Lydia Chukovskaya

Lydia Korneyevna Chukovskaya was a Soviet writer, poet, publicist, memoirist, and dissident. She was the daughter of Korney Chukovsky and Maria Borisovna Goldfeld. Her brother, Nikolai Chukovsky, was a Russian Soviet writer and translator of prose and poetry. Her daughter, Elena Chukovskaya, was a Soviet and Russian chemist and literary scholar.

She was born on March 24 (April 7), 1907, in St. Petersburg. In Chukovskaya’s upbringing, a major role was played by the creative atmosphere of her parents’ home in St. Petersburg and in the summer settlement of Kuokkala (now Repino), as well as by her father’s wide circle of acquaintances, which included many outstanding figures of culture and the arts. Chukovskaya later wrote about this in her memoirs In Memory of Childhood (1983). From the age of 10–12, Lydia liked to read aloud to her father in the evenings, often for long stretches — 3–4 hours — and by the age of 15 she was already editing his translations, in particular those of Sinclair. “She edited wonderfully,” Korney Chukovsky recalled. In his Diary, Korney Chukovsky described the terrible impression made on his daughter by the head of the “school district,” whom they had come to see on some school matter. Opposing the inclusion of fairy tales in the reading program for younger grades, this woman said: “We gave children fairy tales when we had no opportunity to tell them the truth.” Lida was so upset that she could not hold back tears.

In 1912 the Chukovsky family moved to Kuokkala, a dacha area in then Finland, and lived there until 1917. During that period, the family became friends with the artist Ilya Yefimovich Repin, who also lived in Kuokkala. Artists, writers, actors, poets, literary historians, and publicists from St. Petersburg often visited Repin and Chukovsky. At an early age, Lydia Chukovskaya met Chaliapin, Mayakovsky, Leonid Andreyev, and Vladimir Korolenko.

After the February Revolution of 1917