ABSTRACT
K ornei Ivanovich Chukovskii (born Nikolai Vasilevich Korneichuk) was a writer, literary critic, and translator. Early in his career, Chukovskii spent a year in England, where he studied English literature and wrote about it for Russian journals and newspapers. This experience laid the foundation for his life-long interest in British and American literature and
Whitman. From 1918 on, he occupied a key position in the Anglo-American division of the World Literature publishing house and devoted much of his energy to editing and translating. Chukovskii translated works of Mark Twain, G. K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Henry Fielding, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, O. Henry, Rudyard Kipling, and many others. Much of his literary effort was devoted to children’s literature. His books of children’s poems, influenced by English nursery rhymes, have enjoyed enormous and lasting success in Russia. He also popularized English-language literature for children; his highly readable free version of Daniel Defoe is one of many examples of his work as a translator for children. Chukovskii published a number of books and articles on translation, the best known of which are Principles of Literary Translation [Printsipy khudozhestvennogo perevoda, 1919, 1920] and its enlarged and ammended versions, first published in 1930 under the title The Art of Translation [Iskusstvo perevoda], and later as A High Art [Vysokoe iskusstvo] (1941). Numerous additions and changes were introduced by Chukovskii into several subsequent versions of A High Art published between 1964 and 1968. For four years, beginning in 1965, he was an editor of an important series dedicated to the theory and practice of translation The Craft of Translation [Masterstvo perevoda]. In 1962, Chukovskii won the Lenin Prize, the highest government award, for his The Craft of Nekrasov [Masterstvo Nekrasova, 1952, 1959, 1962], and in 1969, he became the second Russian writer, after Anna Akhmatova, to be awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Oxford University.
