Biography of mikhail bulgakov

In the final pages of Southern Adventure, the previous volume in his memoir The Story of a Life, Konstantin Paustovsky boards a train from Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia to return to Russia having been struck by “the realization that nobody needed me here.” Anyone who’s read the first three volumes will know that Paustovsky must have been haunted by the memory of the two people who did need him: his mother and his sister Galya.

Paustovsky’s mother and sister were the last remnants of his family, a family blown to pieces by war, revolution, and misfortune.

Volume One of The Story of a Life opens, in fact, as the author, then a young schoolboy, travels through a Ukranian winter to his father’s burial. The last sight we (and Paustovsky) have of them is in Volume 3, In That Dawn, when he’s forced to abandon them in Kiev as control of the city is wrestled for by the Reds, the Whites, the Germans, and the Ukranians.

At the time, Galya had already begun