In January 1965, when Roy Plomley asked Marlene Dietrich for her book to take with her on Desert Island Discs, he must have been baffled by her answer. Her choice was a practically unknown six-volume autobiography by a Russian novelist, Konstantin Paustovsky (1892-1968), of which only one volume had slipped out in English. But Dietrich, who spoke three languages, had come across his writing in French translation the year before, and been so haunted by it that, as Douglas Smith describes in the preface to his outstanding new translation, when chance brought her and Paustovsky face to face in Moscow that summer, all she could do was fall at his feet and bow her head.

In the Soviet Union, this reaction was not uncommon. Paustovsky was hugely popular, with an almost mythical status, not only for his prose but for his character – for managing not to be a member of the Communist Party, for never joining in the vilifying of a fellow writer. When the hounding of Boris Pasternak was at its worst, after Doctor Zhivago had been published in the West, Paustovsky walked out in disgust from the Soviet Writers’ Union meeting as it denounced him. Forty years after his death, my Russian mother-in-law still worshipped him.

But Paustovsky, unlike Pasternak, was – and still is – hardly published in English. We have left him out of our canon because his novels, short stories and children’s books aren’t clearly dissident works. How wrong we have been. Instead, he dissented indirectly, writing against dishonest political realities by living at one remove, quitting Moscow to seize on Chekhov’s “minute particulars”, to truthfully describe Russia and Russians and eventually the world-shaking events he lived through. The quality of his narrative imagination makes The Story of a Life, the Proust-length autobiography he started in 1943, a masterpiece.

Novelists tend to write their own contracts with factual truth when they write about themselves, as we know from Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Paustovsky’s three volumes (the second three are yet to be rescued from their bowdlerised Soviet version) doubtless also mobilise the fictional process, because it is the story that rules, not plain facts. But his story is an artist’s achievement. “In the amount of time it takes Jupiter to orbit the sun,” he writes, “we had experienced so much that just thinking about it makes my heart ache.” To write it, he flips history inside out, seeing his turbulent times, from before the 1905 revolution to Soviet victory in the civil war, through an unmediated and fabulously peopled gaze, threading an inexhaustible string of narrative pearls – stories, anecdotes, sketches – cultivated by a self-trained memory and occasional invention.

Born in 1892, half-Ukrainian, half-Russian, Paustovsky begins at the end of his schooldays in Kiev (now Kyiv) with the arrival of a telegram telling him his father is dying on his farm at Gorodishche. Reaching him is near-impossible, because the river is in flood. But Konstantin (“Kostik”) succeeds. Having stayed with his father till the end, he is stuck at the farm:

I recalled my early childhood… Summer came into its own at Gorodishche – hot summers with terrifying thunderstorms, rustling trees, currents of cool river water, fishing outings, blackberry picking, the sweet sensation of carefree days filled with surprises… the ponds were my favourite place to visit. Father went there to fish every morning, and he took me with him. We went out very early, moving slowly through the heavy, wet grass.

That “sweet sensation of carefree days filled with surprises” signals the book’s rhythm: first, a picture of everyday life so colourful it can teeter between naturalism and magical realism, with a power of nature that overlays modernity, the way “thick pollen would cover the sides of the carriages” of passing express trains; and second, that picture’s harsh obverse, Kostik’s milestones of love and life that fail. Especially moving are Hannah, a 16-year-old cousin he is in love with at Gorodishche, who slips away from consumption; his brothers, Borya and Dima, killed on the same day in the First World War; and most heartbreaking, Lëlya, a nurse he falls in love with while serving as a medical orderly in the war, who dies, trapped in a locked-down village near the frontline, of smallpox.