Discover one of twentieth-century Russia’s most lauded lost classics, now in a translation by Douglas Smith.
In 1943, Konstantin Paustovsky, the Soviet Union’s most revered author, started out on his masterwork, The Story of a Life, a grand, novelistic memoir of a life lived on the fast-unfurling frontiers of Russian history. Eventually published over six volumes, it would cement Paustovsky’s reputation as the voice of Russia around the world, and see him nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The first three books of Paustovsky’s epic take the reader from Paustovsky’s Ukrainian youth, struggling with a family on the verge of collapse and the first flourishes of creative ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on Russia’s frontlines and then as a journalist covering the country’s violent spiral into revolution, The Story of a Life offers a portrait of an artistic journey like no other.
The Story of Life is as richly dramatic as the great Russian novels of the 19th and 20th centuries, but all the more powerful for its first-hand testament to one of history’s most chaotic eras.
‘Outstanding . . . A sparkling, supremely precious literary achievement’ Telegraph
‘One of the great Russian autobiographies, as fresh now as the day it was written – and the day it was lived’ Julian Barnes
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