When, in 1918 in the summer, the newspaper was closed down, he went to Kiev and started to work for different newspapers, most of the time for the ”Moryak”, a seamen´s journal in Odessa, where he got to know Isaac Babel among others. Via the Caucasus, now writing in other seamen´s journals, he ended up in Moscow, 1923, still working as a journalist.
When, finally, in 1932 he became famous for his attempt in the field of ”construction novels” – Kara Bugaz – he left journalism for literary writing.
From that time on he was dedicated to the landscape of Middle Russia, the Meshchora District. Although he had taken a great interest in Nature all his life, he had now found the place to nourish his talent for lyrical landscape prose, a theme he was never to leave from then on.
He is also famous for his autobiograhical works in six parts The Story of a Life (1946- 1963) and his portraits of authors and artists.
1948-1955 he taught at the Gorky Institute for Literature, and in the 1950s and ´60s he encouraged and defended other Soviet writers, who were subjected to criticism.
In 1965 he would have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, ”if the Soviet Union had not intervened” (according to the great authority on Paustovsky, Prof. W. Kasack).
Paustovsky never managed to complete his great autobiographical series. He died on July 14, 1968, and was buried at Tarusa, District of Kaluga, where he had his second home since 1954.