Kornei Ivanovich Chukovsky

Postage stamp from the Soviet Union dedicated to K. Chukovsky, 1982 (Michel 5164, Scott 5033)

Korney chukovsky ( Russian Корней Иванович Чуковский ; actually Nikolai Vasilyevich Korneitschukow or soot. Николай Васильевич Корнейчуков ; born March 19 ^{. Jul} / 31 March  1882 ^greg. In St. Petersburg ; †  28. October 1969 in Moscow ) was a Russian and Soviet poet, literary critic, translator and author of numerous children's books.

life and work

Tschukowski was born in Saint Petersburg as the illegitimate son of the Jew Emmanuel Lewenson and his housekeeper, the Russian farmer Jekaterina Korneitschukowa from the Ukrainian city ​​of Poltava . When his parents separated, he moved with his mother to Odessa at the age of three , where he first attended high school, but was expelled from school in fifth grade due to his "too simple" background. In spite of the permanent poverty in which the family had to live, Chukovsky developed more self-study afterwards and thus also learned English and French .

He began his professional career in 1901 as a publicist and literary critic in the newspaper Odesskije Novosti (in German "Odessa News"). In 1903 he became a correspondent for this newspaper in London , moved there and lived there for a year. During this time he had published articles on works of English literature in the Russian press. After returning to Russia, Chukovsky continued to work as a literary critic. In 1905, also under the influence of the Russian Revolution of 1905 , he founded a satirical magazine called Signal , in which, among other things, poems and caricatures critical of the regime were printed. Among the authors of the magazine were well-known names such as Alexander Kuprin , Fyodor Sologub and Nadeschda Teffi . Due to the uncomfortable publications, Chukovsky was arrested after the fourth issue of the magazine and brought to court for insulting the Tsar , but acquitted.

O. Mandelstam , Tschukowski, B. Liwschiz , J. Annenkow v. l. No. (1914)

In 1906 Chukovsky moved to Karelia in what was then the village of Kuokkala . He lived there for about ten years and during this time made friends with the renowned painter Ilya Repin and the writer Wladimir Korolenko . Chukovsky's translations of Walt Whitman's works into Russian also date from this period . In addition, around 1915, Chukovsky began to be interested in children's language and writing children's books. In 1916 he wrote his first fairy tale called “The Crocodile” and in the same year, at Maxim Gorki's invitation, took over the management of the children's book department of the Parus publishing house (in German “Segel”). Since then he has often written fairy-tale poems for children, including such well-known works as Moidodyr (Russian Мойдодыр , in German about “washes blitzsauber”), Tarakanishche (Russian Тараканище , “The giant cockroach”) or Aibolite (Russian Айболит , “ Russian Айболит ”) . Wow ”; based on Hugh Lofting's “ Doctor Dolittle and His Animals ”). He also published the book Von Zwei bis Fünf (Russian От двух до пяти ) in 1933 , in which he described in detail his impressions and observations of the speech behavior of small children.

In the Stalin era, Chukovsky fell out of favor with his works by the rulers - also and in particular with a number of his children's books, as the fairy tale of the giant cockroach was denounced by some critics loyal to the regime as a pamphlet against Stalin. Many of Chukovsky's works were therefore banned and only released again in the thaw period after Stalin's death and Nikita Khrushchev's rise to power. In 1957, again only after Stalin's death, Chukovsky was awarded the Order of Lenin for his work . 1962 also awarded him the University of Oxford , the honorary doctorate .

Gravestone of Kornei Tschukowski and Lydia Tschukowskaja in Peredelkino

In the last years of his life, Tschukowski devoted himself more and more to literary criticism and wrote, among other things, books that were each devoted entirely to the work of a few well-known authors, such as Nikolai Nekrasov , Juri Tynyanow and Mikhail Soschtschenko . Even after his rehabilitation during the Khrushchev era, he kept a certain distance from state power; Among other things, he was the only Soviet writer to officially congratulate Boris Pasternak on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature . His daughter Lidija Tschukowskaja (1907–1996), also a writer and long-time friend of the poet Anna Akhmatova , was considered very critical of the regime and for this reason had to struggle with harassment and professional bans for almost her entire life.

For a large part of his last years Kornei Tschukowski lived in the artist settlement Peredelkino near Moscow, where a museum still exists in his former country house. Chukovsky also found his final resting place in Peredelkino after he died in 1969 of virus hepatitis .

plant

• (as Kornej Tschukowskij) Chekhov , in Chekhov, works in 3 volumes. Novellas, Stories, Dramas, Vol. 3, Transl. Johannes von Guenther . Heinrich Ellermann , Hamburg 1963, pp. 781 - 850 (a picture of life, with special appreciation of his person)

Web links

Commons : Kornei Tschukowski  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Kornei Iwanowitsch Tschukowski in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by Kornei Tschukowski and Lydia Tschukowskaja (Russian)
• Short biography (Russian)
• Biography and photos (Russian)