- Published: 20 January 2022
- ISBN: 9781473549241
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 816
The Story of a Life
Volumes 1–3
- Published: 20 January 2022
- ISBN: 9781473549241
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 816
A work of astonishing beauty ... a masterpiece
Isaac Bashevis Singer
A literary masterpiece.... This is not the cracker-barrel blandness of some professional sage, as so often in America's ghost-written memoirs, but a wisdom of tragic insight and of hard-earned integrity
Saturday Review
An older man, a survivor, and a witness, Paustovsky writes against time, to tell the young what the past was like... His work is nothing like an elegy, nor is it as routine as a backward glance at the good or bad old days. It is, rather, a series of sketches, stories, novellas, in which vanished people (including the author's young self) are present again - as they once walked in a park, or smiled, or wept - and made anew in man's most endurable medium, language
New Yorker
For Paustovsky, books are like stars in the darkness, and "literature draws us closer to the golden age of our thoughts, our feelings and our actions". He was, unquestionably, a part of that golden age, and now with this lively new translation of his memoir, he can be again
John Self, The Times
The Story of a Life radiates a terrific vim and thirst for experience. A more gloriously life-affirming book is unlikely to emerge this year.
Ian Thompson, Spectator
One of the great Russian autobiographies, as fresh now as the day it was written - and the day it was lived
Julian Barnes
The quality of his [Paustovsky's] narrative imagination make The Story of a Life, the Proust-length autobiography he started in 1943, a masterpiece
Julian Evans, Daily Telegraph
Excellent... Smith ably captures the unaffected simplicity and Tristram Shandy-like discursiveness of Paustovsky's prose...to create a teeming portrait of early 20th-century Russia... The Story of a Life radiates a terrific vim and thirst for experience. A more gloriously life-affirming book is unlikely to emerge this year
Ian Thomson, Spectator
Outstanding... A sparkling, supremely precious literary achievement
Telegraph
In Douglas Smith's revelatory new translation of the first three volumes, late imperial Russia and Ukraine, the Revolution and the Civil War are observed with astounding clarity and originality... Smith's limpid and outstandingly readable translation finally captures this unique voice, and should assure Konstantin Paustovsky's monumental autobiography a substantial new readership
Polly Jones, Times Literary Supplement
Beautifully translated, these volumes are a uniquely rich and moving account of events that continue to haunt us to this day
Mark Mazower, Financial Times
This is generally considered his greatest work and the translation is both accurate and stylistically immaculate
Robert Chandler, Literary Review
A 20th-century masterpiece
Daily Telegraph, *Summer Reads of 2022*
Konstantin Paustovsky could tell a good story. This lively new translation of the first three volumes of his memoir...is delightful proof
The Times