series of heart attacks. He could barely manage more than a few hours of writing a day and worried he would never see his work through to the end. After the monthly Znamia (‘Banner’) refused to publish A Book of Journeys, the sixth and what would be the final volume, Paustovsky swallowed his pride and offered the manuscript to Tvardovsky. Novyi mir published it in 1963, but only after removing everything Paustovsky had to say about the barbarism of the Stalin years. Paustovsky’s original text was cut in half.fn24
As a man and a writer who belonged to no camp, Paustovsky found himself attacked not only by the Soviet literary establishment but by dissidents as well. Varlam Shalamov, author of Kolyma Tales, who spent seventeen years in the Gulag, maligned Kara-Bugaz and Kolkhida for their silence about the use of convict labour in the construction of these industrial projects. Paustovsky, he wrote, had been blind to the horrors playing out right before his very eyes.fn25 Setting aside the fact that Shalamov only thought to criticise Paustovsky the year before he died when he was far too ill to respond, there is an element of truth in his criticism. Paustovsky never was a dissident or an active foe of the Soviet state; nor did he ever claim to be. He had never been motivated by politics. As he himself admitted numerous times, he was a dreamer, an observer, a romantic, an individual who insisted on living according to his own terms. In his 1984 commencement speech at Williams College, Joseph Brodsky said: ‘The surest defence against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even – if you will – eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated.’fn26 This was Konstantin Paustovsky.
Paustovsky was not blind to the nature of the Soviet system, however. As early as 1920, he wrote in his diary:
When the Civil War ended and the period of ‘peaceful construction’ began, everyone immediately saw that ‘the emperor had no clothes’ and the only power he had was to destroy and wage war. […] The entire country has been turned into one of Arakcheev’s military colonies. A new era has begun – the tempting of the intelligentsia, the academicians, the artists and the writers … Lord, let this cup pass me by.fn27
The lyrical romanticism of Paustovsky’s prose blinded critics like Shalamov to just what it was he was saying in The Story of a Life, but the clues are unmistakable to the careful reader. Consider Paustovsky’s handling of the two revolutions of 1917. The collapse of the Romanov dynasty is depicted as the great national liberation from centuries of autocratic oppression that it truly was. All of Russia came together to celebrate this new beginning and a wave of hope and possibility swept over the land. But, he writes, ‘The idyllic generosity of the first days of the revolution faded. Entire worlds crumbled and collapsed into dust.’ The Bolshevik seizure of power in October is not treated as the next step on the road to a better tomorrow, but as the brutal and senseless victory of an armed mob. There is nothing heroic in Paustovsky’s passages about what he saw in Moscow that autumn. Rather, these pages are filled with accounts of wholesale theft, vandalism, anarchy, brutality and destruction. Paustovsky himself was caught in the violence, captured by Bolshevik forces, and nearly executed as a suspected supporter of the Provisional Government. The politics of the new Soviet government are characterised as ‘harsh’ and ‘pitiless’. An aura of ambivalence hangs over his chapters recounting the first years of the regime. Even this volume’s title – The Dawn of an Uncertain Age, the adjective being the key signifier here – leaves no doubt as to Paustovsky’s attitude to the Bolshevik Revolution. He admits to being disturbed by the Bolsheviks’ ‘contempt for the culture of the past’. He refused to pick a side during the years of the civil war and not until 1920, with the collapse of the White armies, ‘did I realise that there was no other path forward than the one chosen by my people’.
This is a shocking, and brave, admission for a Soviet author to make in 1956, especially for one who for years had been criticised for his ideological deviance. Questioning Stalin’s cult of personality at the time was one thing; questioning the revolution itself, however, was taboo.
Paustovsky’s disgust at the ‘brutality, violence and sudden unreason of the twentieth century’ reverberates throughout The Story of a Life, regardless of the regime, army or political party responsible. Children’s skulls bashed in by men wielding rifles; women raped; Jews flayed alive by Ukrainian gangs; a monastery burned to the ground, the monks shot dead for a bit of silver; an orphan crushed by a frenzied crowd of starving refugees; the sugar-white bone of a young soldier’s amputated leg. Such were the horrors Paustovsky experienced and described with unflinching honesty. He reminded readers of ‘how thin was the veneer of civilisation that separated us from a bottomless sea of dark savagery’.
That savagery touched Paustovsky in the most personal of ways. Among the happiest moments in his life were the days spent with Uncle Nikolai and Aunt Maria at their home in Bryansk and then summers at their dacha in Rëvny. After Georgy Paustovsky left his family, Uncle ‘Kolya’ became a surrogate father to young Kostik. Paustovsky’s love for his uncle flows from the pages of his book. In August 1919, Nikolai took his family to Moscow to escape the advance of General Anton Denikin’s army. There he spent the next decade working in the Soviet arms industry until his arrest on 26 March 1929 as a foreign spy. He was executed on 21 October. The death warrant was signed by Genrikh Yagoda, deputy chairman of the OGPU, the Soviet secret police.fn28