The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The great Russian writer that the West forgot
Konstantin Paustovsky’s ‘The Story of a Life’ was Marlene Dietrich’s desert island book. Now it’s time the rest of us discovered it
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In January 1965, when Roy Plomley asked Marlene Dietrich for her book to take with her on Desert Island Discs, he must have been baffled by her answer. Her choice was a practically unknown six-volume autobiography by a Russian novelist, Konstantin Paustovsky (18921968), of which only one volume had slipped out in English. But Dietrich, who spoke three languages, had come across his writing in French translation the year before, and been so haunted by it that, as Douglas Smith describes in the preface to his outstanding new translation, when chance brought her and Paustovsky face to face in Moscow that summer, all she could do was fall at his feet and bow her head.
In the Soviet Union, this reaction was not uncommon. Paustovsky was hugely popular, with an almost mythical status, not only for his prose but for his character – for managing not to be a member of the Communist Party, for never joining in the vilifying of a fellow writer. When the hounding of Boris Pasternak was at its worst, after Doctor Zhivago had been published in the West, Paustovsky walked out in disgust from the Soviet Writers’ Union meeting as it denounced him. Forty years after his death, my Russian mother-in-law still worshipped him.
But Paustovsky, unlike Pasternak, was – and still is – hardly published in English. We have left him out of our canon because his novels, short stories and children’s books aren’t clearly dissident works. How wrong we have been. Instead, he dissented indirectly, writing against dishonest political realities by living at one remove, quitting Moscow to seize on Chekhov’s “minute particulars”, to truthfully describe Russia and Russians and eventually the world-shaking events he lived through. The quality of his narrative imagination makes The Story of a Life, the Proustlength autobiography he started in 1943, a masterpiece.
Novelists tend to write their own contracts with factual truth when they write about themselves, as we know from Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Paustovsky’s three volumes (the second three are yet to be rescued from their bowdlerised Soviet version) doubtless also mobilise the fictional process, because it is the story that rules, not plain facts. But his story is an artist’s achievement. “In the amount of time it takes Jupiter to orbit the sun,” he writes, “we had experienced so much that just thinking about it makes my heart ache.” To write it, he flips history inside out, seeing his turbulent times, from before the 1905 revolution to Soviet victory in the civil war, through an unmediated and fabulously peopled gaze, threading an inexhaustible string of narrative pearls – stories, anecdotes, sketches – cultivated by a self-trained memory and occasional invention.
Born in 1892, half-Ukrainian, halfRussian, Paustovsky begins at the end of his schooldays in Kiev (now
Kyiv) with the arrival of a telegram telling him his father is dying on his farm at Gorodishche. Reaching him is near-impossible, because the river is in flood. But Konstantin (“Kostik”) succeeds. Having stayed with his father till the end, he is stuck at the farm:
I recalled my early childhood… Summer came into its own at Gorodishche – hot summers with terrifying thunderstorms, rustling trees, currents of cool river water, fishing outings, blackberry picking, the sweet sensation of carefree days filled with surprises… the ponds were my favourite place to visit. Father went there to fish every morning, and he took me with him. We went out very early, moving slowly through the heavy, wet grass.
That “sweet sensation of carefree days filled with surprises” signals the book’s rhythm: first, a picture of everyday life so colourful it can teeter between naturalism and magical realism, with a power of nature that overlays modernity, the way “thick pollen would cover the sides of the carriages” of passing express trains; and second, that picture’s harsh obverse, Kostik’s milestones of love and life that fail. Especially moving are Hannah, a 16-year-old cousin he is in love with at Gorodishche, who slips away from consumption; his brothers, Borya and Dima, killed on the same day in the First World War; and most heartbreaking, Lëlya, a nurse he falls in love with while serving as a medical orderly in the war, who dies, trapped in a lockeddown village near the frontline, of smallpox.
Kostik’s schooldays at the First Kiev Gymnasium and the superb
disappointment are things we all have to live with. It is also interesting that these stories often turn up in forms that once looked wildly experimental. That enchanting film, Groundhog Day, has a screenplay of insane repetition that might once have been the preserve of austere avant-gardistes. The same could be said of Kate Atkinson’s hit novel, Life After Life. So it’s perhaps not as surprising as it might be that a French novelist of advanced experimental tendencies has won the Prix Goncourt, and scored a million-copy bestseller, with a high-concept narrative of doubles, parallel simulated universes, and multiplying possible existences.
In Hervé le Tellier’s The Anomaly, a plane crossing the Atlantic one March hits a huge storm cloud, and
is buffeted about with terrifying violence. It emerges, damaged, and lands. Three months pass, and it emerges once more from the cloud, asking permission to land of a baffled air traffic control tower. It is exactly the same plane; it contains exactly the same people; as far as they are concerned, they took off one March day and are astonished to discover, on landing, that it is now June. The novel focuses on a small group of passengers, and what the appearance of another version of themselves means. In every case, both people are convinced that they are entitled to their property, their children, their partners, their jobs. It means different things to the writer, to the singer, to the hitman, to scientists and other professionals. Sometimes the June
version is given another chance at life, an earlier warning of a terminal disease; sometimes they find, on emerging, that their other version actually died in the intervening period, and they have to take up the reins of obligations they never knew they had undertaken.
In the implications of the situation, Le Tellier gives us a teasing glimpse of his origins in the French loose grouping of experimental writers, Oulipo. Observers of the event come to the alarming conclusion that it may prove decisively that their reality has been artificially created. Someone, somewhere, is running this – perhaps to discover what the consequences would be, perhaps to understand where things could go wrong. They are living within a simulation of
reality. Or, to put it another way, a novel. When the text disintegrates into illegibility on the last page, the simulation has been concluded.
It’s a good idea, and quite elegantly executed. From time to time Le Tellier produces a wizard wheeze – I very much enjoyed the June hitman tying up and killing the March version of himself. However, it remains, rather obstinately, a striking concept rather than a multiplying and engrossing narrative. Le Tellier could certainly have done more with the different paths the two versions follow – we stay with one version of each pair, for the most part. The possibilities of the situation aren’t really realised. For one thing, it would make the hitman legally untouchable – how to prove whether the June or the
March version did the killing? Have marriages become ménages à trois? Would a gay character find themselves tempted by themselves, or would it cross some deep incest taboo? It certainly sets the reader’s practical speculative faculty off running, albeit in directions the author hasn’t considered.
The Anomaly is amusing, but lacks the ruthless machinery and demonic capacity for elaboration that Le Tellier’s master Georges Perec would certainly have brought to the table. Perec was brilliant at making the most unpromising scenarios gripping – the description of an apartment block’s furniture in his Life: A User’s Manual, for instance. The Anomaly takes a very promising scenario indeed. In the end, it’s reduced to the status of “quite interesting”.