Korney Chukovsky. From early childhood and for the entire life

Nikolai Vasilyevich Korneychukov (Chukovsky’s name) was born in St. Petersburg on March 31, 1882 in an unlawful marriage of the maid Katerina Korneychukova and the son of the owner, medical student Emanuel Levenson. Shortly after the birth of a son, the young man married a woman of his circle. A mother with two children had to leave, and the writer’s childhood passed in Odessa. Nikolai did not succeed in completing the gymnasium - he was expelled in accordance with the Circular on Cook’s Children because of his low origin. The boy began to engage in self-education, he studied English and read a lot and passed the exams for the certificate of maturity externally.

He started working early. According to his friend’s recommendation, journalist and writer Vladimir Zhabotinsky, he was lucky to get a job as a reporter in the newspaper Odessa News. Then the pseudonym Korney Chukovsky appeared under his first articles.

When it turned out that he was the only one in the editors who knew English, he was sent on a business trip to London, thanks to which he was able to read English works of writers, historians, philosophers, and publicists in the free reading room of the British Museum library.

Having returned to Russia, Chukovsky in St. Petersburg began to publish the satirical journal Signal, the anti-government nature of which led to his closure and arrest and conviction of the publisher for "insulting Majesty."

Since 1906, Korney Chukovsky has become a regular contributor to Valery Bryusov's Libra magazine. His critical articles also appeared in magazines Russian Thought, an almanac of the Shipovnik publishing house, which are available on the Presidential Library’s portal.

He settled in Kuokkale (now the village of Repino), was well acquainted with prominent people - artist Ilya Repin, lawyer Anatoly Koni, singer Fedor Chaliapin, writers and poets Vladimir Korolenko, Alexander Kuprin, Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Leonid Andreyev, Alexei Tolstoy. Later, Chukovsky described many of them in his memoirs: Repin. Bitter. Mayakovsky. Bryusov. Memoirs (1940), Memories (1959), Contemporaries (1962). His essays of that time about modern writers were collected in the books Chekhov to the Present Day (1908), Critical Stories (1911), Faces and Masks (1914), Futurists (1922).

It is difficult to even name all the writers to whose work Korney Chukovsky devoted both long-term thoughtful research and brilliant critical articles. Anton Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Igor Severyanin, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Nekrasov, Taras Shevchenko... How was it possible to predicted that he would be known to everyone as a wonderful children's writer who first spoke to the children on an equal footing, without preaching and moralizing!

The prerequisites for this were several events. This was the compilation of the Yolka children's collection for children in 1916, the proposal of Maxim Gorky to head the children's department of the Parus publishing house, the editorial work on the Firebird almanac and the illness of his son, to whom Chukovsky told the tale of a crocodile memorized by a child.

Thus the children's writer Korney Chukovsky emerged. The “Crocodile” was followed by Cockroach (1922), Moydodyr (1922), Mukha-Tsokotuha (1923), Miracle Tree (1924), Barmaley (1925), Telephone (1926), Confusion (1926), Fedorino Gore (1926), Aibolit (1929), Overcome Barmaley! (1942) The Stolen Sun (1945), The Adventures of Bibigon (1945). Digital copies of editions of Chukovsky’s tales are available on the Presidential Library’s portal.

Such familiar and at the same time unexpected images, colored by the author’s imagination, echoing Russian and world folklore, strict rhyme and distinct rhythm made his poems easy to remember from early childhood and for the entire life. In almost all the tales of Chukovsky, animated films were shot.

Children all their lives have been for Korney Ivanovich a source of vitality and inspiration. In recent years, he lived in a country house in Peredelkino, where he arranged holidays and gatherings with tea for the kids, and having decided that the children read too little, he built a children's library at his summer house.

Chukovsky was awarded the Order of Lenin, three orders of the Red Banner of Labor and medals. In 1957 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philology, in 1962 - the honorary title of Doctor of Literature at the University of Oxford and awarded the Lenin Prize for the book "Nekrasov’s Mastery".

Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky died in 1969 from viral hepatitis and was buried in a cemetery in Peredelkino. Today his country house is a museum.