Southern Adventure

Southern Adventure is the fifth volume of Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography Story of a life. In the earlier volumes he wrote of his childhood and schooldays, of the war years and of the Revolution. Southern Adventure describes life in the early nineteen-twenties. The Soviet regime was still extending its sway over the disintegrating territories of the former Russian Empire and had only just established itself in the republic of Abkhaiza. The relative prosperity of this tiny state, its inhabitants exercised a powerful appeal on Paustovsky; as a journalist, he managed to smuggle himself into the country which refused entry to all and sundry in an effort to protect itself from the typhus epidemic raging outside its borders. With great perceptiveness he portrays the life of a society which sill had room for price and commissar, ancient codes of justice and Soviet law, traditional blood feuds and world war partisans. His is probably authentic first-hand account of that strange, southern world, little enough known at the time and which has since disappeared for ever.

After a bout of malaria he left Sukhum and lived for a while in the oil port of Batum where he edited the seamen’s paper THE MAYAKK. Then, homesick for the north, he moved to Tiflis, from where he hoped it would be easier to return to Moscow. Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, had only recently been reabsorbed into the Soviet Union after a short-lived and precarious independence.
Paustovsky’s memories of his experience there, his friendship with the foremost artists and writers of the time and, above all, for a Polish girl, are tinged with a bitter-sweet nostalgia.

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