The Story of a Life (Paperback)

Paperback. One of the most famous works of Russian literature, a memoir about a writer's coming of age during World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the rise of the Soviet era. This is the first unabridged translation of the first three books of Konstantin Paustovsky's magnum opus.In 1943, the Soviet author Konstantin Paustovsky started out on what would prove a masterwork, The Story of a Life, a grand, novelistic memoir of a life spent on the ravaged frontier of Russian history. Eventually expanding to fill six volumes, this extraordinary work of a lifetime would establish Paustovsky as one of Russias great writers and lead to a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature.Here the first three books of Paustovskys epic autobiographylong unavailable in Englishappear in a splendid new translation by Douglas Smith. Taking the reader from Paustovskys Ukrainian youth, his family struggling on the verge of collapse, through the first stirrings of writerly ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on the front lines of World War I and then as a journalist covering Russias violent spiral into revolution, this vivid and suspenseful story of coming-of-age in a time of troubles is lifted by the energy and lyricism of Paustovskys prose and marked throughout by his deep love of the natural world. The Story of a Life is a dazzling achievement of modern literature. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…