Statements about Chukovsky’s work by other poets. Wonderful quotes from children from the book by Korney Chukovsky

Epigraph: “If you add up all the paths of joy that Chukovsky paved to children’s hearts, you will get a road to the moon” (S. Obraztsov).

Progress of the event

Leading. Today we have gathered here to talk about one cheerful and cheerful person who loved children and dedicated many poems and fairy tales to them. So, who will we talk about today? That's right, about Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky!

* (Portrait) Tall stature, large facial features, a large curious nose, a brush of mustache, laughing light eyes and a surprisingly light gait - this is the appearance of Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky. By the way, Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky is a name he invented, a literary pseudonym. And the writer’s real name is Nikolai Vasilyevich Korneychukov.

Chukovsky lived almost his entire life in St. Petersburg. If they had told him that he would be famous as a children's writer, he would probably have been very surprised. Chukovsky became a children's poet and storyteller quite by accident. Here's how it happened.

His little son fell ill, and Korney Ivanovich took him home on the night train. The boy was capricious, moaning, crying. To somehow entertain him, his father began to tell him a fairy tale: “Once upon a time there was a crocodile. He walked the streets." The boy stopped being capricious, listened without stopping, and then calmly fell asleep. The next morning, as soon as he woke up, he immediately demanded that his father tell him yesterday’s tale again.

Perhaps this incident would not have had any consequences. But soon something similar happened to Korney Ivanovich again. He sat at his desk and worked. Suddenly he heard a loud cry. It was his youngest daughter crying. She roared in three streams, violently expressing her reluctance to wash herself. Chukovsky left the office, took the girl in his arms and unexpectedly quietly said to her:

I need to wash my face
In the mornings and evenings,
And to unclean chimney sweeps -
Shame and disgrace! Shame and disgrace!

Many years have passed since then, and the works of K.I. Chukovsky are known not only in Russia, but also in other countries.

Today we will check whether you really know his fairy tales well. I invite you on a journey.

So, let's hit the road!

Station I. Name the fairy tales

*From the letters lying in the envelope, you need to make up the names of fairy tales by K.I. Chukovsky

1. Fly Tskotukha, Telephone

2. Cockroach, Crocodile

3. Moidodyr, Barmaley

4. Miracle tree, Aibolit

5. Confusion, Fedorino grief

*Station II. Rhyming (Say the word - the teacher reads the assignment from the envelope)

In the garden somewhere in the garden
Grow up... ( Chocolates; "Miracle Tree".)

There's polish on your neck,
Right under your nose... ( Blot; "Moidodyr".)

A fly went to the market
And I bought... ( Samovar; "Fly Tsokotukha".)

The bears were driving
On the… ( Bicycle; "Cockroach".)

And again the bear:
- Oh, save the walrus!
Yesterday he swallowed
Marine... ( Hedgehog; "Telephone".)

Look into the tub -
And you will see there... ( frog; "Fedorino's grief.")

9. The little frogs came running,
Watered from... ( Ushata; "Confusion".)

I'll sew him new legs,
He will run again... (Along the path; “Aibolit”)

In Africa there are sharks, in Africa there are gorillas,
There are big evil ones in Africa... (Crocodiles; “Barmaley”)

But the Bear doesn’t want to fight,
He walks and walks, Bear, in a circle... (Swamps; “The Stolen Sun”)

*StationIII. Lost and Found - (teacher reads assignment from envelope)

Some heroes lost things. Let's remember what works we could return them to.

Shoes (“Miracle Tree”).

Saucers (“Fedorino’s grief”).

Balloon (“Cockroach”).

Thermometer (“Aibolit”).

Galoshes ("Telephone").

Soap (“Moidodyr”).

Washcloth (“Moidodyr”).

Dishes (“Fedorino’s grief”).

Samovar (“Fly-Tsokotukha”, “Fedorino’s grief”).

Irons (“Fedorino’s grief”).

*Station IV. Crossword (Write in the characters whose words these are)

Go ahead, clubfoot, scratch the crocodile,
Tear it into pieces, snatch the sun from its mouth (hare)

Come, cockroaches, I’ll treat you to tea (fly)

Wait, don’t rush, I’ll swallow you in no time (cockroach)

Oh, you, my poor orphans, my irons and frying pans (Fedora)

I forgive Fyodorushka, treat him to sweet tea,
Eat, eat, Fedora Egorovna! (samovar)

Oops, I was bitten by a wasp! (fox)

Where is the killer? Where is the villain? I'm not afraid of his claws! (mosquito)

Hey, firefighters, run, put out the blue sea! (whale)

I'll sew him new legs.
He will run along the path again (Dr. Aibolit)

*Station V. Exhibition of drawings (1 - guess the fairy tale from children’s drawings; 2 - assemble a picture from pieces)

*Station VI. Riddle (Riddles are printed on pieces of paper, one of the team members reads the riddle, the other gives the answer)

Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky was a very hardworking person. “Always,” he wrote, “no matter where I was: on the tram, in line for bread, in the dentist’s waiting room, I wrote riddles for children so as not to waste time.”

Book "25 riddles"

Date of Birth:

19.03.1882

Date of death:

28.10.1969

Occupation:

Journalist

Literary critic

Literary critic

Translator

Publicist

Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky - Russian Soviet poet, publicist, literary critic, translator and literary critic, children's writer, journalist. Father of writers Nikolai Korneevich Chukovsky and Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya.

Russian conversation is dear to me -
In it, loving your own mind,
Nobody listens to the neighbor
And everyone listens to themselves...

Oh, this is not an easy job -
Drag a hippopotamus out of the swamp!

