Readers become acquainted with Chukovsky in childhood, memorizing his poems for the rest of their lives, but for many, this acquaintance ends in childhood. Meanwhile, everyone's favorite classic of children's literature was also a critic, translator, prose writer, linguist, literary scholar, memoirist... Chukovsky the translator gave the Russian reader an entire library of works of English and American literature; Chukovsky the researcher, fascinated by the psychology of children's speech, created the famous book 'From Two to Five'; and Chukovsky the memoirist created a magnificent gallery of portraits of his contemporaries: Chekhov, Gorky, Blok, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Zoshchenko... Chukovsky's memoirs—live, vivid, unusually interesting—are rightfully considered one of the finest examples of memoir prose of the twentieth century.

Korney Chukovsky