The short life of Chukovsky's little muse, for whom he wrote his best fairy tales

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

We all know and love the tales of Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky from childhood. Several generations of children have already grown up on his unique melodic poems, so he remained in the memory of people more as a children's writer. However, in the life of a poet, publicist, literary critic, translator, literary critic and journalist, wonderful works for the youngest readers were "born" for only about ten years, and they were written for one girl - the writer's youngest daughter Maria, whom everyone in the family called Murochka. 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of her birth.

By 1910, the family of a young journalist and writer Korney Chukovsky had three children - Kolya, Lida and Boris. Then an era of terrible upheavals awaited the country, first the First World War, then the revolution and the Civil. At this time, everyone survived as best they could. The writer, in order to feed his large family, had to take on any job - he lectured for sailors of the Baltic Fleet, at the Red Army University and at the House of Arts, in order to somehow be able to make ends meet. However, in the midst of hunger and devastation, the Chukovskys suddenly had another child. On February 24, 1920, Korney Ivanovich makes an entry in his diary:

Murochka grew up a little, and the 40-year-old writer, who was already, it seems, an experienced father, thanks to this late child, suddenly discovered the amazing world of children's fantasy. Increasingly, he writes in his diary about his youngest daughter, admiring her:

Chukovsky often plays with his daughter, consoles her in small troubles. It is in these games, conversations, persuasion to sleep and eat that ideas for amazing children's stories are born, which the happy dad begins to write down. In 1925 the first collection of poems and fairy tales "Murkina Kniga" was published. Of course, the writer devotes it to his little muse, because his Murochka flashes here and there on the pages:

Chukovsky is increasingly fascinated by the amazing childish logic. Sometimes he plays with his daughter so sincerely and with pleasure that people’s eyes go up in surprise - for example, a girl pretends to be a dog, and dad leads her on a leash. In quiet moments, they are engaged in serious business together - Murochka learns to read and write, gets acquainted with serious works of literature. True, the results, refracted through the direct consciousness of the child, sometimes turn out to be unexpected:

At the age of seven, the girl almost died from an attack of appendicitis. She was rescued, but from that moment on, a black shadow seems to hang over the writer - he is afraid of losing his daughter, who is not very healthy. At the same time, troubles of a different plan await him - the works written for Murochka and donated to all the children of the country are subjected to harsh criticism. In February 1928, Pravda published an article by the Deputy People's Commissar of Education of the RSFSR Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya “On the Crocodile“Chukovsky”:

Soon this persecution takes on a serious scale, and a negative term even appears in the literary environment - "Chukovshchina". The writer is forced to "renounce" his strange ideas about children's literature and return to the beaten path of socialist realism. In December 1929, Chukovsky published a letter in Literaturnaya Gazeta in which he promised to write a collection of poems called "The Merry Collective Farm" instead of stupid fairy tales. True, he never fulfilled this promise, because in the future he hardly wrote any more poems for children. The most terrible period began in his life - doctors discovered bone tuberculosis in Murochka. In those years, this disease was considered almost incurable.

The writer took his daughter to the Crimea, treated in the best children's sanatorium, but the misfortune that he had foreseen for so long nevertheless overtook the family:

Maria Chukovskaya was buried in the old cemetery of Alupka. Since then, the writer hated Crimea. Until the end of his life, he believed that the death of his daughter was retribution for his "renunciation" in Literaturnaya Gazeta from their common fairy tales. He sometimes tried to return to children's works - in 1933 he published a book about the psychology of children “From two to five”, begun a long time ago, during the war in Tashkent, during the evacuation he wrote the fairy tale “We Will Defeat Barmaley”, which again fell “out of place”, the criticism called it "K. Chukovsky's vulgar and harmful concoctions." In the 60s, the writer worked on a Bible for children, and a book called "The Tower of Babel and Other Ancient Legends" was even published, but later the entire edition was destroyed. From the photographs on the book covers, we remember Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky as a venerable elderly writer, but he created the vast majority of children's fairy tales and poems when he was still young enough - in those years when his little muse Murochka lived next to him.

Chukovsky sometimes looked for characters for his fairy tales in life. One of the prototypes of the good doctor, for example, was a doctor from Vilnius.