Many readers become acquainted with Chukovsky's work as children, memorizing his poems for the rest of their lives, but that's often where their acquaintance ends. Meanwhile, this beloved classic of children's literature was also a critic, translator, prose writer, linguist, literary scholar, and memoirist... Chukovsky the translator gifted the Russian reader with an entire library of works of English and American literature; Chukovsky the memoirist—a magnificent gallery of portraits of his contemporaries, which are rightfully considered among the finest examples of memoir prose of the twentieth century; Chukovsky the researcher—famous books on the Russian language, highly praised by experts and beloved by the general public for many decades. One such book is 'Alive as Life,' in which the author, without in any way playing with the reader, easily and captivatingly uses vivid examples to explain what a complex, interesting, wisely constructed self-regulating system the Russian language is.