The Days Burn Like Paper: The Century of the Chukovsky Family
An alternative history of the twentieth century in Russia, based on censure and literary power politics
The illegitimate son of a Jewish student and his Ukrainian housekeeper, Korney Chukovsky was born in the Russian Empire in 1882. By the time of his death in the Soviet Union in 1969, he’d sold 82 million books, translated into 64 languages. Writing under authoritarian rule was, however, often nearly impossible. Through his family’s story, Petra Couvée paints a brilliant portrait of Russia’s twentieth century.
Stella Rieck
Cossee
rieck@cossee.com
Critic, children's book author, translator, memoirist and author of a three-volume diary, Korney Chukovsky was at the heart of Russian literary life for decades and knew practically everyone important in twentieth-century Russian literature and art, from Maxim Gorky and Ilya Repin, to Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
He lived under two tsars and four volatile Soviet leaders, surviving revolutions—he reported the mutiny on the Potemkin—famines, Stalin’s terror, evacuation, defamation, and national vilification. After years of self-sacrifice and bitter poverty, he was finally rewarded with a dacha, a chauffeur-driven car, and the highest state literary honors.
He was a survival artist, never arrested or exiled – though the same couldn’t be said of those close to him. Chukovsky had a large family and his son-in-law was arrested and murdered. While earlier publications inevitably came back to haunt him whenever the political winds turned, he escaped the brutal punishments inflicted upon more than a thousand other writers including Isaac Babel and Boris Pilnyak. In the end, the Chukovsky family’s eventful life – with imprisonments, favours and systematic opposition from high authorities, loss of loved ones – forces us to nuance our view of the dichotomy between loyalists and dissidents, good writers and bad.
On a subject that is playing out again in the present – history is repeating itself
A portrait of Russia’s Dr Seuss
By the author of the internationally acclaimed The Zhivago Affair (Pantheon Books/Vintage)
For readers of Frank Westerman’s Engineers of the Soul and Michiel Krielaars’ The Sound of Utopia
A world opened for me when I read Petra Couvée’s The Days Burn Like Paper… Couvée shows, like no other, how as an artist you were forced to live during the Stalin terror.
NRC, Michel Krielaars
It’s clear that very meticulous and thorough research was carried out… It’s partly thanks to Couvée’s pleasant, even entertaining style that you want to know everything about the family’s balancing act from start to finish.
Tzum
