A storm is coming down off the Caucasus onto the Colchis marshes, the excavator has broken down, the canal will overflow in ninety minutes, and the engineer Gabunia needs a bearing cast and has no bronze. There is a flash of lightning.
The swift glare caught the bust of Lenin, on its rough wooden shelf. Lenin's eyes were screwed up in the faintest smile. He was looking quizzically at Gabunia.
Gabunia stares. Then: "Bronze! What a fool I've been!" He picks the bust up, laughing, while the hydrologist Nevskaya watches him, afraid he has gone mad. "It's got to be melted, cast, and turned. That will take more than three hours, but there's nothing else we can do," he says — and Paustovsky adds the stage direction that makes the scene: gently fingering the bust. Then: "He'd have done the same, in my place." Nevskaya asks who would. He does not answer. He walks to the workshop and drops the bust carefully into the furnace, and the two Mingrelian mechanics glance at him and turn away.
That is from Colchis, published in 1934, and it is the single most extraordinary page in this book. 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.
The apparatus of this volume is thin, and every thin thing in it says something.
The title page is Progress Publishers, Moscow. The copyright leaf reads Translated from the Russian / Illustrated by Vladimir Noskov, gives the Russian title as Избранные повести и рассказы, and records First printing 1970 / Second printing 1974. The cover price on the back flap is 2 roubles 19 kopeks.
Note what the copyright leaf does not say. It names no translator. The translators are in the table of contents instead, attached to individual pieces, and there are four of them: Kathleen Cook, who did fourteen of the seventeen items including the author's introduction; Helen Altshuler, who did Colchis, the longest thing in the book; Leonard Stoklitsky, who did Snow and A Night in October; and Vladimir Talmy, who did The Telegram. A reader who skips the contents page will finish this book without knowing that anyone translated it.
That is worth naming plainly, because it is not a trivial oversight. Kathleen Cook made this book in English: the introduction, the Meshchora pieces, the Levitan and Mikhailovskoye sketches, the late travel writing, fourteen items of seventeen. Progress recorded her the way a table of contents records a page number. The illustrator, by contrast, gets a line of his own on the copyright page, and he has earned it — Vladimir Noskov's black headpieces, a silhouetted figure and a rip of white for each story, are among the best pieces of book design in this series.
The series claim is on the final leaf, and it is worth quoting because it dates the volume's membership rather than the volume:
In 1973, Progress Publishers commenced publication of a new series entitled Progress Soviet Authors Library, which includes works by the most distinguished representatives of Soviet multinational literature. For the first time, the foreign reader will have an opportunity to gain a comprehensive picture of Soviet literature over the last fifty years in its many forms — novel, short story, poem and drama.
The book was first printed in 1970. The series began in 1973. Paustovsky was therefore enrolled into the Soviet Authors Library retrospectively, three years after this collection was made and five years after he died, and the 1974 reprint carries the series flash on the jacket and the 1974 list on the back — Avizius, Aitmatov, German, Yefremov, Serafimovich, Shaginyan, Sholokhov.
And the jacket flap carries a sentence in quotation marks:
"I have always lived the lives of my characters, always tried to find their good points...."
Turn to page 21 and you will find what the book itself prints: "I have always shared the life of my characters and always tried to show their good features, to reveal their true nature and their uniqueness, which is not always immediately apparent." The flap has paraphrased the inside of its own book and put inverted commas round the paraphrase. Beside it, Vera Panova is quoted: "I think the reading public likes Paustovsky because he so generously dispenses good.... A person can fight for good in many ways. One way of serving it is by cultivating the finer feelings. This is the way Paustovsky chooses."
One more small thing, which is not small. At the foot of the author's own essay, on page 21, his name is set as KONSTANTIN PAUSTOUSKY. The publisher misspelt him under his own signature, and the error survived into a second printing.
There is no commissioned foreword here. Instead the volume opens with fourteen pages by Paustovsky himself, Some Random Reflections, which he calls, in the middle of it, "this introduction to my writing".
It is the best front matter in this series, and the reason is worth naming exactly. Count the vocabulary. In roughly four thousand three hundred words of autobiography and aesthetics by a Soviet writer in a Soviet state publisher's series, the word Party appears not once. Neither does class, or Marx, or Marxism, or bourgeois, or imperialism. Socialism occurs once, in the final sentence. Revolution occurs twice, both times naming a month. Lenin occurs twice — Paustovsky heard him speak, and later wrote about him. Against that: Russia and Russian together, sixteen times.
What he writes about instead is craft, geography and honesty. He describes the family breaking up when he was thirteen and having to pay for his own schooling by coaching. He describes reading in an old newspaper that both his brothers had been killed on the same day at different parts of the front. He describes tram-driving in Moscow, a metal works at Yekaterinoslav, a boiler factory at Taganrog, a fishing artel on the Azov Sea, and Odessa, where he first fell in with Ilf, Babel, Bagritsky, Shengeli and Slavin. He describes deciding, after an evening at the newly opened Moscow planetarium, that everything he had written so far was "as unreal as the sky on the concrete dome" — and burning several stories.
