Krasnovodsk and the wastelands of the Karakum beyond filled Paustovsky with abhorrence. Perhaps it was the climate ‘with its air thick and syrupy as glycerine’, perhaps it was only his state of mind. From the sea, the sun-blackened rock encircling the harbour appeared to him as ‘the gullet of an Asia blasted to ash’. Not exactly the inviting, natural amphitheatre others had seen.
Along the sleepy quays he found nothing to his liking. ‘Everything was so scourged by the heat that the mere rolling of the surf elicited one’s amazement; one wondered how this heavy seawater found the strength to throw itself languidly against the burning shores, then withdraw with a lingering hiss.’
It was in the summer of 1931 that Paustovsky found himself stranded on this barren coast. For the final stage of his journey to the salt works at Kara Bogaz he was dependent on the arrival of two tankers, the Frunze and the Dzerzhinsky, whose task it was to deliver spring water from the Caucasus to the chemical plant. ‘Flying Dutchmen,’ he fumed. ‘Ships with no idea when or where they are sailing.’ There was no timetable, and neither shipping line nor harbour master could tell him when the tankers would dock. Desperate for information, he almost wore out the dial of the Bakelite telephone in the port office; all that came of it was a dressing-down by a Soviet switchboard operator: ‘What do you think you’re doing, hanging on the line as though a fire’s broken out? Put that phone down!’
Scattered across a few chapters of his six-volume memoirs (Story of a Life, written after the Second World War), Paustovsky unfolds, bit by bit, the story of how Kara Bogaz came to be, from idea to manuscript. ‘This book was my first success, because it is about things that are real.’
Strangely enough, however, Paustovsky wastes no words on Kara Bogaz itself (What did a sulphurous bay look like? Did it smell of rotten eggs?), on the ‘marine waterfall’ or the pilot plant for sulphate that had risen on its shores. These omissions stand in stark contrast to the exhaustive detail with which Paustovsky describes the run-up to his literary breakthrough. A pattern slowly emerged in my mind: each time he nears the bay his memoirs leap to a different subject. Or the passage concludes flatly: ‘The rest/the consequence/what happened next… can of course be read in Kara Bogaz.’ But as to whether the Frunze or the Dzerzhinsky actually docked at Krasnovodsk – he breathes not a word.
About the wellspring of his fascination with Kara Bogaz, however, Paustovsky is neither vague nor coy. To his mind, it can be traced to his childhood: or, to be more precise, to an evening long ago in Kiev when his father, a railway statistician, took him out for a walk on Vladimir Hill beside the Dnieper. On the heights above the river, a strange man in a battered hat, carrying a telescope and tripod, suddenly appeared. The stranger launched into a monotone spiel: ‘Honoured signori and signorini. Buona sera! For only five kopeks you can travel from the earth to the moon and stars. May I specially recommend a look at the ominous planet Mars, which has the colour of human blood?’ His father allowed Konstantin (‘Kostik’) to look at Mars through the telescope. ‘Against a black background I saw a reddish globe hanging freely in the void.’ At a snail’s pace, the globe crept towards the margin of the copper ring. The stargazer adjusted his device a few degrees, but Mars immediately began edging away again.
‘“Well?” my father asked. “Can you see anything?”
‘“Yes,” I replied. “I can even see the canals.”’
Mars – with its Martians and the ‘canals’ discovered by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli – produced in young Kostik a vague foreboding. It was ‘a dying planet’, his father told him, where the seas and rivers had all dried up. Plant life had withered, the mountain ranges were worn down to nubs. All that remained was a huge, sandy desert.
‘“Does that mean that Mars is just a ball of sand?”
‘“You could say that,” my father replied. “And what happened to Mars may also happen to our own planet.”’
At home, Kostik heard from his eldest brother, Dima, that one half of the earth’s surface was already covered by desert. ‘After that,’ writes the author of Kara Bogaz, ‘my fear of the desert (without ever actually having seen one) assumed obsessive proportions.’
It would not be long before Kostik’s worst nightmare was realised. That summer the Paustovskys visited the family estate outside the city. They were descended from a line of Cossacks from Zaporozhye, who had – with intermittent success – defended the lower reaches of the Dnieper in the service of the tsar. After being routed by a Turkish offensive, Grandfather Paustovsky had moved further inland to an elongated island in the river Ros, a fast-moving tributary of the Dnieper.
‘Without a doubt the most mysterious spot on earth,’ Paustovsky wrote of this estate. In the woods behind the apiary he and his brothers played ‘knights of Zaporozhye’, a fantastical game in which the chief virtues were valour and loyalty to the tsar.
Kostik was fishing with his grandfather one lazy afternoon when the old man suddenly leapt to his feet and, shielding his eyes with his hands, peered out across the fields: ‘There it is, the desert wind. The wind from Bukhara.’ He spat angrily on the ground. ‘Damnable, hellish heat. It’s a disaster, Kostik. Once it’s here we won’t be able to catch our breath.’ In advance of the rushing grey haze the boy ran for the house, but the first hot gusts caught up with him and made his shirt stick to his back. In the twenty-four hours that followed, everything green, from the fennel in the garden to the leaves of the willows, would, in Paustovsky’s inimitably beautiful prose, be blasted to a dried bouquet.
