Konstantin Paustovsky - Early Life

Early Life

Konstantin Paustovsky was born in Moscow. His father, descendant of the Zaporizhia Cossacks, was a railroad statistician, and was “an incurable romantic and Protestant”. His mother came from the family of a Polish intellectual. Konstantin grew up in Ukraine, partly in the countryside and partly in Kiev. He studied in “the First Imperial” classical Gymnasium of Kiev, where he was the classmate of Mikhail Bulgakov. When Konstantin was in the 6th grade his father left the family, so he was forced to give private lessons in order to earn a living. In 1912 he entered the University of Kiev, the faculty of the Natural History. In 1914 Konstantin Paustovsky transferred to the Law faculty of the University of Moscow, but World War I interrupted his education. At first he worked as a trolley-man in Moscow, then served as a paramedic in a hospital train. During 1915, his medical unit retreated all the way through Poland and Belarus. After two of his brothers died on the front line, Konstantin returned to his mother in Moscow, but later he left and wandered around, trying his hands at many jobs. He started with the metallurgical factories in Yekaterinoslav (now: Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine) and Yuzovka (now: Donetsk, Ukraine). In 1916 he lived in Taganrog, where he worked at the Taganrog Boiler Factory (now: Krasny Kotelschchik). Later Konstantin Paustovsky joined a cooperative association of fishermen (artel) in Taganrog, where he started his first novel Романтики ("Romantiki", Romantics) to be published in 1935. The novel, its content and feelings agreed with its title. It was author’s story of what he had to see and feel in his youth. One of the heroes, the old Oscar, was an artist who resisted all of his life, people forcing him to become a moneymaker. The main theme throughout “Romantics” – destiny of an artist who strives to overcome his loneliness – was later used in other works of Paustovsky. In his later works, as Разговор о рыбе (“Razgovor o ribe”, Conversation about the Fish), Азовское подполье (“Azovskoe podpolie”, Azov Underground), Порт в траве (“Port v trave”, Seaport in The Grass) and others, Paustovsky described the time spent in Taganrog.