The Days of My Life

K. I. Chukovsky's diary is his most candid and dramatic book, covering almost seven decades of his life. Here, the turbulent era of the early 20th century is replaced by the phantasmagoria of the twenties to sixties, filled with the endless struggle for the right to be a writer, and the terrible losses of relatives and loved ones… Chukovsky was friends with or closely acquainted with almost all the outstanding contemporaries — Gorky and Leonid Andreyev, Korolenko and Kuprin, Repin and Evreinov, Blok and Mayakovsky, Gumilyov and Mandelstam, Pasternak and Akhmatova, Zoshchenko and Tynyanov, Tvardovsky and Solzhenitsyn… All of them, as well as many other well-known figures of Russian culture, come to life on the pages of his diary — this relentless testimony of the already historical 20th century.