Looking Horror in the Eye

My father was a country priest, a bookish intellectual hidden in a Devon valley on the edge of Dartmoor. He was something of a Russophile, and among the books that lined the walls of his study was a section of Russian literature. I left school at 16, much to his bemusement, and in between odd bouts of employment and moping around like a teenage Oblomov I read through the canon of nineteenth-century Russian novels – they became my nourishment, my writer’s seedbed.

After my father’s death, and through house moves and the various changing arrangements of life, that Russian section of his library was scattered. With one exception: I held on to his five volumes of The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky. There were various reasons for this. One was that the work was an outlier, a series not of novels but of memoirs, ones covering moreover not the nineteenth century but the first part of the twentieth. A second was their beauty as objects, hardback copies published by Harvill Press. And a third, most significantly, was that I could remember my father reading them, reporting at breakfast the pleasure of his previous evening’s immersion. And so I kept them with me, literary totems. It was some years before I opened the first volume, Childhood and Schooldays, and was instantly captivated. Konstantin or Kostik Paustovsky was born in Moscow in 1893 but grew up from the age of 5 in Kiev, where his father Georgy was sent for his work as a statistician with the railways. Kostik was the youngest of four, with two older brothers, Boris and Vadim, and a sister, Galya. Kostik had varied ancestry. His paternal grandfather, descendant of Zhaporidzian Cossacks, was an ox-cart driver. In his youth he’d fought in the Russo-Turkish wars and been captured, but he had somehow returned with a beautiful Turkish wife. As she aged she became increasingly bad-tempered, and he kept out of her way in a hut amongst his beehives, where the grandchildren visited him and he sang them old Cossack songs in a trembling tenor. Kostik’s mother, Maria, was from a noble but impoverished family. His maternal grandfather was a sullen, silent man employed in a sugar factory. His grandmother was Polish, a pious Catholic, who remained in lifelong mourning – not for a loved one but rather for the suppression of the Polish rebellion in 1863. In 1904 Kostik followed his brothers into the elite First Kiev Gymnasium. Chapters describe the eccentric behaviour of teachers and fellow pupils, who included Mikhail Bulgakov. Outside the school, change was brewing. In October 1905 Tsar Nicholas II issued an imperial manifesto promising civil rights and democratic elections. In Kiev as elsewhere spontaneous celebrations erupted. Kostik and his friends rushed to join in. But first mounted police attacked the crowd, then anti-Semitic violence spread. Thugs roamed the streets. Shortly thereafter his father Georgy abandoned the family for another woman. His mother Maria and his sister Galya left Kiev to join Kostik’s brothers, who were now in Moscow. Living in a rented room, Kostik subsidized himself through his last years of school by tutoring. Volume two, Slow Approach of Thunder, opens in 1914, with Paustovsky at Moscow University. As a youngest son and a student, one moreover with poor eyesight, he was spared call-up to the army in the First World War, but as the conflict intensified he abandoned his studies to work first as a tram conductor and then as a medical orderly on a hospital train. Travelling across Russia and Poland and to the Eastern Front, he saw in gruesome detail the savagery and suffering of war. Meanwhile, both his brothers would perish in action. Paustovsky went on to work in an armaments factory, then as a fisherman on the Sea of Azov. Returning to Moscow, he found work as a journalist and was sent out to write about the political currents bubbling in the provinces in the first days of 1917. The book ends with the abdication of the Tsar. The third volume, In that Dawn, opens with Paustovsky careering between meetings, open-air speeches and intense discussions in smoky cafés as the populace argued out the aims of revolution. Paustovsky got trapped in his apartment building in a suburb fought over by the Red Army and military cadets loyal to the Provisional Government. Taken for a cadet in his student coat, he was only saved from a firing squad by the arrival of a Red Army officer who recognized him. Later – even as the Bolsheviks took power, in October – he was taken for a spy by anarchists, and for an anarchist by Bolsheviks, again barely escaping with his life in those febrile times. In order to support his mother and sister, Paustovsky followed them back to Kiev. The city was surrounded by a chaotic maelstrom of forces battling out the Civil War: the Red Army, the White Army, various Ukrainian nationalist factions as well as Poles and Germans. Paustovsky was twice conscripted and took part in confused fighting as well as a mutiny of his fellow soldiers. When the White Russians under General Denikin occupied Kiev, Paustovsky escaped to Odessa, where he scraped a meagre living on a struggling newspaper. The translation of the first volumes of The Story of a Life was by Michael Duncan and Manya Harari. With Marjorie Villiers, Harari had set up Harvill Press (a combination of their surnames) in 1947 (see SF no.13). The first five volumes were published between 1964 and 1969. A sixth joined them in 1974 but never made its way to my father’s library. I imagine he simply didn’t learn of its existence. As the Ukrainian catastrophe unfolded through 2022, I thought of Konstantin Paustovsky, of his varied ancestry and muchtravelled life, and of the richness of Russian culture that Putin and his thugs have been happy to destroy along with so much else. As chance would have it, in January 2022 the first three volumes, newly translated by Douglas Smith, were published by Vintage Classics in a single edition. Now I had a wonderful excuse to reread them. Kiev was one of the three intellectual centres of Tsarist Russia, along with Moscow and St Petersburg, and a meeting place of nationalities and religions. Paustovsky’s Ukrainian and Russian identities were intermingled. Nicholas II visited his high school: walking along a line of the older boys, the Tsar asked them where they were from – there were Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews – and Kostik said, ‘Ukrainian’. Yet shortly before, at the death of Tolstoy, he and his schoolmates had mourned ‘the greatest writer in our country’. Later, travelling around Russia as a hospital orderly and then as a journalist, Paustovsky developed a deep love of Russia. But as we read we understand that he is not thinking of Russia as a single, separate country: for this was the age of Empire. In the second volume, his hospital train goes to the Eastern Front. As they cross the river San, Paustovsky observes, ‘I was leaving the country for the first time.’ This seems incongruous when one has already read of his travels between Ukraine, Russia, Poland and beyond. The significant frontiers in eastern Europe, however, were those between the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman empires. The Story of a Life is an invaluable record of momentous events recounted by a witness caught up in them, but it’s also history written by a novelist. Konstantin Paustovsky gives the impression of a man who strolled from crisis to catastrophe, who looked horror in the eye without ever losing an enthusiastic innocence and a sweet curiosity. His service as a hospital orderly was the experience that forged him. He and a nurse, Lolya, fell in love. Near the front line they were sent with another nurse to help a village, which appeared to be protected by units of Russian soldiers. Kostik and Lolya entered the village and found its inhabitants dying from smallpox. The soldiers were in place not to protect the villagers but to stop them escaping. The nurses realized that they themselves were now trapped. All they could do was ease people’s suffering and hope they didn’t catch the pox themselves. But Lolya came down with the telltale signs. Kostik nursed her, and then buried her at the edge of the village, his heart broken. Paustovsky had a remarkable eye for detail, or rather his memory did. He claimed that one should never rely on notes, for then one does not fully inhabit existence but merely observes it. Instead, the memoirist should return to past events and allow memory to make its own, superior, selection. No doubt this was as disingenuous as most writers’ pronouncements on their work. The translator Douglas Smith describes finding Paustovsky’s work in Moscow archives: to his surprise the lucid prose of the finished work was achieved through laborious handwritten drafts, with so many crossings-out, amendments and other scrawls as to render the work almost illegible. But if there is any truth in Paustovsky’s dictum, then his memory was forensic. He describes falling in love at the age of 9, with 16-year-old Hannah:

