Accepted and Rejected Titles in The Story of a Life by K.G. Paustovsky (Towards the Reconstruction of Creative History)

The article highlights the issue of choosing the titles of the works that make up The Story of a Life by K.G. Paustovsky and the general name of the cycle. The manuscripts, typescripts, and the writer’s correspondence, published only partially, allow us to trace the history of the search for the names of the third and fifth parts of the cycle and to establish their long-established working names — “Collapses of Time” and “Agitated Caucasus.” Materials from Paustovsky’s Collection in RGALI demonstrate that the sixth part was originally entitled “On Slow Fire (The Book of Wanderings).” The title was changed by the will of the editorial board of the journal “Novyi mir,” causing the writer’s regret. The expanded elements of the heading complex (the title, the epigraph, and the closely related framing parts) are characteristic of typescripts but do not always pass into the published text. Of the four parts that had epigraphs, only two have preserved them — the first and the last, and the framing parts remained unused. However, they are valuable because they shed light on the crucial concepts of Paustovsky’s works. The final titles of all six parts somehow convey the focalization of the character-narrator: his perception of the world, emotional state, and fixation of himself in time and space. Starting from the fifth part, as the manuscripts testify, the author correlates the new title with the titles of the already published parts, for which he makes peculiar lists.