‘Happiness can be ignited by making something small infinite’: what makes me happy now
It’s a nightmare, a barbaric farce. The city is first taken by Russians, then by Ukrainians, then by Russians again; foreign forces join the struggle, gangster hordes go on killing sprees, thousands are butchered, and a plague engulfs the survivors. It’s Kyiv. The year is 1918.
A young nobody called Konstantin Paustovsky (fisher, paramedic, student) has just arrived with an itch to write. He’s unusual: in the midst of the slaughter he thinks about happiness. Decades later he will be nominated for the Nobel prize for literature, but won’t, of course, get it. The happiness he thinks about is always the wrong kind.
In Kyiv in 1918, for example, Paustovsky believed that the safest, the happiest refuge from the avalanche of catastrophes engulfing his homeland lay in three things: nature, domesticity and intimacy. As it happens, when the , it was in a