Scoundrels are, first of all, fools. Being kind is much more fun, entertaining and ultimately more practical.

And such rubbish
All day:
Ding-dee-lazy,
Ding-dee-lazy,
Ding-dee-lazy!
Either the seal will call, or the deer.

Read what the Americans write about Tolstoy, or the French about Chekhov, or the British about Maupassant - and you will understand that the spiritual rapprochement of nations is a conversation between the deaf and dumb.

My phone rang.
- Who's talking?
- Elephant.
- Where?
- From a camel.
- What do you need?
- Chocolate.
- For whom?
- For my son.
- How much should I send?
- Yes, about five pounds
Or six:
He can't eat anymore
He's still small for me!

For some reason, a plenum on children's literature is being held. I won't perform. If I spoke, I would turn to the young poets with a single question: why are you so untalented? This speech would be very short - but I have nothing more to say.

August 1, 1925 I was in the city yesterday on Klyachko’s call. It turns out that “Mukha Tsokotukha” has been banned in Gublitt. The "cockroach" was hanging by a thread - they defended it. But “Mukha” could not be defended. So, my most cheerful, most musical, most successful work is destroyed only because it mentions a name day!! Comrade Bystrova, in a very pleasant voice, explained to me that the mosquito is a prince in disguise, and Mukha is a princess. This made even me angry. This way you can see a prince in disguise in Karl Marx! I argued with her for an hour - but she stood her ground. Klyachko came, he also pressed Bystrova, she did not move one iota and began to claim that the drawings were indecent: the mosquito was standing too close to the fly, and they were flirting. As if there is a child who is so depraved that the proximity of a fly to a mosquito will cause him to have frivolous thoughts!

Am I alienated from trends in my children's poems? Not at all! For example, the “Moidodyr” trend is a passionate call for little ones to be clean and to wash themselves. I think that in a country where just recently they said about anyone brushing their teeth, “Gee, gee, you see, you’re a Jew!”, this trend is worth all the others.

Writing talent consists of the ability to choose the right word and put it in the right place.

Translation is a self-portrait of the translator.

Let's take the verb to die. It’s one thing - he died, another thing - he passed away into eternity, passed away, another thing - he died, or fell asleep forever, or fell into a deep sleep, or went to his forefathers, passed away, and a completely different thing - he died, died, died, fell, bent, died, died, gave oak, played in the box, etc. Academician Shcherba divided the language into four stylistic layers: Solemn - face, taste. Neutral - face, there is. Familiar - mug, gobble up. Vulgar - muzzle, eat.

Who is told to tweet -
Don't purr
Who is ordered to purr -
Don't tweet!

When you are released from prison and you go home, these minutes are worth living for!

Freedom of speech is needed by a very limited circle of people, and the majority, even intellectuals... do their job without it.

... To be an unoriginal writer is to be a fraud. Talent will look at any thing - and in each he will find a new feature, a new side, he will experience an old feeling in a new way. Therefore, an untalented writer who comes into the world only to set out rules in poetic form can sit and not fiddle. Gg. readers knew this before him. Only talent can and should undertake copywriting. Vulgarity and boredom are bad things - we will listen to this from Chekhov, and if Mitnitsky undertakes to promote the same things, then it will seem to us that he is laughing at us, mocking us. After all, the whole job of an artist is to overcome the habit.<...>The whole job of the artist is to tell me about a well-known, familiar thing so that it seems to me that I am only meeting it for the first time, so that all my previous, ordinary ideas about the thing do not obscure its true meaning and significance. A person gets used to everything, adapts to everything - throw away the consequences of these habits and adaptations, and you will make our hearts tremble from the true knowledge of things, from the so-called artistic feeling. Only an artist knows how to discard these ordinary, habitual ideas, or, better said, he does not know how not to discard them.

The mother of the future writer is a simple peasant woman from the Poltava province, Ekaterina Osipovna Korneychukova, who gave birth to the then student Emmanuil Solomonovich Levenson. Korney Ivanovich spent his childhood in the city of Odessa, where his mother was forced to move. The reason for this decision was that the writer’s father left her as a woman “out of her circle.”

Korney Ivanovich’s first publications were published in the Odessa News newspaper, which was facilitated by his friend Zhabotinsky. Then the works - articles, essays, stories and others - simply “flowed like a river,” and already in 1917 the writer began a large work on Nekrasov’s work.

Then Korney Ivanovich took many other literary figures as the subject of study, and already in 1960 the writer began one of the main works of his life - a special retelling of the Bible.

The writer's main museum currently operates in Peredelkino, near Moscow, where Korney Ivanovich ended his life on October 28, 1969 as a result of viral hepatitis. In Peredelkino, Chukovsky’s dacha is located not far from the place where Pasternak lived.

Chukovsky's creativity

For the younger generation, Korney Ivanovich wrote a large number of interesting and entertaining fairy tales, the most famous of which are the following works: “Crocodile”, “Cockroach”, “Moidodyr”, “Tsokotukha Fly”, “Barmaley”, “Fedorino’s Mountain”, “Stolen the sun", "Aibolit", "Toptygin and the moon", "Confusion", "telephone" and "The Adventures of Bibigon".

The following are considered the most famous children's poems by Chukovsky: “Glutton”, “The Elephant Reads”, “Zakalyaka”, “Piglet”, “Hedgehogs Laugh”, “Sandwich”, “Fedotka”, “Turtle”, “Pigs”, “Vegetable Garden”, “ Camel" and many others. The remarkable thing is that almost all of them have not lost their relevance and vitality to this day, and therefore are often included in almost all collections of books intended for the younger generation.

