The Story of a Life is a dazzling achievement of modern literature. Taking the reader from Paustovsky’s 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 Russia’s 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 Paustovsky’s prose and marked throughout by his deep love of the natural world. Here the first three books of Paustovsky’s epic autobiography-long unavailable in English-appear in a splendid new translation by Douglas Smith. Eventually expanding to fill six volumes, this extraordinary work of a lifetime would establish Paustovsky as one of Russia’s great writers and lead to a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Niva 's editor Alexey Tikhonov-Lugovoy thought that was 'too retro-sounding, as if it were some kind of memoirs', so the author decided against further arguing.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. Chekhov hated 'My Life' (in particular, the 'my' bit of it) and suggested that it should be called 'In the Nineties' (В 90-х годах) instead. There was some disagreement about the title. Background Ĭhekhov started working upon the novella in February 1896 and finished it in the late July of that year. With some additional changes edits Chekhov included in into Volume 9 of his Collected Works, published in 1899–1901 by Adolf Marks. Revised by the author, it was included into the Suvorin-published collection Peasants and My Life, to be reproduced, unchanged, in all of its 7 editions (1897–1899). 10–12, 1896 issues of the Monthly Literary Supplement to Niva magazine.

The novella first appeared in the October–December, Nos. My Life ( Russian: Моя жизнь, romanized: Moya zhizn') is an 1896 novella by Anton Chekhov, set in a provincial southern Russian city like Chekhov's own hometown of Taganrog.

The story of my life novel