`The Sunniest Russian Book Ever Written'

Konstanin Paustovsky (1892-1968) threads the theme of books as solace and sustenance throughout The Story of a Life, his account of a remarkably motley existence in Russia and the Soviet Union. His curriculum vitae sounds like one of those hard-knocks biographies concocted by publishers to make a writer sound “romantic.” This classmate of Bulgakov and friend of Babel worked as a tram conductor, military orderly, boiler factory worker, fisherman, novelist, poet, war correspondent, editor and screenwriter.

I learned of Paustovsky in the best possible way – from a book-loving friend. In the summer of 1975 he gave me a copy of The Story of a Life but I was reluctant to read it, expecting another dreary Soviet whitewash. I read it the following year and felt foolish for having waited so long. The proprietor of Neglected Books Page put it like this last year:

“The Story of a Life is, with Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, perhaps the sunniest Russian book ever written. Paustovsky seems to have possessed an almost inexhaustible stock of optimism. Sitting in a lonely room on a dark winter’s night, nearly penniless, a teenager whose family has fallen apart and scattered far from him, he notes, `I began to notice that the more unattractive reality looked, the more strongly I could feel all the good that was hidden in it.’”

That captures Paustovsky’s good-natured temperament precisely. There’s little of what Western readers still seem to expect from Eastern European writing -- stereotypical Slavic brooding. Paustovsky enjoys life and always returns to books as a reliable source of pleasure and comfort. Of his school days in Kiev he writes:

“We were carried away by poetry and literature. But an understanding of Russian literature, in all its classical clarity and depth, came to us later than our understanding of the lighter literature of the West. We were young, and Western writing attracted us by its elegance, its calm, and the perfection of its design. The cold and gloomy Mérimée was easier for us than the tortured Dostoievsky. Everything in Mérimée or Flaubert was as clear as a summer morning, while Dostoievsky came on us like a thunderstorm with all its terror and a desire to hide under any sheltering roof. And Dickens knew no doubts. Nor Hugo. Nor Balzac.”

In Kiev again, after the Revolution, he writes:

“To keep my own sanity, I went back to rereading some of my favorite books: Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring, Boris Zaitsev’s The Blue Star, Tristan and Isolde, Manon Lescaut. These books really shone like imperishable stars in the dim twilight of those Kiev evenings.”

Stripped of his specifically Russian context, Paustovsky reminds us that literature is written to be enjoyed. It’s a marvelous arrangement: Writers write, readers read and everyone is happy. No prerequisites, no tests to take or loyalty oaths to sign. Paustovsky’s example recalls something Robert Conquest, the great historian of the Soviet Union, writes in The Dragons of Expectation:

“Literature exists for the ordinary educated man, and any literature that actively requires enormous training can be at best of only peripheral value. Moreover, such a mood in literature produces the specialist who only knows about literature. The man who only knows about literature does not know even about literature.”