Korney Ivanovich also wrote several stories. For example, “Sunny” and “Silver Coat of Arms”.

The writer was keenly interested in the issues and problems of children's education. It is to him that readers owe the appearance of an interesting work on preschool education, “From Two to Five.”

The following articles by Korney Ivanovich are also interesting for literary scholars - “The History of Aibolit”, “How “The Tsokotukha Fly” was Written”, “About Sherlock Holmes”, “Confessions of an Old Storyteller”, “Chukokkala’s Page” and others.

V. Berestov

Doctor of Philological Sciences, laureate of the Lenin Prize, awarded to him for the book “The Mastery of Nekrasov,” Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky, returning from England in 1962, began to sometimes appear in a purple robe of medieval cut and a black cap with a flat top. He was now an honorary doctor of letters from Oxford University. Kolya Korneychukov, the “illegitimate” son of a Ukrainian peasant woman and a St. Petersburg student, expelled from the gymnasium at one time due to a circular about “cook’s children,” wearing the same robe that Turgenev wore before him.
The mother's surname (Korneichukova) became the son's name: Korney Chukovsky. It first appeared under an article about art in Odessa News (1901). Chukovsky was then 19 years old. He graduated from high school in absentia and became self-taught in English. Chukovsky composed poems as a child. And then he experienced the strongest influence of Chekhov - not yet on the literary style, but on the lifestyle: firm rules of behavior, hatred of vulgarity, philistinism, democracy, everyday work, creative communication with people. This influence bizarrely crossed with the influence of the American democratic poet Walt Whitman, whose “Leaves of Grass” the young Chukovsky obtained from a foreign sailor in the port of Odessa.
Then newspaper work, a trip to London (1903), a move to St. Petersburg (1905), editing the satirical magazine "Signal", a trial for lese majeste, release on bail (1906), articles in magazines, lectures, debates, close acquaintances, or even friendship with outstanding figures of Russian culture, the first book “From Chekhov to the Present Day” (1908), which made Chukovsky an authoritative critic, then the first articles about children’s reading, about “the propaganda of reactionary ideas corrupting youth,” “sloppy, philistine, vulgar" children's literature of those years. And in 1911, an unforgettable night conversation at a well in Kuokkala with Korolenko, when it was decided that Chukovsky’s life’s work was not the study of beauty. He became a researcher, a collector of Nekrasov's unpublished works, and the first editor of the collected works of the great poet, freed from censorship (1920). “Chukovsky gave the country,” wrote Yu. N. Tynyanov, “more than 15,000 new, unknown poems (i.e. lines. - V. B.) of Nekrasov.”
K.I. Lozovskaya, Chukovsky’s secretary, writes that Chukovsky all his life “as if he held several threads in his hands and either pulled out one after another, or in parallel pulled out two or three at once, or left them alone for a long time.” Here are the dates of the first and last publications of his diverse works.
Chekhov: the first article about him – 1904, “The Book about Chekhov” – 1969. Whitman: first translations – 1905, book “My Whitman” – 1969. The thread runs from the first translations to the latest edition of the theoretical book on translation, “High Art” (1968). Children: article “Save the Children” - 1909, 21st edition of “From Two to Five” - 1970 (a year after the writer’s death). Nekrasov: article “We and Nekrasov” - 1912, 4th edition of the book “Nekrasov’s Mastery” - 1966. Chukovsky’s linguistic interests found completion in the book “Alive as Life” (1966), and his literary portraits in the memoir prose “Contemporaries” (1967). These are the main threads of his creative life. It is very interesting to follow their movement and interweaving, but now we are occupied by another thread, connected with others, but the brightest - the fairy-tale thread of Chukovsky’s children’s poetry.
The scientist and the poet are inextricably fused in Chukovsky. “Scientific calculations,” he wrote to Gorky about the critic’s work, “must be translated into emotions.” This is the key to Chukovsky's work. Expressions that become emotions, a thought that becomes a feeling. He begins as a scientist and ends as a poet.
He became a scientist at the age of 25, and a true poet in his mid-thirties. This sharply contradicts the well-known fact that a poet is formed earlier than a scientist.
True, even in his youth, along with lyrics, Chukovsky tried to compose for children:

Like the bays of Barakhty
Two yachts were sailing...

And in a satirical poem of 1906 about the tsarist ministers, he even broke out the “Korneev stanza” (it was highlighted and studied by Y. Satunovsky):

Goremykin said to Aladin:
“I’ll crush you like a reptile.”
And Aladin repeated to Goremykin:
“I’ll throw you out, Goremykina.”
And Stolypin,
Vigilant,
Didn't say anything...

Such stanzas with non-rhyming lines at the end flashed 26 times in “Crocodile”; they were also included in other fairy tales; Chukovsky also has short poems, entirely consisting of one “root stanza”.
But “Crocodile” was preceded by a period of unconscious apprenticeship, a period hidden from us, when Chukovsky, as he admitted, “little by little, after many failures and vacillations... came to the conviction that the only compass on this path (i.e. children’s poetry. – V.B.) for all writers – strong and weak – is folk poetry.”
As if in preparation for this, Chukovsky studied Russian folklore, which helped him develop a “healthy normative taste,” and the poetics of English children’s folklore; he constantly enjoyed the masterpieces of Russian classical poetry, without which, according to him, he would not have written a single line of his “Crocodiles.” " and "Moidodyrov". For him, the school of literary taste was also the poems of modern poets in the author’s reading: Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Khlebnikov...
“Poetry for children,” he wrote at the end of his life, “is such a difficult, such an artistically responsible genre that one had to prepare for many years to master it.” The children's poet-storyteller developed in the daily work of a literary critic and, very importantly, in the leisure hours he spent with children.
Here is a critic writing another article. Maybe it was an article “On Children's Language” (1914) with the appeal: “I ask, I beg everyone who is in one way or another close to children to inform me for further research of all sorts of original children’s words, sayings, figures of speech...” And A baby looks in the window, shows him a reed and selflessly screams:

Uncle gave me a pike!
Uncle gave me a pike!

