Nostalgia For Abkhazia

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32020, 21 June 1969, Page 4

Nostalgia For Abkhazia

Southern Adventure. By Konstantin Paustovsky. Harvill Press. 227 pp.

This is the fifth volume of Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography, “Story Of A Life." It deals with two years, 1922 and 1923, which Paustovsky spent in a little-known part of Russia, the southern region of the Caucasus. The four previous volumes are not necessary for the enjoyment of the fifth as a story on its own. Paustovsky, a Russian writer of repute, was born in 1893 and died last year. He thus witnessed in his life the remarkable changes which have taken place in Russia this century, and witnessed them from the point of view of a conservative White Russian with sympathy for old ideas and customs as well as for new ideals. In 1922 Paustovsky set out to return to Moscow from Odessa, which be had reached during the turmoil of the revolution. He was travelling on a ship, the Pestel, when it stopped off the port of Sukhum, the chief town of a small state called Abkhazia. No-one was allowed to leave the ship because Abkhazians feared typhus, which had broken out in neighbouring states. But Paustovsky, with the sensitivity of a poet at the time he was

still working as a journalist on various seamen’s newspapers) felt the balmy air and smelt the exotic scents of bay trees, eucalyptus, and oleanders coming from the shore. They had a dream-like quality, and it seemed to him that not to go ashore would be to miss a once-in-e-lifetime

chance of realising a dream. “Dreams of being able, if only with the tips of my fingers, to touch the hairy trunk of a coconut tree, a bamboo’s emerald bark ever cold and shiny, the earth pink with coral sand.” Paustovsky got ashore into this forbidden southern paradise, and most of this volume reports what he found there.

The Soviet regime had only just reached Abkhazia when Paustovsky arrived. The former feudal prince was still alive and receiving tribute from the further villages, and the peasants still persisted in their traditional subjection of women and glorification of warriors. The women “dragged themselves along, bent double and scarcely able to breathe under the weight of sacks of maize and bundles of brushwood. And in front of them, hand on hip, would ride the men on their glossy steeds—the husbands and sometimes the sons or even grandsons of these women.”

Paustovsky witnessed episodes in desperate feuds as colourful as any Western movie. The scent of azaleas, so powerful as to be nearly overwhelming, was associated with sudden violence and bloodshed. And over all the action we are given the feeling that the mountains are dominating the great brilliant peaks of the Caucasus. The vivid quality of the writing is a great virtue, and seems indeed to bring the reader close to the extraordinary experience of life in this remote state—a state which Paustovsky thinks would now scarcely resemble the one he describes. Part of the dreamlike quality of the episode is caused by the heightened awareness which suffering the delirium of malaria brings to the writer. The fever also brings a trip to the beneficial air of the mountains, which the reader savours for the encounters with outlaws and many Russian bears. Near the end of the book the author moves to Tiflis, capital of Georgia, but events there are of a more workaday quality, in spite of the author’s love for Maria. Many readers will find interesting material in this volume. As a reconstruction of the irretrievable past it is a masterpiece of unsentimental nostalgia.