Then he sets out a position. He distinguishes the exotic from the romantic: "The exotic as such is divorced from real life, whereas the romantic is firmly rooted in life and feeds on its rich sap. I abandoned the exotic, but I did not abandon the romantic and never will." And then, quietly, he refuses an instruction:
I think that one of the most distinctive features of my prose is a tendency towards romanticism. This reflects my character, of course. It is ridiculous to expect anyone, least of all a writer, to renounce this tendency. Anyone who makes such a demand does so through ignorance.
He ends that passage by noting, with a politeness that is itself a report, "And I am very pleased that after the heated controversy among critics not so long ago romanticism has resumed its rightful place in our literature." A foreign reader in 1974 was given no help whatever in identifying the controversy, the critics, or the outcome.
His statement of what a writer owes is the sharpest sentence in the book:
But at that time I did not realise that writing also demanded an enormous expenditure of time and energy, that even the smallest grain of truth concealed by the author from his readers was a crime against his own conscience for which he was bound to pay dearly.
There is one more count worth making, and Paustovsky makes it for us. On page 21 he lists the people he has written about: apart from separate works on Levitan, Kiprensky and Shevchenko, he names Lenin, Gorky, Chaikovsky, Chekhov, Lieutenant Schmidt, Victor Hugo, Blok, Pushkin, Hans Christian Andersen, Maupassant, Prishvin, Grieg, Gaidar, Charles de Coster, Flaubert, Bagritsky, Multatuli, Lermontov, Mozart, Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe, Vrubel, Dickens, Grin and Malyshkin. Twenty-five names. One Bolshevik, one mutineer of 1905, and twenty-three writers, painters and composers, roughly half of them foreign and most of the rest dead before 1917. Then he says where he actually preferred to be: "But most of the time I have been happy writing about simple unknown people, artisans, shepherds, ferrymen, forest wardens, buoy keepers, watchmen and village children — my bosom friends."
And the essay closes, after all that, with the one doctrinal sentence in it: "My country, my people and the new truly socialist society which they have created are the noble masters which I have served and continue to serve with each fresh word." It reads like a receipt stapled to a document.
Now look at the dates. Progress prints the year at the end of each story, and the run is this: 1926, 1934, 1936, 1936, 1937, 1937, 1938, 1938, 1943, 1944, 1946, 1946, 1950, 1953, 1954. The only later item is the closing travel sketch Ilyinsky Waters, which is undated here and belongs to the European cruise of the early sixties.
Paustovsky died in 1968. This collection, first made in 1970 and reissued in 1974 as part of a series promising "a comprehensive picture of Soviet literature over the last fifty years", contains essentially nothing from the last fourteen years of his life.
Those are the years that made him a public figure. Story of a Life, the six-volume autobiography that is his major late work, is not represented; the reader learns it exists only because Paustovsky mentions it in his own introduction and says he is still writing it. Tarusa Pages, the 1961 anthology he edited and filled with young writers, is not mentioned anywhere in the volume. Neither is the speech he made in Moscow in 1956, nor the letter he sent to a defence lawyer in 1966.
The apparatus does not hide these things. It is more effective than that. It selects a writer whose subject is birch woods, provincial railway halts, buoy keepers and watchmen, and then tells the foreign reader on the jacket that what he "generously dispenses" is "good", and that his way of fighting for it is "by cultivating the finer feelings".
The record exists, and it is in the press of the Fourth International, written while he was alive.
In the summer of 1964 the International Socialist Review ran a review of the first volume of Story of a Life by George Saunders, under the title "Revolt Against Stalinism". Saunders places Paustovsky precisely: one of the writers who, in the absence of a political opposition destroyed in the thirties, had become "the nearest thing to popular spokesmen", and who had "especially gained note for his defense of young, nonconformist writers against the 'neo-Stalinist' official critics". He notes that Tarusa Pages sold out its 75,000 copies in two days.
He also notes something else. In 1935, in the Diary in Exile, Trotsky recorded his impressions of a short novel by Paustovsky that he happened to read:
"A gifted man," he wrote, "technically superior to the so-called 'proletarian writers.' He paints nature well; you can discern the sharp eye of a seaman. At times, in his description of Soviet life (in the Transcaucasus) he reminds one of a good gymnast with his elbows tied. But there are some stirring pictures of work, sacrifice and enthusiasm."
Saunders does not name the book and neither can we; but a short novel of Soviet life in the Transcaucasus, published the year before, full of stirring pictures of work, sacrifice and enthusiasm, with a seaman's eye for water and weather, is a very exact description of Colchis, the second item in this volume. The reader can test the judgement directly. The Kakhiani speech at the end — "I thank you, in the name of the Bolshevik Party", "We shall add it all to the furnace of our socialist ideals", "Long live the Soviet subtropics!" — is a required set-piece, delivered word-perfect. And Paustovsky gives it to a man who has just told the assembled workers, of the antique statue dug out of the swamp, "I'm no judge of sculpture. I'm a land reclamation expert, not a Michelangelo or an Antokolsky." The elbows are tied, and the gymnast has arranged for you to see the rope.