“But,” recalls Chukovsky in “From Two to Five,” obviously his delight went far beyond the limits of human words.” The song sounded like this:

Ekikiki didi da!
Ekikiki didi da!

The kid ran away, and Chukovsky began to study such “ekikiks”. At first he decided that “the child freed his song from meaning, as from an extra burden,” but years later he realized that it was not the song that was freed from meaning, but rather from the difficult sounds that prevented the child from reveling in the poetry. And finally, it turned out that these are “impromptus, born of joy”, “not so much songs as (subtle cries or “chants”, that they “are not composed, and, so to speak, are danced”, that “their rhythm is trochee”, they are “short, no longer than a couplet,” “shouted out several times,” and “infectious for other kids.” And the main thing is that kids need a special verse, which is not written for adults, that “the closer our poems are to ekikiks, the stronger little ones will love them”, that “each verse in ekikiks is an independent phrase” and even that, “in essence, Pushkin’s “Saltan” and Ershov’s “The Little Humpbacked Horse” in their structure represent a whole chain of ekikiks.”
And when Gorky ordered Chukovsky (amazing insight!) for a fairy tale in the spirit of “The Little Humpbacked Horse” for the future almanac “Yolka”, believing that one such thing was worth a dozen accusatory articles against children’s poetry of that time, it turned out that Chukovsky already had a similar fairy tale. Once on the train, while entertaining his sick son, he began to compose it out loud, and in the morning the boy remembered what he had heard from the first to the last word. The fairy tale, like a knife through butter, entered the children's environment and, having appeared in print ("Crocodile" was published as a supplement to "Niva" in the summer of 1917), to the horror of its author, immediately and forever eclipsed the fame and popularity of Chukovsky the critic:

Once upon a time there lived a Crocodile,
He walked the streets
I smoked cigarettes
He spoke Turkish.

“Crocodile”, already in Soviet times, was followed, in parallel with articles on the child’s psyche, by fairy tales for the little ones: “The Cockroach” and “Moidodyr” (1922), “The Tsokotukha Fly” (1923), “Barmaley” (1925), “Telephone”, “Confusion”, “Miracle Tree” and “Fedorino’s Mountain” (1926), “Stolen Sun” and “Aibolit” (1935), “Bibigon” (1945), “Thanks to Aibolit” (1955), “ A fly in the bathhouse" (1969), translations of English children's songs, jokes, riddles. Unlike The Crocodile, which was intended more for five- to seven-year-olds, these tales were created for ages two to five and were designed to be read in front of many children.
Chukovsky's activities as a Soviet children's writer are not limited to preschool age. Younger schoolchildren are treated to an innovative retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Perseus, retellings of “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” by Raspe, “Robinson Crusoe” by Defoe, translations of “Fairy Tales” by Kipling, “The Prince and the Pauper” and “Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain, “The Little Rag” by Greenwood, for teenagers - the autobiographical story “Silver Coat of Arms”, an anthology of Russian classical poems “Lyrics”. They can also recommend many of Chukovsky’s literary works. It is not for nothing that memories of Zhitkov were published in Pioneer, and he introduced sixth grade students to the memories of Gorky in schools. And the books “Contemporaries” and “My Whitman” will be loved by high school students.
Only in his youth did Chukovsky occasionally publish his lyric poems, and in 1946 he published the wonderful “I never knew that it was so joyful to be an old man.” And yet, like a true lyricist, he was able to express himself in fairy tales for children in all the richness of his personality, his diverse interests, tastes, and passions.
Chukovsky the critic, according to the observation of M. Petrovsky, the author of “The Book about Chukovsky,” always looked for writers’ favorite key words and from them he guessed the innermost personality traits of each. This is what he noticed from Chekhov: “Of all these “usually”, “almost always”, “in general”, “mostly” it is easy to see how much soul he devoted to the science of human studies, which for him was more precious than all other sciences... it was all his joy.” Approximately the same words: “everyone” and “everyone”, “everyone” and “always” were key in Chukovsky himself; they permeate all his “adult” books and every children’s fairy tale. And so, moving from literary studies to human studies, he discovered that “there are millions of creatures among us who, every single one, passionately love poetry, revel in them, and cannot do without them. These are children, especially small ones.”
He had fun writing “From Two to Five” because “childhood is radiant and every contact with it is happiness.” When he says the word “child” in this book, he is happy that it means “all the children in the whole world.” Analyzing folk inverted poems (a term introduced into science by Chukovsky), incredible stories, ridiculous absurdities, like “A village was driving past a peasant,” he notes the “worldwide attraction” of children to them, and for the first time establishes that these poems not only amuse, but also instruct : “any deviation from the norm strengthens the child in the norm, and he values ​​his firm orientation in the world even higher.”
How interesting it is for Chukovsky to note that “for every child from two to five, the life of all humanity begins, at best, with his grandfather,” and that “the child wants to be the Columbus of all the Americas and rediscover each one for himself,” and that “he is his own Andersen, Grimm and Ershov, and every play of his is a dramatization of a fairy tale, which he immediately creates for himself, animating all objects at will,” and that the fairy-tale perception of the world for children is “an everyday norm”:

– Does the alarm clock never sleep?
– Doesn’t the needle hurt your stocking?

