Victor Erlich

Michael Henry Heim

Корней Чуковский

E. T͡S. Chukovskai͡a

A perceptive literary critic, a world-famous writer of witty and playful verses for children, a leading authority on children’s linguistic creativity, and a highly skilled translator, Kornei Chukovsky was a complete man of letters. As benefactor to many writers including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, he stood for several decades at the center of the Russian literary milieu. It is no exaggeration to claim that Chukovsky knew everyone involved in shaping the course of twentieth-century Russian literature. His voluminous diary, here translated into English for the first time, begins in prerevolutionary Russia and spans nearly the entire Soviet era. It is the candid commentary of a brilliant observer who documents fifty years of Soviet literary activity and the personal predicament of the writer under a totalitarian regime. From descriptions of friendship with such major literary figures as Anna Akhmatova and Isaac Babel to accounts of the struggle with obtuse and hostile censorship, from the heartbreaking story of the death of the daughter who had inspired so many stories to candid political statements, the extraordinary diary of Kornei Chukovsky is a unique account of the twentieth-century Russian experience.

Diary, 1901-1969

Victor Erlich was born in 1914, at the threshold of what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova called "the real twentieth century," in Petrograd, a place indelibly marked by that century's violent dislocations and upheavals. His story, begun on the eve of the First World War and taking him through Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Germany, and the U. S. Army, is in many ways a memoir of that "real twentieth century," reflecting its lethal nature and shaped by the "fearful symmetry" of the age of totalitarianism. To read about Erlich's life growing up at the intersection of the century's darkest currents is to experience history firsthand from the Russian Revolution to the end of the Second World War--and to know what it truly is to be a child of the century. Throughout, despite the darkness, even the horror, of much of what he describes, the author maintains the beguiling tone and the warm manner of one who has reached the new millennium with rare and hard-won insight into the human comedy of his time.

Child of a Turbulent Century

Victor Erlich, an eminent authority on modern Slavic culture takes up this question in Modernism and Revolution, a masterful appraisal of Russian literature during its most turbulent years.

Russian Literature in Transition

Modernism and Revolution

A selection of essays about Polish literature, language, and history in honor of Wiktor Weintraub.

Victor Erlich

Books

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