The first volume of A Life: The Years Far Away by the Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky (1892–1968), who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. This six-volume autobiography is perhaps his best-known work. It is an extensive and lyrical account centred on the author’s inner perceptions and development. As has been said, it is more a biography of a soul than a biography of events.
This first volume concludes with his graduation from secondary school, when the author was eighteen and had not yet begun his university studies; the First World War had not yet begun either. His years in Kyiv, his father’s death, the separation of the family, summers spent at his uncles’ dacha or in Crimea, the secondary-school system, his literary interests... are some of the subjects that emerge in the course of the forging of his vocation as a writer.