Chukovsky himself did not notice how he became a teacher and psychologist. And only at the request of Makarenko he enriched the new editions of “From Two to Five” with pedagogical advice.
The norm is for everyone. In his attraction to the norm, he goes so far as to use the expression “normative taste”, contrary to the ancient saying: “There is no arguing about tastes.”
And the bearer of the norm for him is the people, thousands of years of folk experience. This is not just a matter of folklore: “The Russian people (that is, the Russian peasants, because the people at that time were almost entirely peasants) dictated all the best children’s books to their brilliant writers.” And Chukovsky specifies: “All of Pushkin’s fairy tales, every single one, were peasant tales both in vocabulary and diction.” But how can we forget about the people who moved to the cities, if not enrich our tales with the rhythms and techniques of urban, street folklore!
For Chukovsky, the people are a living, precise concept. We adults are “only mediators between children and the people.” Correcting the child’s mistake, “we act on behalf of the people as their representatives, their representatives.” With our “this is how it should be”, “you can’t say this”, we “declare to the child the thousand-year-old will of the people.”
The people are a teacher both for the child and for the children's poet. And in a letter to Marshak, Chukovsky says that if we were to make a report on Soviet children's poetry, then he, Chukovsky, would talk about its universality, about its universality, for this is his favorite, cherished topic.
And who else but Chukovsky could tell the children such a riddle about the echo:

I bark with everyone
Dog,
I'm howling
With every owl,
And every song of yours
I'm with you
I sing.
When is the steamer in the distance?
A bull will roar on the river,
I cry too:
"Uh-oh!"

Here we take only one property of the echo - the ability to respond to everyone. “With every dog”, “with every owl”, “every song”... This is already all-encompassing, universal, and Chukovsky emphasizes this again and again. The child’s attention is focused on one property, although in the folk riddle about the echo there are several of them: “He lives without a body, speaks without a tongue, no one has seen him, but everyone hears him.”
In the folk riddle, the echo is given in the third linden; in Chukovsky it speaks in the first person, and Pushkin addresses it in the first person:

Does a beast roar in the deep forest?
Is the horn blowing, is the thunder roaring,
Is the maiden behind the hill singing?
For every sound
Your response in the empty air
You will give birth suddenly.

It is obvious that these works, folk, classical and children's, are somewhat related. Here the fusion of individual style with folk style, characteristic of Chukovsky, manifested itself - a quality that he sought and emphasized in Pushkin, Nekrasov, Ershov, Krylov. Even a small riddle, not to mention fairy tales, corresponds to his commandments for children's poets, the poetics he developed for small children.
Poems should be graphic, rich in visual images - this is the first commandment. The riddle can be illustrated with four drawings: 1) a dog with a kennel, 2) an owl in the forest, 3) a singing child, 4) a steamboat on the river.
Images must change very quickly (second commandment). It would seem that this property alone - saturation with visual images - is enough for a children's poet. “Is it possible to demand,” asks Chukovsky, “that every episode depicted in a poem with graphic clarity should at the same time be perceived by readers as a ringing song, prompting them to joyfully dance?”
And he immediately demands this in his third commandment (lyricism), supporting it with examples from his own practice: all his fairy tales consist “of chains of lyrical songs - each with its own rhythm, with its own emotional coloring.” This riddle about the echo is like one link in Chukovsky’s verse, from such links all his fairy tales are woven.
The fourth commandment is also observed: mobility and changeability of rhythm. The first part of the verse is permeated with internal rhymes, while the second part does not.
Increased musicality of poetic speech (the fifth commandment) is in the utmost euphony, in “maximum smoothness.” Not a single consonant junction. Such lines that Chukovsky hated, such as “suddenly became sad” (“barbaric suddenly - vzgr - backbreaking work for a child’s larynx”) are impossible here. In a riddle with 57 vowels, there are only 58 consonants: a rare euphony.
The sixth commandment: “rhymes in poems for children should be placed at the closest distance from one another.” “With every dog”, “I howl - with every owl - every - your - you - I sing” - there are almost no unrhymed words. Much closer! And in fairy tales, the rhymes are sometimes so close that the subject immediately rhymes with the predicate (“the blanket - ran away”), the definition with the defined (“unclean - chimney sweeps”), a common noun with a proper noun (“Karakula shark”), a line with a line without a single non-rhyming word:

And aren't you ashamed?
Aren't you offended?
You are toothy
You are fanged
And the little one
Bowed down
And the booger
Submit!

Maybe that’s why, no, no, a “root stanza” with non-rhyming lines will appear, so that this abundance of sound repetitions does not suddenly become tiresome.
The rhyme in the riddle carries the main meaning of the phrase - this is the seventh commandment. Moreover, rhyme is an echo in itself.
The eighth commandment: a line must be an independent organism, a complete syntactic whole, like lines or couplets in folk songs and in Pushkin’s fairy tales.

I bark with every dog
I howl with every owl...

But there are also lines (this is extremely rare in Chukovsky) that do not form a syntactic whole:

When the steamer is in the distance,
A bull will roar on the river...