She braided orange and black ribbons in her thick reddish plaits. Around her neck hung a necklace of dull coral. Hannah had sparkling, greenish eyes. Every time Hannah smiled, she lowered her eyes and then raised them slowly as if they were too heavy to lift.

During the war, attached to a field dressing station,

Twice we stopped to bury dead bodies abandoned by the roadside . . . one was a young peasant woman. Her light-coloured eyes were still open, and she looked up peacefully into the sky where a yellow sun shone through the smoke. A bee, entangled in the woman’s hair, buzzed angrily.

There are countless descriptions of nature, and of the passing scene, like this one from his hospital train: ‘Tall black crucifixes stood at the crossroads. Old women with their knitting sat beside them, and tethered goats grazed on the grass. Candles burned in a small chapel, but I could not make out anyone inside.’ By taking time to notice incidental detail in every scene, Paustovsky achieves the paradoxical effect of creating a slow reading pace of material that teems with colour and incident. He also depicts people imbued with the peculiarities of their epoch – of dress, behaviour, thought – while always noting the human qualities that render them as familiar as our own friends or neighbours. Rumyantsev is a soldier friend of his uncle’s.

It wasn’t easy to get a good look at him. He was always hidden behind clouds of tobacco smoke and was so shy he preferred to sit in the darkest corners of the living room. There he would sit hunched over a chessboard absorbed in a problem. If he succeeded in solving it, he broke out in laughter and rubbed his hands.

In his thirties, Paustovsky settled down to the life of a writer and, despite never joining the Communist Party or taking part in denunciations of others (indeed in later life he went out of his way to defend and promote writers in trouble), he became a successful novelist in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In his fifties he began work on these memoirs for which he is best remembered. At the end of the third volume, as Soviet troops approach Odessa, White Russians rush to steamships in the harbour. Paustovsky looks down from Alexandrovsky Park upon the crowd pressing desperately up the gangplanks.

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.

It was 1917, but such is the freshness of Paustovsky’s observation, and the repetitions of history, that it could have been yesterday. And it could be tomorrow.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Tim Pears 2023