Great grandfather of Russia Korney Chukovsky

2015 was declared as The Year of Literature in Russia. The relevant decree was signed by Vladimir Putin last summer. On the 25^th of March, 1882 one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky was born. He is loved by generations of Russian children for his catchy rhythms, inventive rhymes and absurd characters. The mosr popular Chukovsky's poems are Tarakanishche ("The Monster Cockroach"), Krokodil ("The Crocodile"), Telefon ("The Telephone") and Moydodyr ("Wash-'em-Clean").

He was born Nikolay Vasilyevich Korneychukov, 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 Levinson, a man from a wealthy Jewish family whose legitimate grandson was mathematician Vladimir Rokhlin). Levinson's family did not permit his marriage to Korneychukova and the couple eventually separated. Korneychukova moved to Odessa with Nikolay and his sibling. Levinson 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". He had to get his secondary school and university diplomas by correspondence.

He taught himself English and, in 1903-05, he served as the London correspondent at an Odessa newspaper, although he spent most of his time at the British Library instead of the press gallery in the Parliament. Back in Russia, Chukovsky started translating English works, notably Walt Whitman, and published several analyses of contemporary European authors, which brought him in touch with leading personalities of Russian literature and secured the friendship of Alexander Blok. He also published a satirical magazine called Signal (1905–1906) and was arrested for "insulting the ruling house," but was acquitted after six months of investigative incarceration.

It was at that period that Chukovsky produced his first fantasies for children. They were adapted for theatre and animated films, with Chukovsky as one of the collaborators. Sergei Prokofiev and other composers even adapted some of his poems for opera and ballet. His works were popular with emigre children as well, as Vladimir Nabokov's complimentary letter to Chukovsky attests.

During the Soviet period, Chukovsky edited the complete works of Nikolay Nekrasov and published From Two to Five, a popular guidebook to the language of children. As his invaluable diaries attest, Chukovsky used his popularity to help the authors persecuted by the regime including Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Alexander Galich and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was the only Soviet writer who officially congratulated Boris Pasternak on winning the Nobel Prize.

Starting in the 1930s, Chukovsky lived in the writers' village of Peredelkino near Moscow, where he is now buried.For his works on the life of Nekrasov he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree in philology. He also received the Lenin Prize in 1962 for his book, Mastery of Nekrasov and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1962.

Here is the list of the cartoons taken on the basis of Chukovsky’s poems

Мойдодыр

Тараканище

Федорино горе

Айболит

Мука-цокотуха

Read about other famous Russians here