About the end of September I found myself too tired to follow an argument in print, able to read only narrative. A fat paperback, The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustofsky, had been on our shelves for some time, and I picked it up. A fortnight and 700 pages later, I was glad to have read it. I should say that this volume has only the first three of the six books in the autobiography.
The NYRB's edition of The Story of a Life takes Paustofsky through childhood to about the age of 35. It is very much the story of loss after loss, beginning with his father's death, continuing through the loss of his two brothers and a beloved during WW I, his mother's destitution and sister's blindness, and the disasters of the Civil War. The book ends with the departure of the last ships to leave Odessa before its capture by the Red Army. Paustofsky had decided to stay in Russia.
Yet the effect on the whole is not depressing. Talleyrand said that one had not tasted the sweetness of life if one had not lived under the Old Regime: Jacques Barzun glossed this to say that life during a decadence is usually sweet. And there is plenty of sweetness in Paustofsky's accounts. There are country visits to family and friends, there are friendships at school in Kiev, there are flirtations and courtships. And there is excitement: near escapes from death at the hands of the German army, Denikin's forces, and in general the trigger-happy and malicious in no man's land or in Odessa.
If NYRB brings out a translation of the next three books, I will read it.
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