Konstantin Paustovsky: Difference between revisions

Konstantin Paustovsky was born in [[Moscow]]. His father, descendant of the [[Zaporozhian Cossacks]]{{Citation needed|date=May 2018}}, 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 (school)|Gymnasium]] of Kiev, where he was the classmate of [[Mikhail Bulgakov]]. When he was in the 6th grade his father left the family and he was forced to give private lessons in order to earn a living. In 1912 he entered the faculty of Natural History in [[Kiev University|University of Kiev]]. In 1914 he 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 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, he returned to his mother in [[Moscow]] but later left and wandered around, trying his hands at many jobs, initially working in the metallurgical factories in [[Yekaterinoslav]] (now: [[Dnipro]], Ukraine) and [[Yuzovka]] (now: [[Donetsk]], Ukraine). In 1916 he lived in [[Taganrog]], where he worked at the Taganrog Boiler Factory (now: Krasny Kotelschchik).

Later he joined a cooperative association of fishermen ([[artel]]) in [[Taganrog]], where he started his first novel Романтики ("Romantiki", Romantics) which was published in 1935. The novel, whose content and feelings are reflected in its title, described what he had seen and felt in his youth. One of the heroes, the old Oscar, was an artist who resisted all of his life being forced to become a moneymaker. He returned to the main theme of Romantics, the destiny of an artist who strives to overcome his loneliness, and his experiences in [[Taranrog]] in later works, including Разговор о рыбе (“Razgovor o ribe”, Conversation about the Fish), Азовское подполье (“Azovskoe podpolie”, Azov Underground) and Порт в траве (“Port v trave”, Seaport in The Grass).