High Art

Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky is known to readers primarily as a classic of children's literature. Several generations have grown up on his fairy tales, and he remains one of the most published children's writers in Russia to this day. Meanwhile, the... beloved author of "Moydodyr" and "The Fly-Tsokotuha" was also a brilliant critic, memoirist, translator, literary scholar, and linguist. Chukovsky the translator gifted the Russian reader an entire library of works from English and American literature, Chukovsky the memoirist — a magnificent gallery of portraits of his contemporaries, Chukovsky the researcher — wonderful books about the Russian language and literature that are interesting not only to specialists but also to the broadest audience, since "scientific rigor", as Chukovsky believed, does not always go hand in hand with "dense verbal thickets". In the book "Alive as Life", the author captivatingly recounts what a complex, amazing, wisely structured, and self-regulating system the Russian language is. The book "From Two to Five" is dedicated to children's word creation, its laws and secrets, which everyone who intends to write for children should know. "High Art" introduces the reader to the problems of artistic translation, which, according to the author, is not just a "craft", but a complex and inspired creative endeavor.