Bourgeois fog

   

“I’ve just been told about the Krupskaya article. Poor me, poor me! So it’s poverty again?I'm writing a response to Krupskaya. My hands are trembling. I can't sit on my chair; I have to lie down <...> [From Diary: 1901-1969: Kornei Chukovsky]

 “Chukovitis,” an article by N.K. Krupskaya that appeared in the February 1, 1928, edition of Pravda, characterized the acclaimed children’s writer, critic, and translator Kornei Chukovsky’s “The Crocodile” as “bourgeois fog,” and accused him of “distorting the facts about animals and plants” (anthropomorphism), of failing to provide a proper class perspective, and of smuggling reactionary ideas into seemingly innocent tales.  Krupskaya, the head of the Soviet GUS Commission on Children’s Literature and Lenin’s widow, also took issue with his Nekrasov studies, going so far as to maintain that “Chukovsky hated Nekrasov.”

 

It’s not like the “The Crocodile”—in which a cigarette-smoking, German-speaking crocodile strolls down the streets of St. Petersburg—was a new book. It had already been published in 1917, and had reportedly sold some 500,000 copies between then and 1928. Krupskaya’s article came at a time when the story was being prepared for reissue and her office insisted on reading all children’s books before they were released for publication. Nonetheless, as a direct consequence of the article, all of Chukovsky’s works for children were summarily banned.

“I’m forced into silence as a critic, because RAPP [Russian Association of Proletarian Writers] has taken over criticism and they judge by Party card rather than talent. They’ve made me a children’s writer. But the shameful way they’ve treated my children’s books—the persecution, the mockery, the suppression, and finally the censors’ determination to ban them—has forced me to abandon them as well.” [From Diary, 1901-1969: Kornei Chukovsky]

In a letter to the editor appearing in the March 14, 1928, edition of Pravda, Maxim Gorky took issue with Krupskaya’s criticism of Chukovsky’s work, recalling Lenin’s own favorable opinion of Chukovsky as a Nekrasov scholar. According ti Gorky, Lenin characterized Chukovsky’s scholarly work as “good and sensible.” The letter halted the baiting of Chukovsky’s book about the great poet, but “the battle over the children’s tale” went on for years.

On a personal note: When I was in college, the instructor of my introductory Russian course, who did not look unlike a young Krupskaya herself, became enraged when she found that none of her American’s pupils had ever heard of Chukovsky’s “The Crocodile,” saying something like: “Even very young Russian children know this tale by heart!” When it was pointed out to her that we were American students in our first Russian course, she said, “It makes no difference—you will learn the story in two weeks!”