Celebrating Konstantin Paustovsky — hailed as ‘the Russian Proust’

When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high drama with heroic misadventure in a comico-lyrical amalgam of history and domestic detail that enchants from start to finish. Why Paustovsky is not better known outside his native Moscow is a mystery. In the mid-1960s he was nominated for the Nobel prize. (He was pipped to the post by Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of the obediently propagandist And Quiet Flows the Don.) Denounced as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ by the Soviet Writers’ Union, Paustovsky belonged to that select band of writers who inspire true fandom. Marlene Dietrich abased herself at Paustovsky’s feet in adoration when she encountered him in Moscow in 1964; the following year, having read him in French, she chose The Story of a Life as her book as a castaway on Desert Island Discs. Dietrich had good taste. On his death in 1968 at the age of 76, Paustovsky was hailed as ‘the Russian Proust’.