Lidiya Chukovskaya

Lidiya Chukovskaya was a Russian writer who survived the most dramatic events of the 20th century Russia, and captured the highlights of Russian cultural history in her memoirs. She was born Lidia Korneevna Chukovskaya on March 24, 1907, in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire (now St. Petersburg, Russia). Her father, Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy, was a famous writer. Young Chukovskaya was brought up in the St. Petersburg cultural milieu where she met such writers as Vladimir Korolenko, Leonid Andreyev and Vladimir Mayakovsky among others. She studied at the prestigious Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, then at the Institue of History of Arts. In 1926 she was arrested and exiled in the city of Saratov for about a year. From 1928 - 1937 she worked as an editor of books for children at the 'Lendetgiz' publishing house in Leningrad. There her mentor was poet Samuil Marshak. In 1937 Chukovskaya's second husband, an astrophysicist Matvei Bronstein, was falsely accused of anti-Soviet activity and executed by the gunshot, during the dictatorship of Iosif Stalin. At that time she left the city of Leningrad and narrowly escaped being arrested. In 1938 Lidiya Chukovskaya and Anna Akhmatova spent many days together waiting in lines for the news about their dear ones at the KGB prison in Leningrad. At that time Chukovskaya became literary secretary of poet Anna Akhmatova, and started a diary which led to creation of one of the most important memoirs about Russian literati, covering several decades of Russian history and culture. She described her experience during the Stalin's dictatorship in her novel 'Sofia Petrovna' which was banned in the Soviet Union and could not be published for several decades. In 1941, Chukovskaya established friendship with poet 'Marina Tsvetaeva'. During the Second World War she was in exile at the central Asian city of Tashkent. In 1953, after Stalin's death, Chukovskaya became an editor of the cultural monthly 'Literaturnaya Moskva'. She became a respected figure during the cultural "Thaw", initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, but after Khrushchev's arrest, Chukovskaya, like many other Russian culture luminaries, was banned and ostracized by the Soviet regime of Leonid Brezhnev. During the 60s Chukovskaya published her writings abroad. At that time she continued collaboration with Anna Akhmatova as an editor of Akhmatova's last collection of poetry. In the 1970's Chukovskaya was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers because she was a dissident and an active supporter of Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; she also supported poet Joseph Brodsky who was unfairly arrested. Lidiya Chukovskaya was a strong supporter of the human rights movement led by the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov. In the 1970s Chukovskaya founded the Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy literary museum in her father's home in Peredelkino, a suburb of Moscow. Her works were translated in many languages and published in Europe and America, causing her trouble with the Soviet authorities. In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she enjoyed literary fame in Russia with the publication of her books of memoirs about Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, for which she was awarded the State Prize of Russia in 1994. Lidiya Chukovskaya was a member of the Bavarian Academy. She died on February 8, 1996, in Peredelkino, and was laid to rest in Peredelkino cemetery, near Moscow, Russia.