7 February 1996 year
Died in Moscow Lydia Chukovskaya — writer and dissident. Daughter of Korney Chukovsky.
These days, one trial after another follows another: words are on trial; books are on trial; a collection of documents exposing the lawlessness of the trial is on trial; a cry in the square in defense of those arrested is on trial. Words are persecuted. Perhaps words are indeed actions, and devastating ones at that. (February 1968)
Born in March 1907 PetersburgAt 19, she was arrested for an anti-Soviet leaflet printed by a friend on her father's typewriter. She took the blame and spent 11 months in exile in Saratov.
Returning to Leningrad, she got a job at a children's publishing house run by Marshak. The editorial staff was disbanded in 1937 following a denunciation that "anti-Soviet types" were working there, engaging in "profound sabotage." Some of the staff were executed.
The country toiled and slept to the soporific accusations of newspapers and radio dishes. Having worked hard, people rested: their consciences were clear. Perhaps that was the most terrible thing.
That same year, her husband, a physicist, was arrested. Matvey BronsteinHe didn't admit that the Italian Marconi had stolen the idea of radio waves from the Russian scientist Popov. Chukovskaya only learned about his execution a year later. She became friends with him while waiting in prison lines. Akhmatova and became her biographer.
Anna Andreyevna read poetry in a whisper, but in her own room she didn't even dare whisper; in the middle of a conversation, she would fall silent and, gesturing at the ceiling and walls, take a scrap of paper and a pencil; then she would loudly say something social: "Would you like some tea?" or "You're very tanned," then she would fill the scrap of paper with her quick handwriting and hand it to me. I would read the poems and, having memorized them, return them to her. "It's such an early autumn today," Anna Andreyevna would say loudly and, striking a match, burn the paper over the ashtray.
In the 60s, she advocated for persecuted writers. She denounced those who supported the repressions and were outraged by the "leniency of the sentences."
And literature itself will take its revenge on you. It will sentence you to the highest measure of punishment—creative sterility. (from a letter to Sholokhov)
