Natasha Gaither
A Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky, New York Review Books, $24.95, 816 pages
About a year ago, I found myself sitting in East Rock Park, remembering myself as a child. She was fierce and clever; she had a quick temper. She was creative, remarkably curious, and often selfish. She had impressive range. Having resurrected her this way in my memory, it dawned on me that I was crying. I suddenly had the acute sensation that she was gone; that I was expressing my gratitude for her; that I was forgiving her shortcomings. Certainly, parts of her linger in my present self. I like to think that I am still creative and curious, although I have learned to share. But I feel definitively that we are different people. That day in the park, I recognized within myself a porous yet durable partition between my childhood and adolescent selves—a recognition at once liberatory and burdened by grief.
John Updike writes, “I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning.” Like Updike, I do not conceive of the progression of days as following a trajectory based on the story that I—a psychologically continuous self—tell about myself. Philosopher Galen Strawson designates such people as “Episodic,” in contrast to “Diachronic” individuals who tend to see their life as a linear narrative. Identifying with the “Episodic” folks, Strawson remarks: “I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative without form. Absolutely none.” Yet there is substantial philosophical literature arguing that such feelings of psychological continuity are the essential feature of personal identity, which in turn becomes the analytical basis for living ethically. Anyone who has written a cover letter or has given a “bio” will realize that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence for this as well. Personally, it has always felt insincere to graft a unifying construction onto the events of my life in order to explain myself to other people. But who am I, if not a story?
The Story of a Life is a memoir for Episodic selves. Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky was born in Moscow in 1892 but moved to Kiev shortly after, inaugurating a “wandering” that would come to define the writer’s life. Living at various times in Kiev, Moscow, Brest, and Odessa, Paustovsky was a child of the crumbling Russian empire. Everchanging historical circumstances propelled him from one odd job to another—trolley driver, paramedic, student, fisherman, journalist, factory worker. Paustovsky’s resume defied rationalization. Nor did his biography neatly conform to the contours of history, although Paustovsky was apparently present at almost every significant event that took place in the Russian Empire between 1905-1918. “This is a story,” Paustovsky wrote in 1958, “not a history. I am writing my autobiography adhering strictly to the principle of setting down only what I have witnessed myself.” His emphasis on producing an eyewitness account suggested a caveat; Paustovsky was unwilling to let the Owl of Minerva spread its wings over his own life. Structuring his memoir as a linear narrative would largely discount the profound contingency of those years. So, he settled on the genre of povest’ (“tale”), embracing the stylistic and structural ambiguity of a literary form somewhere between rasskaz (“story”) and roman (“novel”). The Story of a Life, or Povest’ o Zhizni, proceeds as a series of sequential but discontinuous episodes, recovered from the depths of memory. Published earlier this year, Douglas Smith’s brilliant new translation successfully communicates the visceral quality of a young man’s encounters with a kaleidoscopic and volatile world.
The 1905 Russian Revolution; World War I; a father’s betrayal; a brother’s death. These incidents uprooted Paustovsky’s life over and over, casting him into the web of Russian railroads which ultimately became more familiar than any city he called home. Perpetual motion—or perpetual instability—could have easily conditioned Paustovsky’s cynicism. Yet the defining characteristic of The Story of a Life is the author’s boundless capacity for empathy and awe. Recalling his grandmother’s estate in Gorodishche, Paustovsky wrote: “This mysterious world of water and weeds opened itself before me. I was so enchanted by this world that I could have sat on the banks from sunrise to sunset.” As he grew older, Paustovsky’s sense of wonder did not dissipate. Writing became a way to share what he saw, “enrich[ing]” the world not by disregarding its injustices but rather illuminating the beauty that persisted amid destitution, disease, and war. In 1917, Paustovsky traveled from Moscow to the village of Yefremov to report on the provincial interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution. Aboard the train, he reflected on the past few years, struggling to divine a coherent narrative.
There was one thing that I did know for certain. I had never once during these years given any thought to my comfort or material well-being. I had known only one passion—to become a writer. Now, traveling that night on the train to Moscow, I became aware that I was at last at the point of being able to put into words what I understood by beauty and justice, to express and to communicate to others my perception of life, my vision of human happiness, dignity and freedom. This, I realized, was my life’s purpose.
Paustovsky would pursue writing doggedly until the end of his life. When he was not writing, or driving a tram, or tending to wounded soldiers, or repairing fishing lines, Paustovsky was reading. Poetry saved his life on more than one occasion, sustaining his soul in war-torn Poland and pacifying police commissioners in besieged Odessa.
“Truly happy-go-lucky, see-what-comes-along lives are among the best there are, vivid, blessed, profound,” writes Strawson. At the very least, Paustovsky’s comfort with uncertainty made him highly receptive to the world, and his talent for observation ensured that he was never aesthetically impoverished. Beauty and spirituality were inextricably intertwined. “I would never believe anyone who told me that this life—with its love, its longing for truth and happiness, with its summer lightning and its distant sound of water in the night—is without purpose and meaning,” Paustovsky declares. “Each of us must struggle to affirm this life, everywhere and every day, as long as we live.” While contentious conductors, tenacious backyard roses, and drawers filled with exotic butterflies may have been footnotes in another man’s memoir, the fluid and dynamic structure of the povest’ afforded each treasure their due. Paustovsky preferred description to explanation, and as a result The Story of a Life is not only a moving account of the writer’s youth but a testament to the sheer size and diversity of the Russian empire. Beneath history was humanity, and beneath humanity was the land. The writer empowered the two to speak in their own voices, and while the dialogue in the text is rich, it is Paustovsky’s illustrations of the natural world that most effectively communicate the role Russia—not as an ideology, but as a landscape imbued with memory and meaning, however fraught and difficult––plays in his life. In one of the memoir’s most moving passages, a young Paustovsky travels by train from Bryansk to Kiev, where his father has abandoned his mother and their children. The land rises to answer Paustovsky’s loneliness:
Ever since that summer I have been attached to central Russia with all my heart. I know of no other land that possesses such enormous lyrical power and such touching scenic beauty—with all its melancholy, peace and expansiveness. It’s difficult to measure the depth of this love. Everyone experiences it for themselves. You love every blade of grass, sparkling with dew or warmed by the sun, every cup of water drawn from a forest well, every sapling bent over a lake, its leaves somehow trembling in the calm air, every crow of the cock, and every cloud floating high across the pale sky. And if at times I wish to live to be one hundred and twenty, as old Nechipor had once predicted, then it’s only because one lifetime is not enough to experience all the beauty and healing power of the Russian land.
A recurrent theme of The Story of a Life is the writer’s struggle to identify a unifying thread in his life. “Try as I might, however, I couldn’t,” he finally admits near the memoir’s conclusion. The historical circumstances that shaped Paustovsky’s life defied linearization. Yet the Russian landscape provided spiritual constancy throughout his journeys, and he returned again and again to drink from its well.
I picked up The Story of a Life while I was mired in my own doubts about post-graduation life. Of all the memoirs I have read, Paustovsky’s seems the most faithful both to lived experience and to the act of memory; life is composed of so many little moments, which return to the writer in discrete vignettes. The relationship between the density of these memories and their significance is not proportional—the child’s swing, Saltine sandwiches, high school graduation, and first job all hang together in the cavern of memory. Paustovsky reminds us that it is futile to cherry-pick our memories to fit a narrative. Instead—forgiving ourselves—we honor the things that make us who we are.