Diary, 1901-1969

by Korney Chukovsky, Victor Erlich (Editor), Michael Henry Heim (Translator)

A perceptive literary critic, a world-famous writer of witty and playful verses for children, a leading authority on children’s linguistic creativity, and a highly skilled translator, Kornei Chukovsky was a complete man of letters. As benefactor to many writers including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, he stood for several decades at the center of the Russian literary milieu. It is no exaggeration to claim that Chukovsky knew everyone involved in shaping the course of twentieth-century Russian literature. His voluminous diary, here translated into English for the first time, begins in prerevolutionary Russia and spans nearly the entire Soviet era. It is the candid commentary of a brilliant observer who documents fifty years of Soviet literary activity and the personal predicament of the writer under a totalitarian regime.
From descriptions of friendship with such major literary figures as Anna Akhmatova and Isaac Babel to accounts of the struggle with obtuse and hostile censorship, from the heartbreaking story of the death of the daughter who had inspired so many stories to candid political statements, the extraordinary diary of Kornei Chukovsky is a unique account of the twentieth-century Russian experience.

Genres: Nonfiction, Russian Literature

656 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky (Russian: Корней Иванович Чуковский) was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His catchy rhythms, inventive rhymes and absurd characters have invited comparisons with the American children's author Dr. Seuss. Chukovsky's poems Tarakanishche ("The Monster Cockroach"), Krokodil ("The Crocodile"), Telefon ("The Telephone") and Moydodyr ("Wash-'em-Clean") have been favorites with many generations of Russophone children. Lines from his poems, in particular Telefon, have become universal catch-phrases in the Russian media and everyday conversation. He adapted the Doctor Dolittle stories into a book-length Russian poem as Doktor Aybolit ("Dr. Ow-It-Hurts"), and translated a substantial portion of the Mother Goose canon into Russian as Angliyskiye Narodnyye Pesenki ("English Folk Rhymes"). He was also an influential literary critic and essayist. (from: wikipedia)

For Russian version of same author:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Reviews

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://dodopress.ru/lobster/2017-06-03/

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely beautiful diary of a seemingly beautiful man. It’s also a window into the harried but not quite extinguished intelligentsia. The famous children’s author couldn’t offer any direct critiques of Stalinism but his sensitivity and humanity and cosmopolitan literary activity were an indirect form of resistance.

[Natalia · Rating 5 out of 5]

1. Сердце кровью обливается при мысли о том, что мог бы написать Чуковский, если бы ему просто не мешали
2. Дневники за 30-е годы интересны даже не тем, что написано, а тем - о чем умолчено
3. Поразительно, насколько оживляет человека даже малейшее дуновение свободы

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sixty-odd years of ellipsis-ridden diaries from the great Kornei Chukovsky, but omissions be damned: this is some chronicle of literary life in the Soviet Union. I've read a good deal about Gorky, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn, but this book showed me I had no sense of what they were really like - riveting stuff, with pithy insights all over.

To wit:

"What turbid, pretentious rubbish Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading is. I put it down after forty pages."

"Tynyanov's autobiography is a marvel - all concrete imagery and artistic detail. One would think it had been written by a great novelist rather than a scholar. And what a memory for the picturesque images surrounding him as a child."

"I am deeply sympathetic--{Solzhenitsyn's} heroism is remarkable, his talent evident in every word--but a state may well not survive its writers' telling its people the truth."

All this from the Russian equivalent of Dr. Seuss!

(Now if only there were some lost diaries in which our Seuss defrocks Pynchon, champions John Kennedy Toole, and makes some prophetic remarks about Martin Luther King ...)

Chukovsky also raves about Bulgakov's Black Snow -- "pages worthy of Gogol" -- so I probably ought to revisit this novel, which I found bitter and constricted the first time through. Might be that Chukovsky merely found it as cathartic to read as Bulgakov must have found it to write, given that they had to suffer the same doctrinaire assholes, but it's even more likely that I missed the real flavor of the work.

My favorite snippet: "When I told {Solzhenitsyn} that he needed new shoes, he said, 'I bought these only ten years ago.'"