One of the most famous works of Russian literature, a memoir about a
writer's coming of age during World War I, the Russian Civil War, and
the rise of the Soviet era. This is the first unabridged translation of
the first three books of Konstantin Paustovsky's magnum opus.
In 1943, the Soviet author Konstantin Paustovsky started out on what
would prove a masterwork, The Story of a Life, a grand, novelistic
memoir of a life spent on the ravaged frontier of Russian history.
Eventually expanding to fill six volumes, this extraordinary work of a
lifetime would establish Paustovsky as one of Russia's great writers and
lead to a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Here the first three books of Paustovsky's epic autobiography--long
unavailable in English--appear in a splendid new translation by Douglas
Smith. Taking the reader from Paustovsky's Ukrainian youth, his family
struggling on the verge of collapse, through the first stirrings of
writerly ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on the
front lines of World War I and then as a journalist covering Russia's
violent spiral into revolution, this vivid and suspenseful story of
coming-of-age in a time of troubles is lifted by the energy and lyricism
of Paustovsky's prose and marked throughout by his deep love of the
natural world. The Story of a Life is a dazzling achievement of modern
literature.
