Russian Soviet poet, publicist, literary critic, translator and literary critic, children's writer, journalist
Korney Chukovsky
short biography
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky(real name - Nikolai Korneichukov, March 19, 1882, St. Petersburg - October 28, 1969, Moscow) - Russian and Soviet poet, publicist, literary critic, translator and literary critic, children's writer, journalist. Father of the writers Nikolai Korneevich Chukovsky and Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya. As of 2015, he was the most published author of children's literature in Russia: 132 books and brochures with a circulation of 2.4105 million copies were published during the year.
Childhood
Nikolai Korneichukov, who later took the literary pseudonym Korney Chukovsky, was born in St. Petersburg on March 19 (31), 1882, to a peasant woman, Ekaterina Osipovna Korneichukova; his father was a hereditary honorary citizen Emmanuil Solomonovich Levenson (1851-?), in whose family the mother of Korney Chukovsky lived as a servant. Their marriage was not formally registered, as this required the baptism of the father, but they lived together for at least three years. Before Nicholas, the eldest daughter Maria (Marusya) was born. Shortly after the birth of his son, Levenson left his illegitimate family, married "a woman of his circle" and moved to Baku, where he opened the "First Printing Association"; Chukovsky's mother was forced to move to Odessa.
Nikolai Korneychukov spent his childhood in Odessa and Nikolaev. In Odessa, the family settled in an outbuilding, in the Makri house on Novorybnaya Street (now Panteleimonovskaya), No. 6. In 1887, the Korneichukovs changed their apartment, moving to the address: Barshman's house, Kanatny Lane, No. 3. Five-year-old Nikolai was sent to Madame Bekhteeva's kindergarten , about his stay in which he left the following memories: “We marched to the music, drew pictures. The oldest among us was a curly-haired boy with Negro lips, whose name was Volodya Zhabotinsky. That's when I met the future national hero of Israel - in 1888 or 1889!!!". For some time, the future writer studied at the second Odessa gymnasium (later became the fifth). His classmate at that time was Boris Zhitkov (in the future also a writer and traveler), with whom the young Nikolai Korneichukov struck up friendly relations. Chukovsky never managed to graduate from the gymnasium: he was expelled from the fifth grade, according to his own statements, because of his low birth. He described these events in his autobiographical story "Silver Coat of Arms".
According to the metric, Nicholas and his sister Maria, as illegitimate, did not have a patronymic; in other documents of the pre-revolutionary period, his patronymic was indicated differently - Vasilyevich (in the marriage certificate and baptismal certificate of his son Nikolai, subsequently fixed in most later biographies as part of the "real name"; given by the godfather), Stepanovich, Emmanuilovich, Manuilovich, Emelyanovich, sister Marusya bore the patronymic Emmanuilovna or Manuilovna. From the beginning of his literary activity, Korneichukov used the pseudonym Korney Chukovsky, which was later joined by a fictitious patronymic - Ivanovich. After the revolution, the combination "Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky" became his real name, patronymic and surname.
According to the memoirs of K. Chukovsky, he “never had such a luxury as his father, or at least his grandfather,” which in his youth and youth served as a constant source of shame and mental suffering for him.
His children - Nikolai, Lydia, Boris and Maria (Murochka), who died in childhood, to whom many of her father's children's poems are dedicated - bore (at least after the revolution) the surname Chukovsky and the patronymic Korneevich / Korneevna.
Journalistic activity before the October Revolution
Since 1901, Chukovsky began to write articles in the Odessa News. Chukovsky was introduced to literature by his close friend at the gymnasium, the journalist V. E. Zhabotinsky. Zhabotinsky was also the guarantor of the groom at the wedding of Chukovsky and Maria Borisovna Goldfeld.
Then in 1903, Chukovsky, as the only correspondent of the newspaper who knew English (which he learned on his own from Ohlendorf’s Self-Teacher of the English Language), and tempted by the high salary for those times - the publisher promised 100 rubles a month - went to London as a correspondent for Odessa News, where he went with his young wife. In addition to Odessa News, Chukovsky's English articles were published in the Southern Review and in some Kyiv newspapers. But fees from Russia came irregularly, and then completely stopped. The pregnant wife had to be sent back to Odessa. Chukovsky moonlighted as a correspondent of catalogs in the British Museum. But in London, Chukovsky thoroughly familiarized himself with English literature - he read Dickens and Thackeray in the original.
