The poetess Margarita Aliger dedicated these lines to Konstantin Paustovsky after his death:

"Tarusa bid farewell to Paustovsky, carrying him in her arms, without dropping him, without screaming or flailing, only tears flowed one after another. Everyone dispersed, and she was left alone when the storm broke."

Konstantin Georgievich spent his last years in Tarusa, and this city was especially dear to him. He wrote about Tarusa: "Perhaps there are no places near Moscow that are so typically and touchingly Russian in their landscape. For many years, Tarusa was like a reserve of this amazing lyrical strength, diversity, and softness of the landscape.

Since the late 19th century, Tarusa has become a city of artists, a kind of our native Barbizon. Here lived Polenov and the delicate artist Borisov-Musatov, here reside Krymov, Vatagin, and many other of our artists. Every summer, youth from Moscow's art institutes come here for practice.

Following the artists, writers and scholars came, and Tarusa became a creative laboratory and a refuge for people of art and science."

Until the end of his days, Paustovsky admired the beauty of the Tarusa surroundings: "There even appeared the expression 'Tarusa's expanses.' Not long ago, the forests, as people say, 'fell here to the very edge of the earth.' They rose above the Oka with high and distant planes, bathed in sunlight, shrouded in bluish morning mist, with trembling foliage, rustling forests. In autumn, this land stood all in flowing gold, crimson, and silence."

Eyewitnesses claim that almost all the residents of Tarusa gathered for his funeral.