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Douglas Smith with Marcie Sillman
Local translator Douglas Smith discusses the recent translation of Konstantin Paustovsky’s 1943 autobiography, The Story of a Life.
The Story of a Life is a grand, novelistic memoir of a life spent on the ravaged frontier of Russian history. Eventually expanding to fill six volumes, Soviet author Konstantin Paustovsky’s 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.
Here the first three books of Paustovsky’s epic autobiography—long unavailable in English—appear in a splendid new translation by Douglas Smith. 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.
Douglas Smith is a translator and historian, and has written several books about Russian history. His book Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy won the inaugural Pushkin House Russian Book Prize in 2013, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and was chosen Book of the Year by Andrew Solomon in Salon.
Marcie Sillman is an award-winning journalist. During her 40 year career she's covered the Pacific Northwest for local, national and international media outlets including NPR and the BBC. Since leaving Seattle public radio affiliate KUOW in 2020, Marcie has produced and co-hosted the podcast 'doubleXposure,' and writes about the Northwest cultural scene for the online journal Crosscut, the Seattle Times and a variety of global publications.
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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/1583715-0
