The Days Burn up 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.
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 Gorki and Ilja Repin, to Anna Achmatova, Vladimir Majakovski and Aleksandr Solzjenitsyn. He lived through two Tzars, multiple revolutions – he reported the mutiny on the Potemkin – four volatile Soviet leaders, famines, Stalin’s terror, evacuation, adulation, defamation, national vilification, self-sacrifice, bitter poverty, dachas, chauffeur-driven cars and the highest state literary awards.
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 (Vintage)
For readers of Frank Westerman’s Engineers of the Soul and Michiel Krielaars’ The Sound of Utopia
Petra Couvée (b. 1963) is an author, translator and Russia expert. She taught Dutch at Saint Petersburg State University, while translating Gogol and Nabokov into Dutch, among others. In 2014 she co-wrote with Peter Finn The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (Vintage) to international acclaim. She currently lives in the Netherlands, where she is affiliated with Leiden University.