‘The harvest is ruined,’ his father said. ‘The desert is spreading towards the Ukraine.’
Authorities on Paustovsky’s work believe it may have been this experience that prompted his interest in botany. No one knows whether he ever kept a herbarium with four-leaf clovers and cat’s tail pressed between the pages of his ten-kopek instalments of the Universal Library; what we do know is that after graduating from Kiev’s First Classical Gymnasium, he registered as a student with the Faculty of Natural History at the University of Moscow. In the two years allotted him before the outbreak of the First World War he became a competent botanist.
‘His almost encyclopedic knowledge of flowers and plants and the painstakingly accurate descriptions he gave of them have plagued his translators,’ two Russian–English translators once complained in a foreword to a collection of his short stories. The reader regularly wades, knee- or waist-deep, through dewy grasses and herbs. When the silviculturist Masha Klimova goes to pick wild roses on the banks of the Volga, Paustovsky lets her skirt become festooned with the sticky remains of heather, water soldier, plantain, pondweed, wild mallow, meadow clover, blueberry and bedstraw.
Little wonder then that his favourite author is Ivan Bunin, the Nobel laureate who – though exiled in Paris – carried the Russian tradition of pastoral prose into the 20th century. Bunin can ‘adorn a thicket with human thoughts and moods’; so Paustovsky expresses his admiration. He, however, is much too much in love with the Russian language and Russia’s immense forests to entertain seriously any thought of emigrating. In a summary of the ‘preconditions’ for good writing he lists, in addition to ‘lyrical power and empathy’, a ‘living bond with nature’. No ‘class consciousness’ or other such social engagement. Instead, by dint of careful study, nature must become ‘a second universe in the writer’s heart’. Reading that, I suddenly appreciated the predicament in which Paustovsky must have found himself as a young Soviet writer. Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, after all, were nothing less than frontal assaults on ‘the untrammelled wilderness’. Gorky himself had declared that once the class struggle was won, Soviet humankind would at last be free to engage its final enemy: nature.
Kara Bogaz aligned itself perfectly with that unsentimental ideology of dominance. ‘In the nature surrounding us there is virtually no evil thing that cannot be applied to the good of mankind,’ Paustovsky writes. The story itself is one long ode to the construction of chemical plants as ‘the industrial conquest of the desert’; it is to this that the author owes his fame.
But, I began to wonder, did those songs of praise truly come from the heart? Or had he, along the way, been forced to betray himself?
‘As far as we can ascertain, Konstantin Paustovsky never visited the bay at Kara Bogaz.’
Professor Ilya Ilyich Komarov cocked his head in order better to monitor my reaction, causing his fleshy cheeks to billow to one side and revealing just a hint of the ponytail fanning out over his collar. Precisely what this amiable man was a professor of is something which, to this day, I have never been able to ascertain; I therefore opt for ‘Paustovskiology’. I estimated his age at a little over sixty. His uniformly grey hair was combed back tightly and bound in an artistic mane which brushed his shoulders and made him look ten years younger.
Ilya Komarov was Director of the Paustovsky Institute in Moscow. On several occasions, while rollerblading through Kuzminki Estate, the grounds of a former stately home paved and opened to the public by the Communists, I had zipped past a kind of gingerbread house. But I had never realised that Count Kuzminki’s gardener had once lived there, let alone that the top floor was now the headquarters of research into the life and works of Konstantin Paustovsky. Hanging on the wooden facade of the two-storey house was a likeness of the writer, in bas-relief.
When I rang the bell that spring day, the door was opened by a fragile-looking lady with parchment skin. ‘Ilya Ilyich!’ she called up the stairs. ‘A visitor from Holland!’
I shuffled up behind her to the attic, where the director was already busily clearing papers from a table. He and his assistant, who – despite her advanced age – I was simply to call ‘Monika’, turned out to be the institute’s only paid staff.
‘Let’s celebrate with a piece of simnel cake,’ Ilya Komarov suggested. ‘Monika will make coffee. Do you mind if it’s instant?’ There was a clattering of plates, the director wiped off a bread knife and was immediately reprimanded like a child: his assistant felt that the knife should be washed first.
‘Please, Monika, dearest, you just go and boil some water.’ Smacking his lips, Ilya herded her into the kitchen.
And how could he be of service to me?
To be courteous, and also because I meant it, I told him how impressed I was by the way the Russians pay tribute to their writers. You came across them everywhere: a brooding Dostoyevsky at the Lenin Library, Mayakovsky with his proud forelock at his own metro station, greater and lesser Gogols in the parks. And then to discover that Paustovsky had been honoured with his own research centre – incredible.
‘We have been at work for the last twenty-six years,’ the professor announced, glowing with pride. Sadly, he had never met his beloved writer. ‘Monika never knew him either. We met at Paustovsky’s funeral in 1968. That’s when the idea for the institute was born.’
‘No, that was later!’ Monika interrupted him, her beehive hairdo swaying in disagreement. She sat down at the table, electric kettle in hand. It didn’t matter, Ilya hushed her. What mattered were the literary activities, chief among them the publication of the biannual journal The World of Paustovsky. He handed me the last four issues, each one easily an inch thick. In addition to publishing, the association – which was wholly dependent on a loyal group of volunteers – organised cultural soirées and limited editions for bibliophiles. By way of explanation Monika handed me a Russian dictionary, in which the meaning of each entry was illustrated with a quote from Paustovsky. ‘The only thing like it in the Russian-speaking world is a dictionary using Pushkin,’ she explained in her brittle voice.
Almost before I could comment on this handy Paustovsky bible, it was pressed on me as a gift. I had arrived empty-handed; an oversight which became particularly embarrassing when I told them about the new Dutch-language translation of Kara Bogaz, which I had failed to bring.
No matter. Ilya Komarov fetched a dog-eared notebook from the windowsill, donned his reading glasses and ran a finger down a handwritten list of Paustovsky translations. ‘Kara Bogaz, let’s see, has been translated into… Danish, German, Greek, Japanese and… ah, yes… Dutch. Pegasus Publishers. Amsterdam, 1935. Translated by a certain “Ban het Reve”. Am I pronouncing that correctly?’ The professor peered at me in triumph over the top of his half-moon spectacles.
I was stunned. I knew that Gerard van het Reve, Sr, chairman of the Dutch Association of Friends of the Soviet Union, had collaborated in the 1930s with his teenage son Karel on the translation of two of Paustovsky’s books (Kara Bogaz and Colchis: Land of the New Argonauts). But it was mind-boggling to learn that such information had made its way to a jumbled attic room in Moscow.
Ilya Komarov jotted down the vital data relating to the newest translation and promised to make mention of it in the very next World of Paustovsky. I, in turn, promised to return with a copy of the new edition as soon as possible.
‘I hope I am not being presumptuous,’ the professor continued, ‘but why all this interest in Kara Bogaz?’
I told him that I was preparing a trip to Turkmenistan, to the bay at Kara Bogaz. ‘I plan to follow in Paustovsky’s footsteps, seventy years after his own journey.’
It was then that Ilya Komarov made his startling disclosure and, for several moments, observed me pityingly, his head tilted to one side. Paustovsky had never seen the bay – the very subject of his first successful book ‘about things that are real’ – with his own eyes.
‘He got as far as Krasnovodsk, and his advance ran out. He went home via Baku.’
‘Do you mean to say that the ships he was waiting for never arrived?’
Ilya Komarov nodded cautiously, afraid that I would now be disappointed by this writer he admired so greatly.
Disappointed was hardly the word; I was flabbergasted to discover that, even in his memoirs, Paustovsky had tinkered so adroitly with the facts. It was one thing to titivate a story about ‘real things’ with one’s own imaginings, but to submit one’s own autobiography to the laws of fiction spoke of a life teetering between truth and fantasy. A sentence came into my mind, one which had led me to believe that Paustovsky had indeed reached his destination: ‘“I lived in a plywood house on the shores of the bay at Kara Bogaz,”’ I recited. ‘And you’re telling me that’s not true?’
The director of the Paustovsky Institute nodded once more, this time as deliberately as a doctor breaking bad news. ‘During our research we often stumble across such minor irregularities.’
Monika, lifting a cake crumb from the tabletop with a moistened finger, told me that her initial reaction had been at least as stunned as mine: touched when she first read the scene in which Lolya, Paustovsky’s great love during the First World War, died in his arms, and then all the more indignant when she discovered that the real Lolya had lived on for years as an actress with a famous Moscow theatre company.
‘Imagine that,’ Ilya Komarov added. ‘In his autobiography, Paustovsky buries her with his own hands beneath a willow, just behind the front lines.’
Was there then, I wondered aloud, any way to test the veracity of Paustovsky’s six-volume memoirs? What was fiction and what autobiography in Story of a Life?
The professor and his assistant exchanged glances and led me into the little kitchen, where one corner of the counter had been converted into an altar. The shrine consisted of a plastic icon, a flower in a beer glass and an ashtray filled with candle stubs. These votive offerings stood in a semicircle around the framed photograph of a man sporting stern-looking spectacles and a wispy grey beard. ‘Vadim Paustovsky,’ Ilya Komarov said. ‘The writer’s son. He was taken from us last week. We’ve decreed a forty-day period of mourning.’
Vadim – ‘Dima’ to those who knew him well – had lived to the age of seventy-five and to the very end was an active propagator of his father’s work. A frequent visitor to the attic room, he had served as a source of reference when it came to the ‘irregularities’ confronting Ilya and Monika. Most of the time he could infallibly sift fact from fiction, often on the basis of passages from letters in his father’s hand. But now this walking lie-detector was no more. During his final days Dima had submitted a two-part article about his father’s life for The World of Paustovsky. Ilya Komarov showed it to me; he said it dealt with Paustovsky’s three marriages and their impact on his work, and was therefore a priceless contribution. This is how it began: ‘Throughout his life my father walked the thin line between the real and the imaginary. I see it as my task to clear up some of the mystery, so that the “truth” may become visible.’
With Dima’s exegesis to hand, Paustovsky’s oeuvre proved a great deal less baffling. The son demonstrated convincingly that his father had not in fact regarded Kara Bogaz as his first real book, but The Romantics. This latter work appeared only in 1935, three years after he had established a name for himself as a Soviet writer, but he had started writing it under the reign of Tsar Nicholas.
‘My father lugged the expanding manuscript around with him for twenty years,’ Dima wrote. ‘To him it was a kind of lyrical diary, a second life of the imagination which he could not do without.’
Paustovsky himself, at least in his memoirs, claimed that he had waited so long simply because he did not consider the manuscript to be ‘ripe for the press’. Dima, however, had a more simple explanation: as an up-and-coming writer in the Soviet Union, Paustovsky first had to prove himself with a book which would curry favour with the Party. The best debut would be a ‘production novel’ about heavy industry, dam-building or the extraction of mineral riches. In other words: as a literary debutant, Paustovsky could hardly approach Soviet publishers with a love story.
For The Romantics is, indeed, about love. The main character is a young man, Paustovsky’s alter ego, an aspiring writer who has fallen in love with Chatidze, a ‘child of nature’, and at the same time with Natasha, an urbane actress. He is unable to decide, but in the end the winds of global conflict decide for him: Natasha dies of typhoid fever, contracted in a military lazaretto, near the city of Minsk.
‘Chatidze was my mother,’ writes Dima, who was born in 1925. According to her baptismal certificate, her real name was Yekaterina Stepanovna Zagorskaya: Katya for short. ‘My parents met in 1914 aboard a hospital train behind the front lines in Poland.’ Katya and her sister Yelena (Lolya for short) are ‘sisters of charity’. Konstantin is a medic, and on several occasions he and Lolya assist with the amputation of arms or legs. It is Konstantin’s task to deposit the severed limbs in a zinc container, and to bury them at the next stop. Despite the horrors he encounters, a photo from those days shows him looking ‘fresh-faced’, wearing a wispy moustache and neatly trimmed sideburns, his expression devoid of any trace of cynicism. As the bombs rain down and the ranks are decimated by a fatal epidemic, Paustovsky – like all the other soldiers on hospital train number 226 – falls madly in love with the unapproachable, defiant Lolya, ‘a strong-willed girl with a rather languid voice and a face ever pale, as though from pent-up emotion’. Although she also loves him passionately, he is unable to keep her – she is too fickle. In an attempt to banish her from his dreams, therefore, Paustovsky first has her die of typhoid as Natasha (in The Romantics) and later, this time simply as Lolya, of smallpox (in Story of a Life). He slips the plain silver ring from her finger and stows it in his haversack as a memento.
Dima: ‘Here my father applied the technique of foreshortening: everything he had experienced with a person dear to him he compressed within a short period of time, after which that character had to vanish from the story completely, sometimes by dying.’ According to his son, Paustovsky copied this ‘literary procedure’ from The Life of Arsenyev by Ivan Bunin, who killed off his heroine, Lika, while the woman her character was based upon lived on for years.
Konstantin’s two brothers, unlike the sisters Katya and Lolya, did not survive the war. In an old newspaper that had been used to wrap a piece of cheese, Paustovsky one day saw a report entitled ‘Fallen in Battle’. In it, according to his account, he read the shattering news that his two older brothers had been killed on the very same day, on different battlefields: one at Riga, the other in the foothills of the Carpathians. (‘Almost on the very same day,’ was Dima’s more precise qualification.)
Konstantin’s father died of cancer of the larynx even before the war began; his funeral at the family estate on the Ros is the opening scene in Story of a Life. In that book Paustovsky deals at length with family matters, but completely fails to mention his marriage in 1916 to Lolya’s younger sister, Katya, at the church in her native village. Having returned from the front unharmed, the newlyweds moved in with Paustovsky’s mother and partially blind sister Galya, who had by then fled to Moscow.
And then? I was itching to find out about Paustovsky’s experience of the Revolution. In his memoirs he draws a sharp distinction between the fall of the tsar in February 1917 and the seizing of power by the Bolsheviks in October of that year. ‘Personally, I greeted the February Revolution with boyish enthusiasm, even though I was already twenty-five at the time,’ Paustovsky writes. He was pleased to see the authoritarian regime ‘unravel like a mouldy piece of linen’, and Russia ‘expressing everything in the space of a few short months that it had been bottling up for centuries’.
He is more reticent, however, about what came afterwards. Paustovsky admits that the word ‘proletariat’ was seldom, if ever, used in his circles; until the Romanovs’ abdication, therefore, he ‘could hardly say a sensible word about the revolutionary movement among the workers’. As the descendant of Cossacks he had little affinity with the strike leaders from around Petrograd or Nizhni Novgorod. And in his autobiography one finds nothing about his first encounters with those noisy fellows.
Fortunately, more light was shed on the matter by one of Ilya Komarov’s collectors’ editions, which included letters and articles written by the writer in 1917.
There one finds clear scepticism: how could this rude crowd, with its flag-waving and sabre-rattling, ever hope to run an empire? Paustovsky’s ‘reservations’ – and he is putting it mildly – change to abhorrence when he sees a group of Bolsheviks pasting their hectographed broadsheets onto a statue of Pushkin. Like Gorky in Petrograd, he fears that if power falls into the hands of the illiterate, Russia will go to the dogs. ‘Civilisation is on the chopping block!’ he warns a few weeks before the October Revolution. By way of example he recounts a scene he had witnessed outside the Kremlin walls, where a member of the Red Guard had stood cracking sunflower seeds between his teeth and trying to spit the husks into the barrel of an antique cannon. And no one raised a finger to stop him!
As a Soviet writer, though, Paustovsky could not permit himself such outspoken criticism. Looking back on it later, he states: ‘We lacked the imaginative power and the time needed to properly understand the lightning pace at which history was racing along’ – which is, undoubtedly, very much the truth.
Like his wife Katya, Paustovsky wrote for a slew of short-lived publications. As a reporter he heard Lenin give speeches, on one occasion to demobilised soldiers in a Moscow barracks, at other times in the luxurious Hotel Metropol or from the orchestra pit at the Bolshoi. ‘There was nothing either stiff or monumental about him, neither egotism, pomposity nor any desire to pronounce sacred truths,’ he noted in his autobiography. ‘The word “bread”, which in the mouths of other speakers assumed the sound of an abstract, purely economic term, he invested, by means of a barely noticeable change in inflection, with something tangible; it became black rye bread, that daily bread for which Russia longed so dearly in those days.’
Is this his real voice we are hearing? In household circles, Dima claimed, his father referred to Lenin as ‘a disturbed fanatic’. He considered the man’s revolution to be of a ‘questionable hue’; in Paustovsky’s eyes, the Bolshevik coup had ‘been carried out in accordance with the classic laws of the jungle’.
But from 1918 onwards, such opinions no longer found a forum; the independent newspapers for which Katya and he worked were closed that summer. Their favourite journalists’ café was shut down as well. Paustovsky writes that, for the first few years, he watched the new regime from the sidelines, but decided in 1920 to ‘change from observer to participant’. His explanation is brief: ‘I realised that no road was open to me other than the one my people had chosen.’
As a writer working within the Soviet Union, Paustovsky learned to adapt: the spirit of the age demanded that he praise the advances of socialism. Never as a member of the Communist Party, to be sure, but unambiguously, and with the dedication required of him. Paustovsky’s period of doubt had lasted ten years shorter than Gorky’s. Did he have to overcome qualms, I wondered, before bending his talents to the service of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Or had he sincerely come to believe in the prospect of a better future?
In at least one area Paustovsky accepted no compromises; that was the domain of the Russian language. Like Gorky, he felt that literature could exist only by virtue of its accessibility: ‘Literature that is obscure or intentionally cryptic serves only the author, and not the people.’ Paustovsky distanced himself from those colleagues who found in the Revolution their inspiration for all manner of formal experimentation: such ‘Futurists’ and ‘Formalists’ had, since Gorky’s return, been denounced for their preoccupation with ‘art for art’s sake’. His affinity with Gorky on this point spared Paustovsky the antagonism and the thumb-screw pressure endured by these innovators. But for him, simplifying the language the way the Soviets advocated was not a serious alternative. Naturally, not even Paustovsky opposed the campaign against illiteracy; what gave him pause was the way in which the tool of language was being distributed among the masses. In Russian this campaign was called likvi-datsiya bezgramotnosti (literally, the liquidation of illiteracy), a tongue-twister particularly painful for the illiterate themselves and which was therefore abbreviated to ‘LikBez’. There were LikBez schools and LikBez teachers, and during this same period ProletKult (proletarian culture) and AgitProp (agitation-propaganda) became popular instruments to support the goals of the KomPartiya (Communist Party). Paustovsky hated such ‘ridiculous abbreviations’, which had taken on ‘disastrous proportions’ within the space of a few years. The Russian language was being reduced to a kind of guttural stuttering: the Soviet institute managing hydraulic engineering in Central Asia was called SredAzHidroProjekt, the affiliated organisation for the cultivation of cotton was SredAzHidroVodChlopok. Within the narrow margins allowed him by the GlavLit censors, Paustovsky fulminated against such officialese with all the lyric power at his disposal, referring to the contractions of the word-builders as ‘banalities that are driving our language to rack and ruin’.
And if ruination came, no one would be able to point a finger at Paustovsky. He, for one, would never have dreamed of naming his son Vladilen (short for Vladimir Lenin) or Rem (Revolution – Engels – Marx), as the true believers and careerists did.
His son Vadim was named after Paustovsky’s eldest brother, the reserve officer killed at Riga.
When I telephoned Professor Ilya Komarov a few weeks after our first meeting to ask whether I could bring the new Dutch translation of Kara Bogaz as promised, I noticed a slight hesitation in his voice. He needed a moment to think about it, he said. The crackling on the line told me he had put his hand over the mouthpiece to consult Monika.
‘Would this coming Wednesday suit you?’ he enquired.
Unsuspectingly, I jotted down the appointment in my pocket diary: 30 May, between two and three in the afternoon.
At the appointed date and time I found the door of the gardener’s house at Kuzminki Park blocked by an outside-broadcast van from TV Moscow. Cables ran along the gravel pathway and up the stairs to the attic. Giving an interview beneath a klieg light was Ilya Komarov, looking grave and mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. This, it turned out, was Paustovsky’s 108th birthday. Before I realised what was happening, I had been dragged onto camera, where I handed the Director of the Paustovsky Institute the Dutch edition of Kara Bogaz.
‘Even in Holland, Paustovsky is a famous figure,’ were the words with which the female reporter began her item for the state-owned broadcaster.
Once the shooting was over, the TV crew and the dozen or so rounded-up Paustovsky experts gathered around the table. Monika sliced a fresh cheese, while Ilya opened a bottle of ‘Armenian wine’. Brandywine, from the taste of it. A toast was raised to Paustovsky’s international success and the brotherhood of the peoples. Meanwhile, the copy of Kara Bogaz I had brought went from hand to hand; the members of the fan club, however, were less than unanimous in their approval.
‘Awfully boisterous, that cover,’ said a man who wore his spectacles on the tip of his nose like an old-fashioned assayer.
The designer, I pointed out, had used a detail from a painting by Kazimir Malevich – but that was a remark I would have been better off not making. The discussion that then flared up revolved around this unintentional attempt to place Paustovsky in the shadow of the avant-gardist Malevich.
Making another round with the Armenian wine, Ilya Komarov glanced at me over the men’s heads with an exaggerated frown, as if to say: ‘Don’t look at me, there’s nothing I can do about it.’
Then the critics discovered the word ‘novel’ on the cover. ‘You are aware that Kara Bogaz is not a novel?’
I felt compelled – on behalf of the Dutch nation as a whole – to concoct an excuse for this blasphemy, and began rambling on about the ‘novelistic’ character of the book. ‘The story, after all, depends greatly upon the empathy and imaginative power of the writer,’ I ventured.
‘I’m afraid you don’t understand,’ the purists objected. ‘The point is that Paustovsky himself calls it a “narrative”.’
One of the experts got up and walked over to the Collected Works, lined up in nine austere volumes on the shelf. He rustled through the pages accusingly and pointed a finger at the word ‘povest’. ‘Or do you think that’s a synonym for “novel”?’
I capitulated; there was nothing I could say to that. Fortunately, the camera and microphone boom had already been loaded into the van; the film crew were getting ready to leave. Ilya Komarov went out to see them off but as soon as he came back he gestured to me to follow him to his study. Closing the door behind us, he apologised for the ‘orthodox literary opinions’ of the average Russian Paustovsky aficionado, and said: ‘But you’re interested in the origins of Kara Bogaz, aren’t you? Well then, I think I may have something for you here.’
He handed me a pile of photocopied letters and documents from Paustovsky’s personal archives.
‘And I believe there are more where that came from,’ Ilya Komarov said. Now that the period of mourning for Vadim Paustovsky was over, he explained, he could dedicate the rest of the summer to clearing out the son’s apartment. ‘The furnishings and documents have been left to the institute. I’ll keep my eyes open for anything else that might interest you.’
Until 1930, when Paustovsky discovered the miracle salt of Turkmenistan and with it the theme for a book ‘taken from life both raw and real’, he had always struggled with his image of himself as a writer. His early stories, both the dry runs and the published, he referred to as ‘bent nails’. He had no desire to hammer them out straight: it would in any case be an impossible task.
The more he doubted his own capacities, the greater became his awe of Mayakovsky (with whom he had once played a game of chess) and other literary celebrities such as Babel (whom he considered a mentor) and Bunin (whom he had seen once, but only at a respectful distance).
He and Babel had become friends in 1921, in Odessa. ‘The first true Soviet writer,’ Paustovsky called him in Story of a Life. ‘We all lived somewhat in the reflected glow of his talent.’ In those days Babel often came into the offices of Moryak, the port gazette at which Paustovsky had found work during the civil war, to hand in copy about the gangster Benya Krik, alias ‘The King’, or ‘Lyubka the Cossack’ – stories which later achieved international fame. ‘Bent by his congenital asthma, with his duck’s nose and wrinkled forehead’, the established author made a sorry first impression on Paustovsky. But the moment he opened his mouth Babel proved to be ‘a born penetrator of appearances’ and ‘an ingenious raconteur’.
At this point, Vadim stepped in to expand upon his father’s account. Although his father’s memoirs never mentioned Katya, she had in Dima’s eyes played a crucial role. His mother, for example, had also worked for Moryak: as editor-in-chief of the foreign desk, no less. Like Babel she spoke fluent French (she had attended the Sorbonne before the First World War) and during her years in Paris had learned the art of palmistry. At home the story went that his mother had accurately predicted Babel’s literary success. During a visit to Paris, when Babel received a birth announcement from the Paustovskys, he replied by sending a box full of baby clothes. Three quarters of a century later, Dima still sounded as proud as a peacock: ‘Until the age of three, I waddled around in the finest of French fashion.’
Paustovsky, however, speaks only of his own experiences with Babel. In his account the two men spend long summer evenings sitting on a wall by the coast, skipping stones across the surface of the Black Sea. Babel offers thoughtful comments on language and style. About cutting the fat from a text, weeding out superfluous turns of phrase, selecting metaphors carefully. As a result, Paustovsky suddenly finds his own prose – the manuscript of The Romantics, for starters – sounding affected.
‘What’s wrong with me, anyway?’ he wonders. ‘Why don’t I have the courage to strike out each and every word and throw it all in the bin?’
Paustovsky is in search of ‘authenticity’, of a subject rooted in reality. ‘The muse of wanderlust’, he hopes, may help him to find the mother lode. He travels far, but his trip to Batumi near the Turkish border leaves him only with a case of tropical malaria, and Tbilisi only with a broken heart. It is, in the end, not his exhausting journey through Transcaucasia but his unexpected encounter with the artist Valeria Vladimirovna that awakens his inspiration. In a letter to Katya in 1923, Paustovsky swears that his fleeting romance with this Valeria was experienced ‘in a purely literary sense’, that his feelings for her have been completely exorcised by writing a story entitled ‘The Dust of Farsistan’.
Later, when he shows the text to Babel, the writer applies his razor-sharp pen to cut three superfluous elements from the very first sentence. ‘A story,’ the master expounds, ‘must have the terse precision of a bank draft.’
After their stay in Odessa, in the mid-1920s, Paustovsky and his wife move back to Moscow. Katya has her hands full with raising Dima, alongside her editing and translation work, while Konstantin takes a job as reporter with ROSTA, the forerunner of the official TASS press agency. In addition to snap copy for this wire service he also writes longer pieces for the magazines Thirty Days and Our Achievements. But his dissatisfaction persists. Paustovsky sees himself as a fence-sitter, someone who takes no pleasure in ridiculing others and who, to his own regret, is friendly even to pickpockets on the tram. In near-desperation he searches for a suitable theme, and in the summer of 1930 believes he has found it. The idea is handed to him by a mad Soviet geologist who has travelled the eastern coast of the Caspian. They meet in a little town along the upper Don, where the geologist shows him pictures of Ust-Urt, a plateau Paustovsky says rises up from the desert ‘like a gravestone several hundred kilometres around’. Raving in the grip of fearful visions, the geologist tells a disjointed story about sulphate-extracting activities along a nearby lagoon: the bay at Kara Bogaz.
This enterprise has, owing to its strategic importance (the Soviet Union, at that point, has no chemical industry to speak of), become one of the pillars of the First Five-Year Plan. And although the name ‘Kara Bogaz’ has only recently entered the national vocabulary, it is already being mentioned in the same breath as Belomor (the canal), Zaporozhye (the dam on the Dnieper) or Magnitogorsk (the new foundry town in the Urals).
The heroics of salt mining in such a remote corner will provide material enough for a compelling story – Paustovsky is immediately convinced of that – but he struggles with the practicalities of his plan: the bay at Kara Bogaz is at least two thousand kilometres from Moscow. ‘The only way to obtain funding was to offer the rough outline of the book to some publisher, and to request an advance.’ In his memoirs he mentions various futile attempts along those lines, and speaks of his categorical refusal to work as part of a writers’ brigade. ‘I was convinced (and still am) that there are areas of human endeavour in which collective labour is unthinkable […] Just as it is impossible for two or three people to play a violin together, so too with the writing of a book.’
This bold remark would seem to indicate that Paustovsky did not simply do whatever was expected of him as a Soviet writer. But riffling through the papers Ilya Komarov had given me, I once again stumbled upon ‘a minor irregularity’. The pile included a carbon copy of a grant application for a trip to Kara Bogaz. ‘A narrative about salt’ are the opening words. The request, addressed to the Pan-Russian Union of Soviet Writers, is signed by three applicants: Paustovsky and two colleagues. They introduce themselves explicitly as a ‘writers’ brigade’, with plans to produce a collaborative work of prose. The tone is businesslike, and the proposal already includes the estimated length (270 pages) and submission date (15 October 1931).
I phoned Ilya Komarov to ask about this.
There was no reason, he said, to attach too much importance to this ‘request for alms’. ‘If it had been honoured they would have split the money three ways. But it wasn’t. Honestly, Paustovsky had no faith in the writers’ brigades and never took part in one.’
But then how had he obtained a travel grant?
‘Gorky helped him,’ the professor said. In those days, he explained, Maxim Gorky had taken an active interest in the editorial supervision of Thirty Days and Our Achievements, and had recognised Paustovsky as a competent journalist. In exchange for the promise of a few reportage pieces, Gorky had arranged official transit papers and an advance.
I had already seen the transit visa amid the documents. It had been issued on the day after the May Day celebrations of 1931. The stamps and signatures in it served to recommend ‘Comrade Paustovsky’ to the authorities along the Volga and the Caspian coast. While in transit, Ilya Komarov told me, Paustovsky wrote articles about sturgeon fishing in Astrakhan, and about the recovery of oil in the Emba basin, where Soviet engineers had fallen prey to deadly wind scorpions.
