David Denby

Michael Hofmann writes about Douglas Smith’s translation of Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life (LRB, 29 June). I kept waiting for him to refer to the first English translation of this work, but he never did. Hofmann does say that during the Khrushchev thaw, Paustovsky was very well known in the Soviet Union and ‘enjoyed some reputation, now long gone, in the West’. I can confirm...