Returning to Odessa at the end of 1904, Chukovsky settled with his family on Bazarnaya Street No. 2 and plunged into the events of the 1905 revolution. Chukovsky was captured by the revolution. He twice visited the insurgent battleship Potemkin, among other things, accepting letters to relatives from the insurgent sailors.
In St. Petersburg, he began publishing the satirical magazine "Signal". Among the authors of the magazine were such famous writers as Kuprin, Fedor Sologub and Teffi. After the fourth issue, he was arrested for lèse majesté. He was defended by the famous lawyer Gruzenberg, who achieved an acquittal. Chukovsky was under arrest for 9 days.
In 1906, Korney Ivanovich arrived in the Finnish town of Kuokkala (now Repino, the Kurortny district of St. Petersburg), where he made a close acquaintance with the artist Ilya Repin and the writer Korolenko. It was Chukovsky who persuaded Repin to take his writing seriously and prepare a book of memoirs, Far Close. Chukovsky lived in Kuokkala for about 10 years. From the combination of the words Chukovsky and Kuokkala, “Chukokkala” was formed (invented by Repin) - the name of a handwritten humorous almanac that Korney Ivanovich kept until the last days of his life.
In 1907, Chukovsky published Walt Whitman's translations. The book became popular, which increased Chukovsky's fame in the literary environment. Chukovsky became an influential critic, mockingly speaking about works of mass literature that were popular at that time: the books of Lydia Charskaya and Anastasia Verbitskaya, Pinkertonism and others, wittily defended the futurists - both in articles and in public lectures - from the attacks of traditional criticism (he met in Kuokkale was with Mayakovsky and later became friends with him), although the Futurists themselves were by no means always grateful to him for this; developed his own recognizable manner (reconstruction of the psychological appearance of the writer on the basis of numerous quotations from him).
Osip Mandelstam, Korney Chukovsky, Benedict Livshits and Yuri Annenkov, seeing off to the front. Random photo of Karl Bulla. 1914
In 1916, Chukovsky again visited England with a delegation from the State Duma. In 1917, Patterson's book With the Jewish Detachment at Gallipoli (about the Jewish Legion in the British Army) was published, edited and with a foreword by Chukovsky.
After the revolution, Chukovsky continued to engage in criticism, publishing two of his most famous books on the work of his contemporaries - The Book of Alexander Blok (Alexander Blok as a Man and a Poet) and Akhmatova and Mayakovsky. The circumstances of the Soviet era turned out to be ungrateful for critical activity, and Chukovsky had to “bury this talent in the ground”, which he later regretted.
literary criticism
V. V. Mayakovsky with Boris and K. I. Chukovsky
In 1908, his critical essays on the writers Chekhov, Balmont, Blok, Sergeev-Tsensky, Kuprin, Gorky, Artsybashev, Merezhkovsky, Bryusov and others were published, which compiled the collection " From Chekhov to the present day”, withstood three editions during the year.
Since 1917, Chukovsky set to work on Nekrasov, his favorite poet, for many years. Through his efforts, the first Soviet collection of Nekrasov's poems was published. Chukovsky completed work on it only in 1926, reworking a lot of manuscripts and providing texts with scientific comments. The monograph Nekrasov's Mastery, published in 1952, was reprinted many times, and in 1962 Chukovsky was awarded the Lenin Prize for it. After 1917, it was possible to publish a significant part of Nekrasov's poems, which were either previously banned by the tsarist censorship, or they were "vetoed" by the copyright holders. Approximately a quarter of Nekrasov's currently known poetic lines were put into circulation precisely by Korney Chukovsky. In addition, in the 1920s, he discovered and published manuscripts of Nekrasov's prose works (The Life and Adventures of Tikhon Trosnikov, The Thin Man, and others).
In addition to Nekrasov, Chukovsky was engaged in the biography and work of a number of other writers of the 19th century (Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Sleptsov), to which, in particular, his book “People and Books of the Sixties” is devoted, participated in the preparation of the text and editing of many publications. Chukovsky considered Chekhov the writer closest to himself in spirit.
Children's poems and fairy tales
Passion for children's literature, glorified Chukovsky, began relatively late, when he was already a famous critic. In 1916, Chukovsky compiled the Yolka collection and wrote his first fairy tale, Crocodile. In 1923, his famous fairy tales "Moydodyr" and "Cockroach" were published, in 1924 "Barmaley".