Yu. Uzbyakov. Illustration for K. Chukovsky’s fairy tale “Moidodyr”

But the ninth commandment was fully observed - not to clutter up the verses with adjectives. They simply aren't here. And there are very few of them in fairy tales. They are either simple (“small”, “huge”), or highly emotional (“poor”, “scary”), or deliberately attract the child’s attention to those properties of objects that correspond to the pedagogical task of the fairy tale (“fragrant soap”, “fluffy towel " in "Moidodyr"), or moral assessments understandable to a child ("ugly, bad, greedy Barmaley") or priceless finds ("ruddy moon", "liquid-legged little bug"). Verbs, not properties, predominate; everything is manifested in action.
The predominant rhythm (tenth commandment) should be trochee. The riddle was written by amphibrachium. But in all Chukovsky’s fairy tales (except for “Bibigon”) and in other riddles, the trochee reigns over other meters, the rhythm of “The Little Humpbacked Horse”, however, in the most varied variations.
According to the twelfth commandment, poems must be playful. The riddle is the game. It is also felt in all these “oh”, “oooh” - the echo plays with the children.
The Twelfth Commandment: children's poems - and poetry for adults.
The Thirteenth Commandment is dialectical, just as the development of a child is dialectical. It is necessary to gradually abolish the remaining commandments (except the twelfth). We are talking about the gradual verse education of a child (a concept introduced by Chukovsky), about instilling in children a taste for poetry forever, preparing them, deviating from the strict rules of “preschool” poetics, to perceive the masterpieces of world poetry. This is what Chukovsky himself did in Bibigon. The images have become more complex. Bibigon is both a hero and a braggart, he defeats a dragon on the Moon, and dives into an inkwell from a bee. And the feelings in “Bibigon” are more complicated. There is even a feeling that Chukovsky in “My Whitman” calls new for all humanity: a feeling of the limitless breadth of the universe, a feeling of space. Here is Whitman in his translation:

I visit the gardens of the planets and see if the fruits are good,
I look at quintillions of ripe ones and quintillions of unripe ones...

Bibigon finds himself in this garden of planets:

Wonderful garden
Where the stars are like grapes.
It hangs in such clusters.
What is inevitably on the go
No, no, and you’ll tear off a star.

And the riddle about the echo itself, as it were, prepares the child for the perception of such verses, when the same amphibrach expresses unchildish feelings:

Oh my friend, tell me what’s wrong with you.
I've known for a long time what's wrong with me.

And the image of the same echo will tragically deepen:

You listen to the roar of thunder
And the voice of the storm and the waves,
And the cry of rural shepherds -
And you send an answer;
You don't have any feedback... That's it
And you, poet!

And another requirement, characteristic specifically of Soviet children's poetry: “When we write, we imagine ourselves on the stage in front of many little listeners” (almost the same words he said about Mayakovsky in the early 20s: “When Mayakovsky composes, he imagines himself in front of huge crowds of listeners"). This means that you need to coordinate your creativity with the “mass psyche of children”, make the poems scenic, cinematic (the first edition of “Moidodyr” had the subtitle “Cinematography for Children”). I can vividly imagine how one can read a riddle about an echo, or rather, play in front of children the charming image of an omnipresent wizard who, like a child, enthusiastically barks, howls, sings along, and teases the ships.

M. Miturich. Illustration for K. Chukovsky’s fairy tale “Bibigon”

The commandments for all poets, strong and weak, are universal. But here are the tasks that Chukovsky set for himself: to create a children's epic, to populate fairy tales with crowds of characters, to come up with heroes who, emerging from the book, will become eternal companions of childhood, like Aibolit, Bibigon, like relatives of the folk “beech” and “bearded goat” , which scares the guys, Barmaley and Moidodyr (“beech for sluts”), to use all kinds of poetic meters, coming from folklore, and from classics, and from modern poetry.
Chukovsky’s countless “all”, “everyone”, “always”, which are instrumental in his articles, express not only thought, but also feeling, the joy of discovery, knowledge... They contain the key to his fairy tales, to their inexhaustible optimism. “Every sincere children's fairy tale is always born of optimism,” he writes in “Confessions of an Old Storyteller.” “She is alive with a blessed, childlike faith in the victory of good over evil.”
In Chukovsky's fairy tales, EVERYTHING concerns EVERYONE. If there is trouble, then it is universal, right up to the end of the world (“Stolen Sun”), and if there is joy, then it is universal, from it oranges ripen on aspen trees, and roses grow on birch trees (“Joy”).

V. Konashevich. Illustration for the fairy tale by K. Chukovsky “The Clapping Fly”

In “Crocodile” everyone mocks the monster walking around the city, “everyone trembles with fear, everyone squeals with fear” when it swallows the watchdog and the policeman, and then “everyone rejoices and dances, kissing dear Vanya.” The crocodile, returning to Africa, gives everyone a gift, and one gift to everyone at once - a New Year tree, and everyone dances, even the perches in the seas. All the animals attack the city, where their relatives are languishing in the zoo, “and they will eat all the people and all the children without pity.” And Vanya Vasilchikov saves not just Lyalechka from them, but all of them, releases all the animals, and “the people, the animals, and the reptiles are happy, the camels are happy, and the buffaloes are happy.”
In “The Cockroach” everyone “eats and laughs, chews gingerbread, everyone submits to insignificance, “in every den and in every cave they curse the evil glutton.” The sparrow saves everyone and everyone is happy: “I’m glad, the whole animal family is happy.”
In “The Cluttering Fly,” everyone is celebrating the fly’s name day, in front of everyone (everyone is chickening out!) a spider kills a fly, and a mosquito saves it, and everyone immediately begins to dance at their wedding.

