Lydia Chukovskaya
Tea party in the Sakharov kitchen:
Andrei Sakharov, Ruth Bonner,
and Lydia Chukovskaya, 1976.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lydia Korneievna Chukovskaya (Russian: Лидия Корнеевна
Чуковская) (24 March [O.S. 11 March] 1907 – February 8, 1996)
was a Soviet writer and poet.
Her deeply personal writings
reflect the human cost of Soviet totalitarianism, and she
devoted much of her career to defending dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and
Andrei Sakharov. She was herself the
daughter of the celebrated children's writer Korney Chukovsky,
wife of the scientist Matvei Bronstein, and close associate and
chronicler of the poet Anna Akhmatova.
Early life
Lydia Chukovskaya was born in 1907 in Helsingfors (present-day
Helsinki) in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then a part of the
Russian Empire. Her father was Korney Chukovsky, a poet who is
regarded today as perhaps the best-loved children's writer in
Russian literature.
She grew up in St Petersburg, the former capital of the
empire torn by war and revolution. Chukovsky recorded that his
daughter would muse on the problem of social justice while she
was still a little girl. But Lydia's greatest passion was
literature, especially poetry. It could hardly have been
otherwise, given her pedigree and circumstances — their house
was frequently visited by leading members of the Russian
literati, such as Blok, Gumilyov and Akhmatova. The city was
also home to the country's finest artists — Lydia saw Chaliapin
perform at the opera, for instance, and also met the painter
Ilya Repin.
Lydia got into trouble with the Bolshevik authorities at an
early age, when one of her friends used her father's typewriter
to print an anti-Bolshevik leaflet. Lydia was exiled to the city
of Saratov for a short period, but the experience did not make
her particularly political. Indeed, upon her return from exile,
she returned to Leningrad's literary world, joining the state
publishing house in 1927 as an editor of children's books. Her
mentor there was Samuil Marshak, perhaps her father's biggest
rival in Russian children's literature. Her first literary work,
a short story entitled Leningrad-Odessa, was published around
this time, under the pseudonym "A. Uglov".
Soon, Chukovskaya fell in love with a brilliant young
physicist of Jewish origin, by the name of Matvei Bronstein. The
two got married. In the late 1930s, Stalin's Great Terror
enveloped the land. Chukovskaya's employer came under attack for
being too "bourgeois", and a number of its authors were arrested
and executed. Matvei Bronstein also became one of Stalin's many
victims. He was arrested in 1937 on a false charge and, unknown
to his wife, was tried and executed in February 1938.
Chukovskaya too would have been arrested, had she not been away
from Leningrad at the time.
Later life and career
For several years, her life was to remain nomadic and
precarious. She was separated from her daughter Yelena, and kept
in the dark about her husband's fate. In 1939-40, while she
waited in vain for news, Chukovskaya wrote Sofia Petrovna, a
harrowing story about life during the Great Purges. But it was a
while before this story would achieve widespread recognition.
Out of favour with the authorities, yet principled and
uncompromising, Chukovskaya was unable to hold down any kind of
steady employment. But gradually, she started to get published
again: an introduction to the works of Taras Shevchenko, another
one for the diaries of Miklouho-Maclay.
By the time of Stalin's death in 1953, Chukovskaya had become
a respected figure within the literary establishment, as one of
the editors of the cultural monthly Literaturnaya Moskva. During
the late 1950s, Sofia Petrovna finally made its way through
Russia's literary circles, in manuscript form through samizdat.
Khrushchev's Thaw set in, and the book was about to be published
in 1963, but was stopped at the last moment for containing
"ideological distortions". Indomitable as ever, Chukovskaya sued
the publisher for full royalties and won. The book was
eventually published in Paris in 1965, but without the author's
permission and under the somewhat inaccurate title The Deserted
House. There were also some unauthorized alterations to the
text. The following year, a New York publisher published it
again, this time with the original title and text restored.
Chukovskaya was a lifelong friend of Anna Akhmatova, and her
next major work Spusk pod Vodu (Descent Into Water) described,
in diary form, the precarious experiences of Akhmatova and
Mikhail Zoshchenko. This book too was banned from publication in
her native land. In 1964, Chukovskaya spoke out against the
persecution of the young Joseph Brodsky; she would do so again
for Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. She wrote a series of
letters in support of Solzhenitsyn; these were published in
Munich in 1970.
In supporting Soviet dissidents, Chukovskaya lost her own
right to publish inside Russia. Although the KGB monitored her
closely, it is thought that the Soviet state refrained from
meting out harsher punishment, because of her reputation in the
West but also because of her father’s indisputable stature in
Russian culture.
Her relationship with Akhmatova was the subject of two more
books. Throughout her life, Chukovskaya also wrote poems of an
intensely personal nature, touching upon her life, her lost
husband, and the tragedy of her people.
In her old age, she shared her time between Moscow and her
father’s dacha in Peredelkino, a village that was the home to
many writers including Boris Pasternak. She died in Peredelkino
in February 1996.
Sofia Petrovna became legally available for the Soviet
readers only in February 1988 after it was published in the
magazine Neva. This publication made possible publications of
the other Lydia Chukovskaya’s works as Chukovskaya explicitly
forbade any publications of her fiction in the Soviet Union
before an official publication of Sofia Petrovna
