Korney Chukovsky
| Korney Chukovsky | |
|---|---|
Portrait by Ilya Repin.
|
|
| Born | Nikolay Vasilyevich Korneychukov 31 March 1882 Saint Petersburg |
| Died | 28 October 1969 (aged 87) Moscow |
| Occupation | poet, writer, translator, literary critic, journalist |
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky (Russian: Корне́й Ива́нович Чуко́вский; IPA: [kɐrˈnʲej ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ tɕʊˈkofskʲɪj]; 31 March NS 1882 – 28 October 1969) was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His catchy rhythms, inventive rhymes and absurd characters have invited comparisons with the American children's author Dr. Seuss. Chukovsky's poems Tarakanishche ("The Monster Cockroach"), Krokodil ("The Crocodile"), Telefon ("The Telephone") and Moydodyr ("Wash-'em-Clean") have been favourites with many generations of Russophone children. Lines from his poems, in particular Telefon, have become universal catch-phrases in the Russian media and everyday conversation. He adapted the Doctor Dolittle stories into a book-length Russian poem as Doctor Aybolit ("Dr. Ow-It-Hurts"), and translated a substantial portion of the Mother Goose canon into Russian as Angliyskiye Narodnyye Pesenki ("English Folk Rhymes"). He was also an influential literary critic and essayist.
He was born Nikolay Vasilyevich Korneychukov (Russian: Николай Васильевич Корнейчуков), which he reworked into his now familiar pen-name while working as a journalist at Odessa News in 1901. He was born in St. Petersburg, the illegitimate son of Ekaterina Osipovna Korneychukova (a peasant girl from the Poltava region of Ukraine) and Emmanuil Solomonovich Levenson, a man from a wealthy Jewish family (his legitimate grandson was mathematician Vladimir Rokhlin). Levenson's family did not permit his marriage to Korneychukova and the couple eventually was forced to separate. Korneychukova moved to Odessa with her two children, Nikolay and his sister Marussia. Levenson supported them financially for some time, until his marriage to another woman. Nikolay studied at the Odessa gymnasium, where one of his classmates was Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky. Later, Nikolay was expelled from the gymnasium for his "low origin" (a euphemism for illegitimacy). He had to get his secondary school and university diplomas by correspondence.
...
Wikipedia