Yu. Vasnetsov. Illustration for K. Chukovsky’s fairy tale “The Stolen Sun”

In these three tales, it is not the sun that is eclipsed, as in “The Stolen Sun,” and it is not diseases that have to be treated, as in “Aibolit.” Here an eclipse falls on everyone, an epidemic of cowardice engulfs everyone.
Chukovsky the poet, together with young readers, resolves the same conflict that Chukovsky the scientist had to face more than once. In his articles, concepts such as “huge, mass, thousand-voice judgment” (about Chekhov), “mass blindness, hypnosis, epidemic”, and “general herd error” constantly flash across his articles. It’s not for nothing that one of his early articles was called “Save the Children”; it’s not for nothing that he explores the mass reading of children at that time and, in articles about Charskaya and Verbitskaya, dispels the general eclipse of young minds. Disdain for children's creativity and disrespect for the child's spiritual world also seemed to him a mass delusion, an eclipse of minds. And in the article “Nat Pinkerton”, long before writing his fairy tales, he was the only one of the critics (which earned the recognition of Leo Tolstoy), rebelled against the “mass herd taste”, against the “bulk wholesale goods” of the then cinema and commercial literature, contrasting them with “cathedral creativity ”, to which “the people of the whole world were called”, “the global solid man”, who created Olympus, and Colosseums, and heroes, and Prometheans, and fairies, and genies.
There is no doubt that it was with these feelings that Chukovsky set out to create his epic, in order to instill in children a “healthy, normative”, i.e. folk, taste and to discourage them from the taste of the philistine, vulgar. The child easily puts himself in Vanya Vasilchikov’s place. Sparrow and Mosquito destroy not only the villain Spider and Cockroach, but also instantly deal with universal, herd fear, caring only for themselves, and immediately universal happiness ensues. The conflict between the people and the herd - this, it turns out, is what content fairy tales can contain, completely accessible to the understanding of a small child. (In the writer’s archive there is the following entry about “The Cockroach”: “This is Gogol’s “The Inspector General” for five-year-olds. The same theme: about panic, instilling in cowards that the pathetic pygmy is a giant. To raise children to an adult topic - that was my task.” )

V. Konashevich. Illustration for K. Chukovsky’s fairy tale “Fedorino’s grief”

The same big tasks exist in other fairy tales that affirm the norm. In “Confusion,” everyone swapped their voices, but, having survived a formidable, albeit comic disaster—the sea caught fire—they joyfully returned to normal. In “Moidodyr” all things have run away from the slob, everyone and everything is busy with only one thing - to get him to reform. In "Fedora's Mountain" all the dishes and utensils run away from the careless housewife, and everyone joyfully forgives her when she comes to her senses. Fulfillment of the norm (order in the house, washing) is glorified as a holiday:

Let's wash, splash,
Swim, dive, tumble
In a tub, a trough, a tub,
In a river, in a stream, in the ocean, -
And in the bath, and in the bathhouse,
Anytime and anywhere -
Eternal glory to the water!

A frank edification that became a hymn. It is not enough to teach a child to wash himself. It is also necessary that throughout his life, for the thousandth time, he rejoices at the norm.
In “Telephone”, everyone who is not too lazy calls the unfortunate storyteller. This is Chukovsky’s only fairy tale that is crowned not by a holiday, but by hard work:

Oh, this is not an easy job -
Drag a hippopotamus out of the swamp!

V. Konashevich. Illustration for K. Chukovsky’s poem “Telephone”

Still, it’s fortunate that he didn’t turn off the phone, otherwise he couldn’t have saved someone from certain death.
And in “Barmalei” death threatens not only the mischievous Tanya and Vanya, but also Aibolit himself. The Crocodile swallows Barmaley, but the sources of joy would not have been completely exhausted if the villain, ready to devour any child, had not repented and crawled out of the Crocodile’s mouth as a cheerful, good-natured man, ready to feed every single child with all kinds of sweets for free.
In the “Miracle Tree,” mom and dad plant a magical tree with shoes not only for their child, but also for all the “poor and barefoot” children, they are all invited to it, like to a Christmas tree.
Pushkin, analyzing the features of Russian folk songs, noted in his notes the following feature: “ladder of feelings.” Along this ladder, experiencing now horror, now delight, now funny, now terrible adventures, the child rises to the highest emotions of sympathy, compassion, and therefore to a common celebration of unity and goodness.
There are very complex psychological moves in these seemingly simple tales. The Gorilla in “Barmalei” first brings trouble to naughty children, and then she herself brings the Crocodile to their aid. So judge whether she is a positive image or a negative one. And in “Crocodile” the animals offer Vanya Vasilchikov, in exchange for Lyalechka, to free the zoo prisoners. Vanya only dreams of this, but without desecrating the feat with a cunning deal, he first defeats them, and then releases the prisoners. In “The Stolen Sun”, Bear, the only one who can fight the Crocodile, is persuaded by everyone to perform the feat for a long time; The hare finally succeeds, and even then the Bear, before crushing the Crocodile’s sides, tries to reason with him. And although the fairy tale in its verse and set of characters (except for the Crocodile, and even that one is in popular prints, where Baba Yaga fights with him) is very close to Russian folklore, here too, not only in the verse, but also in the plot, and in the images - - a fusion of individual and folk style.
“Chain of adventures”, “chain of lyrical songs”, “string of images” - these are Chukovsky’s terms. He uses them when talking about Chekhov, Whitman, Nekrasov, and Repin’s painting “The Procession.” These chains of images, chains of songs and chains of adventures in fairy tales intertwine, merge, and overlap one another. Other images flow from fairy tale to fairy tale: there are crocodiles in “The Cockroach”, and in “The Stolen Sun”, and in “Moidodyr”, and in “Telephone”, and in “Barmalei”, and in “Confusion”. Moidodyr will be remembered in “Telephone” and in “Bibigon”. And one of the bunnies on the tram (“Cockroach”), having fallen under the tram, becomes the patient of the good doctor (“Aibolit”). This cyclization, as Tynyanov noted, anticipated the poetics of cartoons.
And since the child constantly demands to reread his favorite fairy tale, the chains and lines eventually turn into round dances. They just nailed the Moon to the heavens (“Cockroach”) and again – “the bears were riding a bicycle.”
Chukovsky would not be Chukovsky if, speaking about everyone, he had not tried to portray everyone. Sometimes the characters only have time to flash (“Like our Myron has a crow sitting on his nose”), but this is already enough for the artist to draw them. Sometimes a character’s personality is also conveyed by rhythm:

The irons run and quack,
They jump over puddles, over puddles.

