Lydia Chukovskaya

Origins and early life

Lydia Chukovskaya was born in Helsinki on 24 March 1907, the daughter of Korney Chukovsky, the beloved children's poet and critic, who has his own fiche on this site; her Jewish descent comes through him, since Korney was the illegitimate son of Emmanuil Solomonovich Levenson, of a wealthy Russian Jewish family, who under family pressure refused to marry his Ukrainian mother.

Work and career

Emmanuil Levenson was therefore Lydia's paternal grandfather, and this fiche states plainly that she was not raised in Judaism and that the Levenson connection is a matter of documented descent rather than religion. She grew up among the writers of Petrograd, worked as an editor of children's literature under Samuil Marshak until the department was destroyed by the purges, and in 1937 her husband, the physicist Matvei Bronstein, was arrested and shot; she was told for two years that he had been sentenced to ten years without right of correspondence, the standard lie for an execution.

Out of that experience she wrote, between November 1939 and February 1940, the short novel Sofia Petrovna, the story of a loyal Soviet typist whose son is arrested and who cannot let herself understand what is happening. It is the only known account of the Great Terror written in the Soviet Union while the terror was going on; the manuscript was hidden by a friend through the war and was not published in Russia until 1988.

Her second novel, Going Under, and her three volumes of Notes on Anna Akhmatova, kept in a private shorthand because Akhmatova's poems could not be written down, are among the essential documents of Russian literature under Stalin. She was expelled from the Writers' Union in 1974 for defending Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, published abroad, and lived unpublishable at home until 1987. She died in Moscow on 7 February 1996.