Despite the fact that fairy tales were printed in large numbers and went through many editions, they did not fully meet the tasks of Soviet pedagogy. In February 1928, Pravda published an article by the Deputy People's Commissar of Education of the RSFSR N.K.
Such chatter is disrespectful to the child. First, he is beckoned with a gingerbread - cheerful, innocent rhymes and comical images, and along the way they are allowed to swallow some kind of dregs that will not pass without a trace for him. I think, "Crocodile" should not be given to our guys ...
Soon, among party critics and editors, the term "Chukovshchina" appeared. Having accepted the criticism, Chukovsky in December 1929 in Literaturnaya Gazeta published a letter in which he “renounced” old fairy tales and announced his intentions to change the direction of his work by writing a collection of poems “Merry Collective Farm”, but he would not keep his promise. The collection will never come out from under his pen, and the next fairy tale will be written only after 13 years.
Despite the criticism of "Chukovsky", it was during this period that sculptural compositions based on Chukovsky's fairy tales were installed in a number of cities of the Soviet Union. The most famous fountain is "Barmaley" ("Children's round dance", "Children and a crocodile") by the prominent Soviet sculptor R. R. Iodko, installed in 1930 according to a standard project in Stalingrad and other cities of Russia and Ukraine. The composition is an illustration to Chukovsky's fairy tale of the same name. The Stalingrad fountain will become famous as one of the few structures that survived the Battle of Stalingrad.
In the life of Chukovsky by the beginning of the 1930s, another hobby appeared - the study of the psyche of children and how they master speech. He wrote down his observations of children, their verbal creativity in the book From Two to Five (1933).
All my other writings are so overshadowed by my children's fairy tales that, in the minds of many readers, I did not write anything at all, except for "Moydodirs" and "Fly-Tsokotuha".
Chukovsky K. I. "About myself" // Collected works: In 15 vols. Vol. 1. - 2nd ed., electronic, corrected. - M .: Agency FTM, Ltd., 2013. - P. 11 -12. - 598 p.
Other works
In the 1930s, Chukovsky did a lot of work on the theory of literary translation (the book The Art of Translation, published in 1936, was republished before the start of the war, in 1941, under the title High Art) and translations into Russian (M. Twain, O Wilde, R. Kipling and others, including in the form of "retellings" for children).
He begins to write memoirs, on which he worked until the end of his life (“Contemporaries” in the ZhZL series). Diaries 1901-1969 were published posthumously.
During the war he was evacuated to Tashkent. The younger son Boris died at the front.
As the NKGB reported to the Central Committee, during the war years Chukovsky spoke out: “... With all my heart I wish the death of Hitler and the collapse of his crazy ideas. With the fall of the Nazi despotism, the world of democracy will come face to face with the Soviet despotism. Will wait".
On March 1, 1944, the Pravda newspaper published an article by P. Yudin “Vulgar and harmful concoction of K. Chukovsky”, in which an analysis of Chukovsky’s book “We will overcome Barmaley!” published in 1943 in Tashkent! (Aibolithia is at war with the Ferocity and its king Barmaley), and this book was recognized in the article as harmful:
The tale of K. Chukovsky is a harmful concoction that can distort modern reality in the minds of children.
The War Tale by K. Chukovsky characterizes the author as a person who either does not understand the writer's duty in the Patriotic War, or deliberately vulgarizes the great tasks of raising children in the spirit of socialist patriotism.
Chukovsky and the Bible for children
In the 1960s, K. Chukovsky conceived the idea of retelling the Bible for children. He attracted writers and writers to this project and carefully edited their work. The project itself was very difficult due to the anti-religious position of the Soviet authorities. In particular, they demanded from Chukovsky that the words "God" and "Jews" should not be mentioned in the book; By the efforts of writers for God, the pseudonym "The Wizard of Yahweh" was invented. The book entitled "The Tower of Babel and Other Ancient Legends" was published by the publishing house "Children's Literature" in 1968. However, the entire circulation was destroyed by the authorities. The circumstances of the publication's ban were later described by Valentin Berestov, one of the authors of the book: “It was the height of the great cultural revolution in China. The Red Guards, noticing the publication, loudly demanded to smash the head of the old revisionist Chukovsky, who clogs the minds of Soviet children with religious nonsense. The West responded with the headline “New discovery of the Red Guards”, and our authorities reacted in the usual way.” The book was published in 1990.
