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p Paustovsky seems to look straight into his readers’ eyes with tenderness and human understanding. All his books radiate goodness and beauty to which he was so sensitive. The antipode of Osborne with his Look Back in Anger, Paustovsky seems to say to the reader: “Look back in joy and kindness”, for the world about us is good.

p In his books an author always gives an answer to the questions posed him by the age he lives in. As Walt Whitman said, the poet 195 is the man who gives the answers. The character of these answers is very largely determined by the writer’s talent, wisdom and feeling. These answers may appear to be completely unconcerned with the present day. Or again, they may assume mystical forms, don the historical robes of a thousand years ago, or take the guise of fairy tales. An experienced eye, however, will unfailingly discern in the works of an artist some mark connecting him with his age, just as a man always bears on his body the mark of his connection with his mother.

p Our epoch of titanic social conflicts, wars, revolutions and astounding technical discoveries places the individual in a peculiar position. His thoughts and feelings cannot keep silent or slumber serenely as though life were a boat rocking gently on the waves as the current slowly carries it downstream. Mayakovsky in one of his poems compared people to boats. Millions and thousands of millions of human destinies arc rushing over rocks and rapids in the turbulent current of history. History demands that people should have keen vision, courage, and an understanding of what is going on. But then not everyone is born a fighter. On the contrary, most people instinctively shrink from violence. With some this comes from moral flabbiness and a desire for a placid Philistine existence. A man who has no metal in his character and no ideological backbone is liable to turn into a reptile or a jellyfish.

p But there are gentle, lyrical natures who, with their whole being, are drawn to goodness, to pastel shades, who love people and all living things on the good earth. They have a strong sense of honour and a spiritual stability that, whatever anyone says, is always an adornment.

p Precisely such was the essence of Paustovsky, the man and the poet. He was indeed a lyric poet in prose. He has shown by what paths a gentle, lyrical soul reaches the road of socialist revolution and how it merges with the ideals of this great revolution. This, in a way, is the philosophical significance of Paustovsky’s writings. A contemporary of Alexander Blok, Paustovsky belonged to the romantics and dreamers who wholeheartedly welcomed the storms of our revolutionary age.

p Konstantin Paustovsky was born in Moscow on May 31, 1892, into the family of a railway employee. He died in 1968. He spent his childhood in an Ukrainian village and then went to school in Kiev. He studied for two years at Kiev University, after which he transferred to Moscow University, where his studies were interrupted owing to the outbreak of the First World War.

p Paustovsky was greatly admired by Maxim Gorky and Romain Holland, and Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, praised him for his Kara-Bugaz.

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p A profound sense of responsibility guided Paustovsky throughout his literary career, which began more than fifty years ago. His first story was published in the Kiev magazine Ogni (Lights) in 1911 when he was a senior at school. But, as Paustovsky himself said, he immediately realised that he lacked the experience and the knowledge of people necessary for a writer, and so he plunged into life, wandering about Russia, constantly changing jobs.

p “It is dangerous for a writer to joke with words,” Gogol used to say. And Paustovsky understood this very early in life. His autobiographical work The Long Ago ends on the words of the chemist to the youth who has just finished school and wants to become a writer. The young lad is full of romantic hopes in which he is encouraged by the motley society of intellectuals who surround him.

p “It’s a big thing,” the chemist says, “but it calls for a real knowledge of life. Right? And you have very little of it as yet, if any. A writer must understand everything. He must work like a slave and not seek after fame. There’s one thing I can tell you—go to people’s houses, to fairs, to factories, to the doss-houses. Go everywhere—to theatres, hospitals, mines and prisons. That’s right: everywhere. And become steeped in life, the way valerian roots are steeped in alcohol. Let the infusion be strong. And then you’ll be able to sell it to people as a miracle-working balsam. In prescribed doses, mind you.”

p In the story A Summer in Voronezh Paustovsky describes a young shepherd boy, Fedya, to whom a writer is a legendary being, indisputably talented in all spheres of life, a sort of wizard who is expected to know everything, see everything, understand everything and do everything excellently. Paustovsky writes: “I did not want to shatter this naive belief of the village shepherd boy. Maybe because this naivete concealed the real truth about the genuine craft of a writer—a truth we do not always remember and do not always strive to live up to.”

p Paustovsky embarked upon life with this definite thought in mind. He wanted to gain personal experience in as many occupations and trades as he could, and so for a time he worked as a tram conductor in Moscow, an orderly on a hospital train during the First World War, an unskilled worker at the metallurgical plant in Yekaterinoslav and then at the turbine works in Taganrog, a sailor, a teacher of Russian literature in a girls’ school, and in many other jobs. During the Civil War he joined the ranks to fight Petlyura, and in the years of the Great Patriotic War he was a correspondent on the Southern Front.

p Paustovsky had travelled a great deal about the Soviet Union. He had been round the Caspian Sea, in Daghestan, the Caucasus, 197 Murmansk Region, Karelia, the Crimea, the North Urals, Ryazan Region, and practically everywhere in Central Russia.

p It was not until 1926, after the ten-year test which he had set himself, that Paustovsky took up the pen again to devote himself to writing.

p At first the world of images which he created was isolated from life and hovered above the real world from which he had emerged. In his early, romantic stories and the novel Gleaming Clouds we do not hear the talk typical of Black Sea and Sea of Azov ports, nor do we see any striking pictures from the life of metallurgical workers or seamen. The truth of life and the people’s struggle for their happiness were hidden behind the haze of “gleaming clouds”, the veil of bookishness and romantic contemplation.

p In his book about the artist Levitan, Paustovsky described with great precision and subtlety that peculiar state of mind when a person ceases to be a fighter and becomes merely an observer.

