Lydia Chukovskaya
Lydia Korneievna Chukovskaya (Russian: Лидия Корнеевна Чуковская) (March 24, 1907 - February 8, 1996) was a Russian 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 Tsarist empire. Her father was Korney Chukovsky, a poet who is regarded today as perhaps the best-loved children's writer in Russian literature.
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.
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 dived straight into the literary world, joining the Children's Publishers in Leningrad in 1927. Her mentor there was Samuil Marshak, perhaps her father's biggest rival in the pantheon of 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 scientist of Jewish origin, by the name of Matvei Bronstein. The two got married. Stalin's Great Terror enveloped the land soon after, and in 1937, Bronstein became one of its many victims. He was arrested on a false charge and, unknown to his wife, was executed in 1938. Chukovskaya too would have been arrested, had she not been away from Leningrad at the time.
Later life and career
In 1939-40, as she waited for news of her husband, Chukovskaya wrote Sofia Petrovna, a story about life during the Terror. But it was a while before this story achieved acclaim. At 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 typescript form. It was published in the West in the 1960s under the title The Deserted House, and was promptly banned in the USSR.
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.