The Story of a Life

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