Last years
In recent years, Chukovsky has been a popular favorite, winner of a number of state awards and holder of orders, at the same time he maintained contacts with dissidents (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Litvinovs, his daughter Lydia was also a prominent human rights activist). At the dacha in Peredelkino, where he lived constantly in recent years, he arranged meetings with the surrounding children, talked with them, read poetry, invited famous people, famous pilots, artists, writers, poets to meetings. Peredelkino children, who have long since become adults, still remember those children's gatherings at Chukovsky's dacha.
In 1966, he signed a letter of 25 cultural and scientific figures to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, against the rehabilitation of Stalin.
Korney Ivanovich died on October 28, 1969 from viral hepatitis. At the dacha in Peredelkino, where the writer lived most of his life, his museum now operates.
From the memoirs of Yu. G. Oksman:
Lidia Korneevna Chukovskaya in advance handed over to the Board of the Moscow branch of the Writers' Union a list of those whom her father asked not to be invited to the funeral. This is probably why Arkady Vasiliev and other Black Hundreds from literature are not visible. Very few Muscovites came to say goodbye: there was not a single line in the newspapers about the upcoming memorial service. There are few people, but, as at the funeral of Ehrenburg, Paustovsky, the police are dark. In addition to uniforms, many "boys" in civilian clothes, with gloomy, contemptuous faces. The boys began by cordoning off the chairs in the hall, not letting anyone linger, sit down. The seriously ill Shostakovich came. In the lobby, he was not allowed to take off his coat. It was forbidden to sit in a chair in the hall. It came to a scandal.
Civil service. The stuttering S. Mikhalkov utters pompous words that do not fit in with his indifferent, even indifferent intonation: “From the Union of Writers of the USSR ...”, “From the Union of Writers of the RSFSR ...”, “From the publishing house“ Children's Literature “...”, “ From the Ministry of Education and the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences ... ”All this is pronounced with stupid significance, with which, probably, doormen of the last century, during the departure of guests, called for the carriage of Count So-and-so and Prince So-and-so. But who are we burying, finally? A bureaucratic boss or a cheerful and mocking clever Korney? A. Barto drummed her "lesson". Kassil performed a complex verbal pirouette in order for the listeners to understand how close he personally was to the deceased. And only L. Panteleev, having interrupted the blockade of officialdom, clumsily and sadly said a few words about the civilian face of Chukovsky. Relatives of Korney Ivanovich asked L. Kabo to speak, but when she sat down at the table in a crowded room to sketch out the text of her speech, KGB General Ilyin (in the world - secretary for organizational matters of the Moscow Writers' Organization) approached her and correctly, but firmly told her, that will not allow her to perform.
He was buried in the cemetery in Peredelkino.
Family
- Wife (since May 26, 1903) - Maria Borisovna Chukovskaya (nee Maria Aron-Berovna Goldfeld, 1880-1955). Daughter of accountant Aron-Ber Ruvimovich Goldfeld and housewife Tuba (Tauba) Oizerovna Goldfeld.
- Son - poet, prose writer and translator Nikolai Korneevich Chukovsky (1904-1965). His wife is the translator Marina Nikolaevna Chukovskaya (1905-1993).
- Daughter - writer and dissident Lidia Korneevna Chukovskaya (1907-1996). Her first husband was a literary critic and literary historian Tsezar Samoylovich Volpe (1904-1941), the second - a physicist and popularizer of science Matvey Petrovich Bronstein (1906-1938).
- Son - Boris Korneevich Chukovsky (1910-1941), died shortly after the start of World War II, in the fall of 1941, returning from reconnaissance near the Borodino field.
- Daughter - Maria Korneevna Chukovskaya (Murochka) (1920-1931), the heroine of children's poems and father's stories.
- Granddaughter - Natalya Nikolaevna Kostyukova (Chukovskaya), Tata (born 1925), microbiologist, professor, doctor of medical sciences, Honored Worker of Science of Russia.
- Granddaughter - literary critic, chemist Elena Tsezarevna Chukovskaya (1931-2015).
- Grandchildren - Nikolai Nikolaevich Chukovsky (born 1933), communications engineer; Evgeny Borisovich Chukovsky)
