In this Light Church — Korney is the Hierarch: Recurring Images in the Poetry of Korney Chukovsky and His Contemporaries

• Main Author: Olga A. Simonova
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2018-06-01
• Series: Studia Litterarum
• Subjects: 20th century Russian poetry; biography; Chukovsky’s tales; poetic portrait; parody; author; storyteller; character; unknown poem by Chukovsky
• Online Access: http://studlit.ru/images/2018-3-2/Simonova.pdf

The article examines a poetic portrait of Korney Chukovsky. By introducing the figure of the storyteller into several of his tales, the author launched a tradition of representing himself as a fictional character. Readers perceived the protagonist of his poems accompanied by his portrait as an integral authorial persona. Another way of self-presentation was through identification with fairy tale characters. In the hitherto unknown and unpublished comic poem by Chukovsky, he identifies Korney (his first name) and Barmaley (a character of his fairy tale). Chukovsky’s detachment from the name Korney and the creation of the homonymous character is due to his incomplete appropriation of his pseudonym. Same tendency was typical for Chukovsky’s perception by his contemporaries who developed a playful attitude to the name “Korney” and saw it as independent from its bearer. The article examines how Chukovsky’s contemporaries co-created his fictional image. Writing parodies on his tales, contemporary poets represented Chukovsky as one of the characters of these parodies. Due to the specific nature of the genre, parodies sharpened certain traits of the poet’s character. Chukovsky’s biography also became a subject in contemporary poetry. His remarkable height stood for his own greatness and featured him as a contemporary of great people of the past. The potrayal of Chukovsky became a recurring image in the 20th century literature as it made its way from one work to another.