at school he received a telegram from the small country estate of his uncle Ilko (where his father had gone to live) informing him his father was dying. Paustovsky rushed to be at his father’s bedside and arrived just in time: he died later that evening. Despite this family tragedy Paustovsky succesfully finished his schooling and earned a place at the University of Kiev.

 

The next few years of Paustovsky’s life are hardly mentioned in his memoirs—we are not even told what he studied at university—and the next volume of his autobiography resumes in September 1914 with the young student on a train bound for Moscow. His brother Vadim had been called up to fight in the recently declared war and Paustovsky wished to see him off. It seems that Paustovsky had wanted to enlist himself, but his short-sightedness and the fact he was the youngest son of the family rendered him ineligible for military service.

 

During his stay in Moscow Paustovsky decided to transfer to the university there so he would be in a position to support his mother and sister. He did not, however, resume his studies. The enormous implications he felt the war had for Russia convinced him there were more important things than study, and as an aspiring writer he believed he needed to be ‘amongst the people’. He got a job as a tram conductor but longed to be more directly involved in the war effort (especially once he learned Borya had also been called up) and so in October 1914 he volunteered to work as a medical orderly on a rear echelon train transporting wounded troops from the front.

 

In the summer of 1915 Paustovsky’s train was ordered to Odessa to undergo urgent repairs. While waiting for his next assignment he got the chance to fulfil one of his childhood dreams- to go to sea. He was granted a transfer to a hospital ship, the Portugal, which happened to be docked in Odessa at the time. But before he could take his berth aboard his new home the Portugal  left port unexpectedly, leaving the would-be seafarer behind. It was a bitter disappointment but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. A couple of days later Paustovsky learned that the ship had been torpedoed by a German submarine and had gone down with all hands.

 

Later that summer Paustovsky obtained another transfer, this time to a field hospital unit, which would bring him much closer to the front line. It was there that he experienced the full horrors of war, especially the impact it had on the thousands of refugees left cold, hungry and homeless by the fighting. He also found love, in the form of Lyolya, a nurse he had first met on the hospital train. But his happiness was to be short lived. When the pair were sent to help the victims of a small-pox outbreak, Lyolya contracted the disease herself. Rather than put her beloved through the anguish of witnessing her slow, agonising death she opted to take her own life.

 

In December 1915 Paustovsky was wounded in the leg by a shell fragment and spent a month in hospital. He often received food parcels from friends and one day, having nothing better to do, began reading the newspaper that had been used to wrap some of the food in. He casually ran his eye over the casualty list only to learn that both his brothers had been killed in action on the same day. He was given two months’ leave and returned to Moscow. There he found his mother and sister preparing to leave- they were moving back to the Ukraine to live with relatives. Now alone, Paustovsky longed to return to his unit, but before his leave was up he was summoned by his superiors and dismissed. It transpired that while he was in hospital the censors had opened a letter he had written to a friend which contained disparaging remarks about the Tsar.

 

Thus began Paustovsky’s long years of wandering. He got a job in an armaments factory and was sent on assignment to various places in southern Russia. After a few months he resigned his post and worked for a time as a fisherman on the Sea of Azov. He returned to Moscow in 1917 and starting working as a journalist. The years that followed the October revolution saw him back in the Ukraine, caught up in the ebb and flow of civil war, surviving as best he could and writing whenever he had the chance. With the civil war over and the Bolsheviks in power Paustovsky again found work as a journalist, first in Odessa, then in a number of locations across the Caucasus region, before finally settling in Moscow in 1923. His first collection of short stories, Sea Sketches, was published in 1925. His fitful career as a writer was now beginning in earnest.

 

Paustovsky the writer

In a literary career spanning more than fifty years Paustovsky turned his hand to just about everything: novels, plays, film scripts, children’s stories, biographical and topographical sketches; however it was the short story at which he really excelled. Even his six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life,²  which many consider to be his finest work, contains many chapters which read like self-contained short stories. Indeed some have been published separately as such. In the late forties no less a figure than Ivan Bunin, who did not know Paustovsky personally, came across one of these ‘stories’ and was so impressed he felt compelled to write and congratulate him: