Konstantin Paustovsky titled the fourth volume of his autobiography The Story of a Life Years of Hope, but it could just have easily been Years of Odessa. At the end of Volume 3, In That Dawn, he had escaped from Kiev and the battles for that city between the Reds, the Whites, the Ukrainians, and the Germans for the relative safety of the port city of Odessa. And here he would be stuck for most of the next two years.
Indeed, there is little hope to be found in these pages. The Whites retreated from the city in February 1920, leaving it with hundreds of ruins buildings and almost no food. Armies would continue to blow through the town like windstorms and the food supply was never a thing to be taken for granted.
Despite the grim situation, Paustovsky finds himself enlisted in a do-it-yourself newspaper operation, occupying offices by fiat, scrounging for paper and ink, and brow-beating officials into accepting the rag as a state-sanctioned news outlet. And among his fellow writers he made the acquaintance of Odessa’s most illustrious son, Isaac Babel.
Paustovsky’s first impression of Babel, however, was less than awe-inspiring:
Never had I seen anyone look less like an author. Stooping, almost neckless because of his hereditary asthma, with a duck’s bill of a nose, a creased forehead and an oily glint in his little eyes, he was anything but fascinating. At first sight you would have taken him for a commercial traveller or a stockbroker.
He soon learns, though, that Babel spoke with an assurance and focus that tended to leave his fellow writers speechless. He had no patience for colorful descriptions or romantic prose: “A story should be as accurate as a military report or a bank cheque,” he declared.
Yet he envied his colleagues for their ability to invent. “You can wrap things up in the dew of your imagination,” he told them, “while I — I have no imagination.” That’s why he had to focus on details, on specifics, on the precise touch, sight, and smell of things. “I have to know everything, down to the last wrinkle, or I can’t even begin to write.” Authenticity was his motto, he said — “And I’m stuck with it!”
Living in Odessa gave Paustovsky a priceless opportunity to learn to observe and record, and Babel’s lessons make Years of Hope, like all the volumes before it, shine with a vibrancy that often belies the grim conditions Paustovsky recalls. There’s barely a page without an incident, a conversation, or a description that seems as if it were happening now. Like this, about Odessa’s central market during one of the city’s periods of plenty:
How convey the noise of swearing, howling, whining, shouting, curses and hysterics, all merging into one continuous roar and suddenly cut off by the piercing sound of a policeman’s whistle ? Or the stampede of the black marketeers, festooned with their belongings, over the wooden pavements shaking to their tread ? Or the trail of yellowing bust-bodices, soldiers’ cotton underpants, and cracked, liver-coloured, rubber hot water bottles left in their wake?
Since rhetoric is out, I will have to do with every-day words.
Babel also taught him the art of the deal in the marketplace. The first rule was to feign indifference. One must never “show interest in any of the goods, and preferably to look bored as you elbowed your way through the crowd.”
Knowing how to bargain and barter was an essential survival skill. Cut off at times as waves of the Russian Civil War break over them, Odessans grow accustomed to living on almost nothing. “Only the cats, unsteady with hunger, wandered about looking for scraps. But scraps in Odessa were a thing of the past.” Food grew so scarce at one point that Paustovsky walks five miles out of town to an old mill where he’s been told the miller will take clothing in trade for flour. The only thing he has to offer the man is the shirt off his back, and he walks back bare-chested.
One of the few times Paustovsky does get away from Odessa, he nearly dies. Assigned to report on a transport of naval mines to Sebastopol, he discovers on the first night out that the ship he’s on is better suited for salvage than sailing. “Judging by all the signs,” a sailor tells him, “the Dimitry is heading for a watery grave.” Battered by a gale force 11 storm, the ship flounders and the captain barely manages to steer it into a safe anchorage.
On his return to Odessa (on a seaworthier ship), Paustovsky takes advantage of a short stop at Yalta to sneak ashore one night and climb up into the hills in search of Chekhov’s house. His last visit there had been in 1906, when his family was intact and the young Kostik had no notion of the turmoil his country would see in the next sixteen years. To even reach the house, he had to risk being stopped by patrols of Red guards. Yet this contact with his past — and Russia’s past — breaks through the danger and dreariness of the moment:
And suddenly I felt the nearness and certainty of happiness. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps because of that pure snow-whiteness which looked like the distant radiance of a beautiful country, or because of my sense of sonship — long unexpressed and driven to the back of my mind – towards Russia, towards Chekhov. He had loved his country in many ways, and he had loved her as the shy bride about whom he wrote his last story. He had firmly believed that she was going unwaveringly towards justice, beauty and happiness.
I, too, believed in that happiness — that it would come to my country, to starved and frozen Crimea, and also to me. I felt this as a swift and joyful impulse, like a passionate look of love. It warmed my heart and dried my tears of loneliness and fatigue.
Perhaps this is why Paustovsky chose to call this volume Years of Hope.
I first wrote about Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography, The Story of a Life, back in 2007. At the time, I’d read the U.S. edition from 1964, which nowhere indicated that it represented just the first three of a total of six volumes. Four years after that edition’s publication, Pantheon published The Years of Hope with the subtitle, Continuing The Story of a Life. When The Story of a Life was reissued as a Pantheon Moden Classic in 1982, again it was half the complete work.
Thanks to Paustovsky’s U.K. publisher Harvill, however, British readers were able to enjoy all six volumes, as translated from the Russian by Manya Harari, Michael Duncan, Andrew Thomson, and Kyril FitzLyon. For the record, these are:
- Volume I: Childhood and Schooldays
- Volume II: Slow Approach of Thunder
- Volume III: In that Dawn
- Volume IV: Years of Hope
- Volume V: Southern Adventure
- Volume VI: The Restless Years
In other words, the U.S. editions of The Story of a Life contain just Volumes I-III. To get the full Story, you’ll have to buy the last three Harvill books, which have never been reissued. They’re worth looking for, however, not only for the wonderful writing but also for their beautiful dust jacket designs.