Preface
I was still in primary school when I first came to Korney Chukovsky house — then already a museum — and in those days any encounter with a foreigner, particularly a British or an American, was quite unusual. The same was true during Chukovsky’s time a decade earlier, when each visit from abroad was more or less an exception and had to be minutely coordinated with authorities.
Only in the late 1980s I started to meet foreign guests at the museum, where I had already been helping out. They must have been tourists. I remember how I regretted not to be able to talk without an interpreter, as my school English was insufficient.
It’s a great solace and a pleasure for me to see the younger generation of guides — my colleagues and friends — having written about Korney Chukovsky in English, the language that accompanied him from his youth and was an integral part of his professional life. It was for them a labour of love and respect.
Pavel Kryuchkov, Leading Researcher at the State Museum of the History of Russian Literature, journalist and critic, August 2017
ESTATE. Exterior in winter
Introduction
Korney Chukovsky (1882—1969) is among the most famous and best-loved people in Russia. For several generations virtually every child in this country has been growing up listening to Chukovsky’s stories, while a lot of his lines and characters have become an integral part of the popular culture. Ironically, however, there are facts, which testify much more vividly to his unique position, and yet are little known.
Chukovsky holds a record as the most published author in Russian language, with a total print run of over 350 million copies, thus closely rivaling Alexander Pushkin (whose head start was a century earlier) and being second only to the Bible. Chukovsky’s career spanned 68 years, his books have been translated into no less than 87 languages, gone through some 2500 different editions and remained continuously in print for more than a century.
The present introductory work, however concise it may be, is the first original book about Chukovsky written in English and for an English reader. It attempts to cover all the principal directions of Chukovsky’s many endeavours. It is not a biography in a traditional sense and does not pretend to follow a single narrative. Without going into unnecessary details, which might be of limited interest to a non-Russian audience, the book gives a separate broad perspective on each of Chukovsky’s areas of expertise. The illustrations are all exclusive and never before released photographs of his last home — now functioning as Korney Chukovsky Memorial House in the writers’ village of Peredelkino.
This book is published in commemoration of Chukovsky’s 135th anniversary, as well as a centennial jubilee of his first children’s story and 55 years since his acception of Honorary Doctorate at Oxford University.
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Born in Saint Petersburg, raised in Odessa (then Russian Empire, now Ukraine), Korney Chukovsky came to live in Peredelkino in 1938. The whole village, a brainchild of Joseph Stalin, had been built in a pine forest near Moscow just a few years earlier and was originally meant to accommodate all the best Soviet writers. It has remained a writers’ village ever since, with younger generations coming in and several houses converted into museums.
For almost 25 years, starting with Chukovsky’s death, his house was a cultural pilgrimage destination for tens of thousands of people, and yet — due to authorities’ reluctance — it could not obtain any official memorial status. Lydia Chukovskaya (1907—1996), the writer’s daughter, decided to keep all the furnishings intact and maintained the so called “people’s museum” at her own expense and considerable risk. It was only in 1994 when the house became a subdivision of the State Museum of Literature.