p “The twilight hours were especially tormenting. ... He listened to the singing of a strange woman on the other side of the garden wall, and memorised yet another romance where ’love sobbed’. He wished he could see the woman who sang in such a ringing yet sorrowful voice, he wished he could see the girls who were playing croquet. . . . He wanted to have tea on the verandah, drinking it out of clean glasses, watching the transparent thread of apricot jam slowly trickle down from his spoon and then touching the slice of lemon in his tea with this spoon. He wanted to laugh and make fun, to play catchers, to sing till all hours, to fly round the giants’ stride pole, and to listen to the excited whispering of school boys about Garshin whose story four Days had been banned by the censors. He wanted to look into the eyes of the singing woman—when women sing their eyes are always half-closed and full of wistful loveliness.”

p Socialist reality and Paustovsky’s enormous life experience helped him to rise above this romantic contemplation of the world. In his best stories about Soviet people and the beautiful Russian countryside, he showed in bold relief the country’s great transformation and painted some memorable portraits of the builders of communist society.

p Paustovsky was essentially a lyric poet. Whatever he touched with his pen became drawn into an atmosphere of amazingly gentle lyricism, breathing faith in goodness, and imbued with loving trust in man. In his autobiographical book Paustovsky wrote: “I surmised that good and evil lay side by side in life. Good can often be glimpsed through the thick of lies, misery and sufferings.... I tried to find these signs of good everywhere. And I often found them, of course. .They can flash out suddenly, like Cinderella’s crystal slipper from 198 under her grey, ragged dress, just as her earnest, tender look can flash out in the crowd somewhere.”

p Paustovsky taught us to see what we often fail to notice in life, and to admire things which do not immediately strike the eye.

p In this connection I cannot help remembering the last lines of his story about the Meshchera woods in Ryazan Region. “At first glance, it’s a quiet, unpretentious place under a not very bright sky. But the better you come to know it the more you love this ordinary land until it almost wrings your heart. And if I ever have to defend my country I shall know deep down in my heart that I am also defending this piece of land which has taught me to see and understand beauty, however nondescript it may appear—this dreamy, wooded land, as unforgettably beloved as the first love in our life.”

p This was written two years before the war. In it we see how naturally his lyricism and his feeling for his native soil blended with his love for the whole of the Soviet land.

p The book about Levitan ends with the following: “He could not communicate to his paintings even a feeble smile. He was too honest not to see the people’s sufferings. He was a poet of the vast, destitute country, a singer of its Nature. . .in this lies the power of his art and the secret of his charm.”

p Paustovsky adopted Levitan’s lyricism, but with him this lyricism, liberated from the thrall of melancholy, acquired new colours and half-tones—joyful, strong and rousing. Yet for all this, we find in Paustovsky another feature, which I personally consider a weakness, and that is his sentimental attitude to suffering. Maxim Gorky was right when he said that suffering must be abhorred as being humiliating to man. Active humanism, endowed with the same responsiveness to suffering as is common to Paustovsky and all Russian literature in general—one has only to think of Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Yesenin—is a call to battle for man; it is not an invitation to shed tears of pity. As I see it, this active humanism lies at the basis of the entire progress in the U.S.S.R. Mayakovsky and Alexei Tolstoi have both expressed it very well.

p Paustovsky’s maturity as a writer and his life experience gradually released him from his bookishness and his romantic contemplation of the world, although I am afraid his perception of the historical struggle continued to show some traces of sentimentality.

p He developed his own manner of writing and his own genre, which was also engendered by his lyrical perception of reality. It is a peculiar combination of essay, diary, memoirs and poetry.

p Many of Paustovsky’s books can be called lyrical diaries of our epoch. Such, for instance, is his story about the construction of the Volga-Don canal, called The Birth of a Sea. It is a very informative book, and there are many interesting details which the pen of an 199 artist has made unforgettable for us. But the most precious thing about it is the poetic image of the Soviet land as it becomes transformed the nearer it approaches communism.

p Paustovsky belonged to the older generation of writers whose names arc well-known to readers and revered by them. A collection of his works in six volumes came out in 1,300,000 copies—a most impressive figure. He published more than 30 books, among them the autobiographical trilogy The Long Ago, Restless Youth and The Beginning of the Unknown Age, and his book on art called The Golden Rose. One of the chapters from The Long Ago was printed in the magazine Vokrug sveta (Round the World) in 1947, and Ivan Bunin, then living in Paris, happened to read it. Bunin did not know Paustovsky personally, but he wrote him a letter saying how much he had enjoyed reading this story, which he called “The best short story in Russian literature”. Needless to say, every opinion is bound to have its share of subjectivity. The fact remains that translations of Paustovsky’s books have been published everywhere in Europe.

p It is interesting too to note Paustovsky’s appraisal of Bunin, that extraordinary master of the Russian language who died abroad, in bitter exile. Paustovsky wrote that the thing he valued most in Bunin was his love “for the beauty and complexity of the world. For the night, for daylight, for the sky, for the endless roar of the ocean, for books, for meditation—in short, for everything about him”. In large measure these words are probably applicable to Paustovsky himself. But for Paustovsky, just as for Lev Tolstoi, love meant people first and foremost, and then Motherland—Russia. One of the books in his trilogy ends with the picture of the remnants of the White Army and the bourgeoisie fleeing from Odessa in 1920. Ivan Bunin emigrated with them. Paustovsky, then a newspaper correspondent, stayed in Russia. The sirens of the departing ships sounded to him like a requiem for those people who were abandoning their homeland.

p “The ships were vanishing in the mist. The northeastern wind seemed to turn a new page. On this page was to begin the heroic history of Russia—our long-suffering, extraordinary country which we shall love till our dying breath.”

The name of Konstantin Paustovsky, a poet of beauty and humanism, has also been inscribed on this clean page in the great book of the new communist mankind.

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