Chukovskaya, Lydia Korneyevna

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CHUKOVSKAYA, LYDIA KORNEYEVNA

(1907–1996), novelist, editor, memoirist, dissident, daughter of writer and critic Kornei Chukovsky.

Born in St. Petersburg, Lydia Chukovskaya studied literature at the Institute of the History of Art. She worked as apprentice editor to Samuil Marshak at the children's literature section of the Leningrad State Publishing House from 1927 until the section was shut down during the purges of the 1930s.

Chukovskaya became one of the most powerful writers to emerge from the Stalinist experience. Chukovskaya's husband, Matvei Petrovich Bronshtein, died in Stalin's purges. Written clandestinely during the winter of 1939 to 1940 and finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988, Chukovskaya's first novel, Sof'ia Petrovna, tells the story of a mother who loses her only son in the purges. Chukovskaya's second novel, Going Under (Spusk pod vodu ) similarly features a female protagonist traumatized by Stalinist repression.

Chukovskaya preserved and edited literary treasures. She saved some of Anna Akhmatova's poems by committing them to memory. Chukovskaya kept a journal of her meetings with her friend during the purges and published Notes on Anna Akhmatova (Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi ), a two-volume account of their conversations. In 1960 she published a collection of essays on the art of editing entitled In the Editor's Workshop (V laboratorii redaktora ).

Over time, Chukovskaya became active in the dissident movement. Her efforts on behalf of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuly Daniel, Andrei Sakharov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn led to her expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1974, which she chronicled in The Process of Expulsion (Protsess iskliucheniia ).

During her final years, she eulogized her father in To the Memory of Childhood (Pamiati detstva ) and established a museum at the Chukovsky dacha in Peredelkino, outside Moscow.

See also: chukovsky, kornei ivanovich