Saunders also quotes at length from Paustovsky's speech at the Moscow writers' rally called in 1956 in defence of Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone, using the novel's villain Drozdov as a name for a whole stratum:
The problem lies in the fact that in our country there exists — unmolested and even to some extent prospering — an entirely new social stratum, a new caste of petite bourgeois. This is a new group of acquisitive carnivores, a group which has nothing in common either with the revolution, or with our regimen, or with socialism.
And, on where they came from: "They are the result of the cult of personality — a term by the way which I consider extremely euphemistic."
Ten years later, in March 1966, World Outlook reported from the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial that Paustovsky, "one of the best-known and most respected writers in the Soviet Union", had sent a letter to Sinyavsky's attorney taking a strong stand for the defendants and against the trial. He wrote that he saw nothing "anti-Soviet" in the works published abroad as Tertz and Arzhak; that he did not care for them artistically; that their publication was a matter of personal conscience; and that to try the two men on criminal charges was a grave affair that would injure the prestige of the Soviet Union. The report adds that the court did not read the letter aloud as part of the record.
That is the writer Progress was selling in 1974 as a cultivator of the finer feelings.
None of which would matter if the work were not good. It is.
Colchis is the centre of the book and the most interesting failure in it: a land-reclamation novella in which the reclamation argument is won by the engineers and the writing argument is won by somebody else. Its real debate is a conversation over a feast table. Pakhomov explains what the ancients meant by a golden fleece — an ordinary sheepskin spread at the bottom of a gold-bearing river, weighted with stones, and the grains of gold collected in the wool. "It's very simple," said Kakhiani. "No poetry about it. A primitive method of gold washing, that's all." And Pakhomov, amicably: "There's lots of poetry about the simplest things," followed by "Legends contain the seed of the future. It's man's aspiration to lofty ideals that gives rise to legend." Asked what the fire-breathing bulls of the Jason myth are now, Gabunia calls out, chuckling, "Tractors." That is the whole quarrel of the 1930s in half a page, and Paustovsky lets the romantic have the last word without ever saying so: it is Pakhomov, not the engineer, who gets the closing argument, that "technology is also an art" and that men must put their faith in it "as the Greeks put their faith in Orpheus' lyre".
The Telegram, dated 1946, is the finest thing here and the least explicable by the doctrine of its year. Nastya, in Leningrad, is doing useful and creditable work organising an exhibition for a sculptor, and does not go to her mother in the village, and her mother dies. There is no reconciliation and no redemption. She arrives two days after the funeral, weeps all night in the cold room, and leaves before anyone can see her: "It seemed to her that no one but Katerina Petrovna could absolve her of her irreparable guilt, her unbearable burden." That story was published in the year the Zhdanov decrees came down on Zvezda and Leningrad.
Look also at where the dates cluster. Six of the seventeen items are from 1936, 1936, 1937, 1937, 1938 and 1938. What Paustovsky published in the years of the Terror was: a story about hunting dogs, a life of the landscape painter Levitan, a description of the Meshchora woodlands, a visit to Pushkin's estate at Mikhailovskoye, a story called Lump Sugar, and a boy from Little Lake. Isaak Levitan opens in a Moscow of the eighteen-eighties, with a drunk painter's hands shaking over a glass of tea and his pupil listening: "Russia hasn't got its own spokesman," Savrasov was saying. Written in 1937, that is a sentence with more than one address.
The nature writing — Meshchora Country, Lyonka from Little Lake, A Night in October, Ilyinsky Waters — is what made him loved, and it is not an escape from anything. It is the ground of the claim he makes in the introduction: that romanticism is "inherent in everything particularly in learning and knowledge", that ignorance makes a person indifferent, and that indifference "is like a cancerous growth in that it develops slowly but surely". A man who thought that about indifference was always going to write that letter in 1966.
The scan behind this ebook is short at the end. The last story, Ilyinsky Waters, breaks off in the middle of a sentence at the foot of printed page 333 — "Yellow plane leaves rustled beneath our feet. They had" — because the final leaf of the copy is missing. Nothing has been supplied or invented to cover the gap. It is recorded here so that the reader knows the ending is absent rather than abrupt.
Read the introduction first, and read it as a document rather than as throat-clearing. It is a man of seventy-four explaining, to a foreign reader he will never meet, that romanticism is not a failure of political seriousness and that a concealed grain of truth is a crime against conscience. Both propositions were arguments he had been having at home for forty years, and he states them here without naming a single opponent.
Then read Colchis for the bust in the furnace, and The Telegram for what he could do when nobody was requiring anything of him, and the Meshchora pieces for the thing he was actually best at.
And keep the dates in view. The book stops in 1954. What Paustovsky did between 1956 and 1966 — the Drozdov speech, Tarusa Pages, the letter the court would not read out — is not in this volume, was not going to be put in this volume, and is the reason the volume exists in this shape. A publisher can make a writer harmless by choosing which fourteen years to leave out.