July 14, 1968
Passed away Konstantin Paustovsky. A writer, four-time Nobel Prize nominee. A man before whom Marlene Dietrich once got down on her knees.
He is not a writer who has not added at least a little keenness to human vision.
Born in 1892, he began his independent life at 17, earning money as a tutor. He was an avid reader of Greene.
My state could be described in two words: admiration for the imaginary world and melancholy due to the impossibility of seeing it.
He published his first story in 1912.
During the First World War he worked as an orderly on a hospital train.
In the detachment, from a greasy scrap of newspaper that I came across, I learned that two of my brothers were killed on different fronts on the same day.
Returning from the war, he joined a fishing cooperative. He said the sea made him a writer. In Taganrog, he began his first novel, "The Romantics":
It's better to love from afar, but you have to love, otherwise it's the end
During the Civil War he lived in Odessa. He communicated with Kataev, Ilf, BabelHe wrote a lot, but didn't publish, embarrassed that he hadn't yet mastered any material. He traveled a lot:
At that time, the book stood above my life, not life above the book. I needed to fill myself with life to the very brim.
In the 20s, he got a job as an editor at a telegraph agency. During World War II, he served as a war correspondent. While working at TASS, he wrote "Smoke of the Fatherland," short stories, and plays. International recognition came in the 50s.
In 1965, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for the first time. But Sholokhov won it. A year earlier, Marlene Dietrich, unable to find the words to express her admiration, knelt before Paustovsky on the stage of the Central House of Writers:
“One day I read Paustovsky’s story ‘Telegram.’ It made such an impression on me that I could never forget either the story or the name of the writer, whom I had never heard of. <> He is the best of those Russian writers I have ever read. I know».
"My darling... I won't survive this winter. Come at least for a day. Let me look at you, hold your hands... It's so hard; my whole life, it seems, hasn't been as long as this one autumn." (Telegram)
A writer who was true to himself and openly supported Solzhenitsyn, and stood up for the disgraced Lyubimova, passed away at 76.