Selected Stories

A storm is coming down onto the Colchis marshes, the excavator has broken down, the canal will overflow in ninety minutes, and the engineer needs a bearing cast and has no bronze. Lightning catches the bust of Lenin on its rough wooden shelf, the eyes screwed up in the faintest smile.

"Bronze! What a fool I've been!" He picks it up, laughing, gently fingering it. "He'd have done the same, in my place." Then he walks to the workshop and drops the bust carefully into the furnace, and the two mechanics glance at him and turn away.

That is from Colchis, published in 1934. A writer in Stalin's Soviet Union put an image of Lenin into a furnace to make a machine part, and made it an act of piety.

Seventeen pieces: the Meshchora country, Levitan, Mikhailovskoye, The Telegram, and the late travel writing. The volume opens with fourteen pages by Paustovsky himself, arguing that romanticism is not a failure of political seriousness and that a concealed grain of truth is a crime against conscience.

The selection stops in 1954. What he did between 1956 and 1966 - the Drozdov speech, Tarusa Pages, the letter the court would not read out - is not here. A publisher can make a writer harmless by choosing which fourteen years to leave out.

Progress Publishers, 1974. Translated by Kathleen Cook, Helen Altshuler, Leonard Stoklitsky and Vladimir Talmy, with headpieces by Vladimir Noskov.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.