“I lost touch with Russia for almost two years,” Konstantin Paustovsky writes in the introduction to this, the fifth volume of his autobiography. “But I do not regret it,” he continues, and neither will the reader. Southern Adventure is easily the most exotic, the most magical chapter in Paustovsky’s life.
After a trip along the Russian coast of the Black Sea aboard the freighter Pestel (which concludes the previous volume, Years of Hope, Paustovsky awakened one morning “feeling on my face the warm palms of somebody’s hands. They smelt of mimosa.” The Pestel is anchored off Sukhum (now Sukhumi), the main port in what was then the Abkhazian Soviet Republic. The scents from the lush tropical vegetation on shore carried out to the ship …
… until they formed a tight ball and the air was compressed into a thick syrup; then they would untwine again into distinct and separate fibres and I would detect the breath of azalias, bay-trees, eucalyptus trees, oleanders, wisterias and many other flowers wonderful in appearance and colour.
The sensation stirs a childhood fantasy based in stories of the Arabian nights and jungle explorers and Paustovsky resolves to go ashore — not just to go, but to stay. As he quickly learns — in an experience repeated throughout this book — the nascent bureaucracy of this young Soviet republic is ruthless and absolute: there is no official way for him to leave the ship except under close supervision and for a matter of just an hour or two. On the other hand, the harshness of Soviet rules are also softened by the indolence and lackadaisical attitude of most officials in the Caucasus: “The old and the new were jumbled up together in the way things get jumbled up in a basket after a sharp jolt.” Soon, he is walking along the boulevards of Sukhum.
In Sukhum, as with the other ports along the now-Georgian Black Sea coast that Paustovsky visits in the course of the book, “It was difficult to grasp what century we were living in.” While Soviet-organized collectives, workers councils, and goverment functions attempted to institute a new regime, blood feuds still broke out between families and tribes, disputes were more often settled by elders than by courts, and bamboo shoots still sprung up overnight in even the busiest streets in town.
Despite having no money and no job, Paustovsky lucks into a conversation with an official of the Cooperative Union of Abkhazia in Sukhum — the Absouyz — who hires him as a secretary. “I was hellishly lucky in Sukhum,” he writes, and indeed his luck throughout his two years in the Caucasus is one of the magical elements of this volume.
But the most magical element by far is Paustovsky’s evocation of the other worldly beauty of the Caucasian landscape, where coastal strips of palm trees and tropical flowers suddenly transformed into steep Alpine mountains. Early in the book, he and an odd assortment of temporary residents of Sukhum make an expedition to Lake Amkeli, formed by an earthquake just a couple of decades before. The lake seems to Paustovsky something out of a fairy tale book:
The crystal clarity of reflections in the water was so perfect that it was impossible to distinguish the reflection of the shores and mountains from the real shores and mountains.
It was as if there were two Caucasuses around us. One of them rose up to the sky above, and the other went down into the shining abyss beneath our feet. Identical feathery clouds slowly moved in the sky and along the bottom of the abyss.
Every time I threw my line and sinker into the lake I shattered the ideal fusion of this world.
Soon, however, he grows restless and talks his way onto a ship heading further south, to the port of Batum. Here, to the fragrances of Sukhum are added the cacophony of a city closer in spirit to the Middle East than to Russia:
… in Batum, particularly in the Turkish bazaar, known as Nuri, you were deafened with a whole kaleidoscope of sounds — from the bleating of sheep to the desperate cries of maize sellers: ‘Hot maize!’; from the plaintive moans of a muezzin on the top of a near-by mosque to the squeaking of pipes out of the windows of dukhans and the tearful singing of their tipsy patrons.
As in Odessa, Paustovsky manages to convince the local seamen’s union to underwrite a newspaper and appoint him as its editor. The pay is low, but then so is the cost of living in Batum, particularly when he takes a room in the town’s “coastal shelter,” a refuge for sailors stranded in the port from getting drunk or spending a night in jail for fighting. The coastal shelter, he writes, was “a cross between a doss house, a pub, a police cell for drunks and a brothel.”
One of the men he encounters there is Batum’s lighthouse keeper, Stavraki. Something about the man sets Paustovsky’s senses on edge, and eventually he discovers that this is the notorious former Imperial Russian Naval officer responsible for shooting Lt. Pyotr Schmidt, the leader of the Black Sea fleet uprising of 1905 later made famous in Eisenstein’s movie Potemkin. Normally one to accept his fellow man with understanding, Paustovsky finds it impossible not to revile Stavraki:
That life of his was just a series ofacts of blackest treachery. And these acts of treachery developed out of petty bits of nonsense: out of a desire to wear just one more pip on his shoulder straps and cut a dash in women’s eyes, out of servile fear of all authority
A few months later, Stavraki was arrested by the Cheka, taken to Sevastopol, tried for his anti-revolutionary crimes, and sentenced to the same fate to which he’d sent Lt. Schmidt: death by firing squad.
After two years enjoying the warmth of the southern Black Sea coast, Paustovsky begins to long to see ice and snow again. He heads into the interior, to the Georgian capital of Tblisi. There, he meets again with Frayerman, a “martyr to the pen,” an inveterate journalist who’d managed to work his way around the rim of the Black Sea, writing for or, when necessary, founding newspapers. In Tbilisi, they start a paper for the railway workers, The Little Train Whistle, and enjoy riding the narrow lines that wind up into the mountains of Georgia.
It’s not a bad life for the time and place, but soon Paustovsky begins to brood about his mother and sister, abandoned long ago in Kiev. Why is he idling away his time in a foreign place when he could be helping them? “I wanted to groan at the painfully obvious, perfectly clear thought which had never before entered my head, groan at the realization of my absolute, unfeigned, genuine and, therefore, hideous loneliness, the realization that nobody needed me here.”
And with this, Paustovsky climbs aboard a train to start the long and tortuous journey back to his native Kiev, bringing his Southern Adventure to a close. Though his idyll in the Caucasus is, by his own admission, a hiatus in his life’s drama, one could not ask for a better way to stir one’s imagination and make one long for a similar time in some exotic locale. It’s a beautiful and memorable excusion.
Note: Vintage Classics recently announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith, due for publication in June 2022. This edition will not, however, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6.