In the Stalin years, ‘enemies of the people’ became non-persons. They disappeared and ceased to exist. Families burned their executed loved ones’ letters and diaries, they removed their pictures from their photo albums, and if they still mentioned their names, then only in a whisper at night in the safety of their room when no one else might hear. And yet here is Paustovsky writing an effusive tribute to his beloved uncle, murdered as a traitor to his country, while the Soviet Union was still at war with Nazi Germany. Other victims of Stalin’s terror are memorialised in these pages as well – the eccentric bibliophile Mikhail Shchelkunov, who was arrested as a Trotskyite and perished in the Gulag in 1938; the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, executed as an enemy of the state in 1940. One could add more names.
It’s one of the remarkable things about Paustovsky that despite the horrors he witnessed, he never became cynical or bitter or defeated; rather he maintained his faith in humanity and his ability to appreciate life’s infinite beauty. He referred to this as ‘my tendency to see the good in all things’, a trait others sometimes saw as a weakness. But Paustovsky couldn’t help himself. It was who he was. He writes that while still a youth,
I began to notice that the worse reality appeared, the more fully I could find all the good that was hidden inside it. I was beginning to realise that in life the good and the bad lie side by side. The good can often shine through a fog of lies, poverty and suffering, just like at the end of some rainy days the fire of the setting sun can pierce the grey clouds with its rays. I tried to find signs of the good everywhere.
He often found these signs in the most unexpected of places and people, like the poor old man in torn overalls he met in Moscow in the hungry year of 1918. The man tended a small kitchen garden that produced just enough to keep him alive, yet he was happy. ‘So, you see, my friend,’ he said to Paustovsky, ‘it just so happens that this too is a way of life. There are all sorts of ways to live. You can fight for freedom, you can try to remake humanity or you can grow tomatoes. Everything has its own price, its own dignity and its own glory.’
Not sure he understood, Paustovsky asked him what exactly it was he was trying to say.
‘That we need to be tolerant and understanding. As I see it, that’s the only real path to freedom. All of us should devote ourselves to the work we like best, and no one should try to stop us.’
Tolerance, understanding, respect for the individual. These were dangerous notions in Paustovsky’s world.
News of a forthcoming English translation of The Story of a Life appeared in 1961 in the Sunday Times, which described Paustovsky, then little known outside the USSR, as ‘a great storyteller, a stylist of the rarest poetic beauty, and a man of simplicity and truth’.fn29 When the first volume appeared three years later the praise was ecstatic. The Sunday Times again likened the writing to that of Gogol, Turgenev and Chekhov for its ‘freshness of response’. The Times Literary Supplement dubbed Paustovsky the ‘Russian Proust’. The Observer called The Story of a Life ‘one of the supreme examples of autobiography […] a small masterpiece […] a classic of childhood’.fn30 Reviewers praised the ‘sense of the numinous wonder and delight’ in Paustovsky’s writing, ‘its lyricism [and] the immediacy of the portraits of persons, places and events’, and its ‘limpid style […] that is simple, unforced and self-effacing’. The Times noted how ‘Everything he writes is stripped to the bone until nothing is left except what is vivid and necessary’.fn31 (Indeed, Paustovsky laboured over his writing, producing draft after draft by hand, trimming, revising and cutting every unnecessary word, as his supremely illegible manuscripts reveal.fn32)
The Story of a Life met with a similar reaction in the United States. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Helen Muchnic called the book ‘profoundly moving, sometimes humorous, often horrifying’ and singled out its ‘passages of lyric beauty’.fn33 The reviewer for the New York Times said it was one of the finest books by a Russian author he had ever read and highlighted the ‘deceptively simple’ quality of Paustovsky’s prose that ‘captures superbly the emotional atmosphere of a situation and an era’. As if that were not enough of an endorsement, the review went on to declare that the greater response to Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago than to Paustovsky’s masterpiece could only be characterised as a ‘cosmic literary injustice’.fn34
Similar comments could be heard on the Continent. When Gallimard published the first four volumes in Paris in 1966, Le Monde praised its ‘lyrisme délicat’ and called Paustovsky ‘un génie du coeur’ – a genius of the heart.fn35 The same year Heinrich Böll said that his entire family was reading the German translation and they were all utterly swept away by it. Discovering Paustovsky had been for Böll ‘a true revelation’.fn36
Paustovsky’s name was first raised in connection with the Nobel Prize in Literature in the Swedish press in 1962. The voices in support of Paustovsky inside the Swedish Academy grew, and by 1965 many in the literary world considered him to be the favourite to win. But the Swedes had their concerns. The previous year Anders Österling, permanent secretary of the academy, had been in favour of awarding the prize to Paustovsky when he was instructed by Gunnar Jarring, Sweden’s ambassador to the USSR, that this would be viewed as a provocation by the Soviet government, which was still angry at Pasternak’s win in 1958. Paustovsky, Jarring warned, was deeply unpopular among the Soviet leadership. As recently as April 1963, at a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev had gone on a tirade against Paustovsky over an article he had written years earlier for Pravda arguing against industrial development around Tarusa. The academy heeded Jarring’s warning, and the 1964 award went to Jean-Paul Sartre instead.
Paustovsky was put forward again the following year, and once more voices were raised within the academy that giving the prize to him would cause an international scandal that Sweden ought to avoid. At the same time, the Soviet government was working frantically behind the scenes to convince the academy to give the prize to its approved candidate, Mikhail Sholokhov, best known as the author of The Quiet Don.
Paustovsky was in Rome in October 1965 as the world awaited the Swedish Academy’s decision. The Italian press was busy trying to secure interviews with the man almost everyone assumed would be the winner. Paustovsky, however, harboured no illusions. Politics, not literary merit, would determine the matter. He told a friend that in light of the Pasternak affair the Swedes wouldn’t give the award to ‘another non-conformist Soviet writer’. Paustovsky was right. Days later Sholokhov was announced as the winner.
One of Paustovsky’s biggest supporters in Sweden was the poet and critic Artur Lundkvist. He and his wife had met Paustovsky in the summer of 1962 when he was recovering from a heart attack outside Moscow:
Marvellously dressed and well mannered, he met us on the veranda of the sanatorium. His sincerity was striking. He was open but at the same time uncommonly tactful, unlike the typical Soviet man. He had the defined, expressive features of someone who had gone through a great deal, although without a trace of cruelty. He had the eyes of a dreamer and a poet, yet clear and perceptive. Despite his heart trouble, he looked strong and youthful for his age, as though he would be more at home walking in the woods or in the thick of things rather than at his writing desk.