In Story of a Life Paustovsky speaks of his journey to the Caspian as an ‘ordeal’, a battle against mental and physical exhaustion. From the first camels he sees in southern Russia (emaciated creatures with the hair falling from their hides) up to and including the map of Turkmenistan (which seemed to emit a drought of its own), he describes the trip in terms both dejected and daunting. For someone who saw a poem in almost every eddy in the river and every leaf that fell, it’s striking to note that not a single feature of the landscape elicits Paustovsky’s rapture. The sea stinks of ‘rotten fish’, the passing coastlines are so monotonous that, unconsciously and in spite of himself, he cannot bear to look at them. What, for heaven’s sake, was going on? Paustovsky the nature-lover notices no flamingoes, no shrimp, no crabs, no marine mammals. Even though, as almost every guidebook mentions, the Caspian ringed seal is frequently seen frolicking in the harbour at Krasnovodsk.
Paustovsky equates the region he is visiting with ‘the hell of the classics’, with ‘fear and desolation’. Having made it to Krasnovodsk at last, he remains sluggishly in the shade, his eyes stinging, his throat raw.
‘A horrible, at times unbearable longing’ for central Russia drives him to the railway station, where he has a vision of the rails as the final link to the forests of his youth. ‘The delicious freshness of the air after a shower, so stimulating to one’s thinking in the north, had given way to a nagging pain.’ And suddenly I think I understand what is driving Paustovsky: he had to describe the eastern shoreline of the Caspian as a Martian landscape, the bay at Kara Bogaz as a deathly morass. How else could he present the industrialisation of this virgin territory as a blessing? Paustovsky, who viewed ‘a living bond with nature’ as a prerequisite for the writer’s calling, had mentally transformed the bay at Kara Bogaz into the ultimate expanse of ‘non-nature’. Drawing upon his full and quite considerable imaginative powers, he has forced himself to believe what he is about to conjure up for his readers. Or was it that, having directed so much poetic power against the desert dust and sulphurous waters, he had truly come to see these as enemies of nature? Whatever the case, this inner revolution had to be completed before he could sympathise with the engineers, the fiziki, and the chemical plant they were building.
Kara Bogaz was more than simply Paustovsky’s literary breakthrough; it was a tour de force of adaptability. He had run the gauntlet, and could now be admitted to the brotherhood of Soviet writers.
The parcel Ilya Komarov had sent me also contained ecstatic reviews. One of them was written by Maxim Gorky, who considered the book an example to others: ‘Kara Bogaz successfully depicts socialist construction.’ Similar admiration was expressed by Lenin’s widow: ‘Books like this are exactly what we need!’
During the final days of summer, Professor Komarov invited me once again to the gardener’s house. His cheeks were aglow, even his voice beamed with pride. It was not hard to guess what had happened: the Paustovsky expert had discovered as-yet-unknown work.
‘Exactly!’ Ilya Komarov crowed, bustling me towards a metal safe I had never noticed before. Its galvanised shelves were overflowing with folders full of clippings, all from the Paustovsky estate.
‘Like Ali Baba’s treasure trove,’ the institute’s director said. His find included a notepad with seventy early poems, something Dima had never mentioned. ‘And,’ he added, holding up his index finger, ‘a novel which we thought existed only in outline.’
Its title was The Collector. Ilya Komarov had already flipped though the manuscript. It was about a Frenchman with a peculiar habit: he collects impressions and facial expressions, which he saves in a notebook. But he also takes his observations of clouds, thickets or the glitter of freshly fallen snow and polishes them into poetic jewels. ‘Paustovsky did that as well,’ the professor clarified. ‘Journal entries of that kind were the raw material for his stories. But we never realised that he had found a character through whom he could process his collection into a complete novel.’
I was allowed to weigh in my hand the loose pages which had been kept together all this time in a cardboard cover. Ilya Komarov helped me to open the folder and announced that it also contained letters that would surely interest me.
The next moment we were leafing through the pages of Paustovsky’s correspondence with his editor, Genrikh Eichler, at the Molodaya Gvardiya (‘Young Guard’) publishing house. In a letter written in 1932, Paustovsky offers Eichler two manuscripts at once: firstly The Collector, and secondly Kara Bogaz. A few weeks later Eichler writes back to tell him that Kara Bogaz has been accepted, but that he dare not touch The Collector.
‘It wasn’t about the means of production,’ Ilya Komarov fumed, ‘so it wasn’t needed! Doesn’t that just break your heart?’
A second letter revealed that Paustovsky had submitted his rejected manuscript to another publishing house, which went by a name characteristic of the age: Zemlya i Fabrika (‘Soil & Factory’).
The final letter in the folder contained a perfunctory rejection from Zemlya i Fabrika. After that, apparently, Paustovsky had given up hope and buried away the manuscript as deeply as possible.
Ilya Komarov vowed that he would prepare the text for publication and print it in serial form in The World of Paustovsky, in order to do justice – seventy years after the fact – to a writer who evidently preferred writing about a French collector of facial expressions to portraying bold Soviet engineers erecting an industrial complex in the desert.