And - with completely different intonations:

So the kettle runs after the coffee pot,
Chatting, chattering, rattling...

And others also manage to shout something alone or in chorus, or even pronounce an entire monologue. The characters in “Telephone” were especially lucky: they managed to talk to their heart’s content, each at their own pace. Chukovsky's tales are filled to the brim with arias, duets, and choral exclamations. From their pages there are pleas for help: “Help! Save! Have mercy!”, angry reproaches thunder: “Shame and disgrace!”, and the victorious magnifications are completely deafening: “Glory!” or “Long live!” All this on the move, in action, in dance: “He ran up to me, dancing, and kissed me, and spoke.” And none of the characters appear only in verbal descriptions. Give the kids action.
Strings of characters are Chukovsky’s favorite technique. In “Barmalei”, in addition to Tanya - Vanya, Barmaley, Aibolit, Crocodile, there is also a daddy and mommy, and a Rhinoceros, and elephants, and a Gorilla, and a Karakula shark, and a Hippopotamus, and, finally, a crowd of children whom the former cannibal craves feed sweets. In “Fedora Mountain” there are more than 30 characters (if you count, say, the irons as one person), and in “Crocodile” there are many more of them.
But a string of characters is not an end in itself. While working on “Aibolit,” Chukovsky rhymed a string of patients with a string of diseases:

And the goat came to Aibolit:
“My eyes hurt.”

And the fox had a lower back, the owl had a head, the canary had a neck, the tap dancer had consumption, the hippopotamus had hiccups, the rhinoceros had heartburn, etc. All this was thrown away.
The tone of the tale was determined by the following lines:

And the fox came to Aibolit:
“Oh, I was bitten by a wasp!”
And Barbos came to Aibolit:
“A chicken pecked me on the nose!”

They are given preference because the number of images here has doubled, the story has become more dynamic (more verbs, not only “came”, but also “bitten” and “pecked”) - qualities, as the author notes, “so attractive to the child’s mind.” And most importantly, he writes, “there is an offender and there is an offended person. A victim of evil who needs to be helped.” He abandons the string of images in order to quickly begin the story of how a selfless doctor overcomes all obstacles on the way to the suffering:

Oh, if I don't get there.
If I get lost on the way,
What will happen to them, to the sick?
With my forest animals!

V. Suteev. Illustration for the fairy tale by K. Chukovsky “Aibolit”

Aibolit saves himself only to save others. Children who listen to the fairy tale are given the opportunity to experience the highest feelings of heroism and self-sacrifice.
The prototype of Aibolit is the character of Hugh Lofting’s prose fairy tale Doctor Dolittle. Chukovsky has already enriched his retelling from English with new realities and gave the hero a name that sounds like a call to salvation. Aibolit in verse is not Dolittle at all. The fairy tale, with its purely folk intonations and repetitions, has such a generalizing power that you remember, for example, the humanist philosopher Albert Schweitzer. It was at the time when “Aibolit” was written that Schweitzer selflessly treated the suffering poor people of the jungle in Africa. And looking at the same animals as in Aibolit, he experienced an amazing feeling of respect for all living things (it is also in Chukovsky’s fairy tale), which little by little forms the basis of environmental education throughout the world.
Chukovsky can be compared with Lomonosov, meaning not the scale, but the very principles of combining poetry with science. Lomonosov, having written “Ode on the Capture of Khotin” in syllabic-tonic verse, unprecedented in Russia, immediately attached theoretical justifications to it. Chukovsky also created poetry for children, a new genre of our poetry, on a solid scientific basis. “He expanded the boundaries of literature,” Irakli Andronikov said about this.
Now it is difficult to write in this genre, not because it has not been developed, but, on the contrary, because it has been developed too carefully and the standards in it are very high. Especially if we take into account one more commandment, which in his declining days Chukovsky wanted to make the most important: “A writer for small children must certainly be happy. Happy, like those for whom he creates.”

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Korney Chukovsky wrote: “Starting from the age of two, every child becomes a brilliant linguist for a short time, and then, by the age of five or six, loses this genius. There is no longer a trace of it in eight-year-old children, since the need for it has passed.”

In confirmation of this website selected some delightful children's sayings from the book "From Two to Five" by a favorite childhood author. Just enjoy:

• Two-year-old Sasha was asked:
  - Where are you going?
  - Behind the sand.
  - But you already brought it.
  - I'm going for more.
• - Is it possible to get married again?
• - I'm daddy's helper.
• A four and a half year old girl was read “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish.”
  “Here is a stupid old man,” she was indignant, “he asked the fish for a new house, then a new trough.” I would immediately ask for a new old woman.
• Mom: - Son, if you don’t eat porridge, I’ll call Baba Yaga!
  Son: - Do you think she will eat your porridge?

• - Once upon a time there was a king and a queen, and they had a little prince.
• - Mom, cover my back leg!
• - Grandma, are you going to die?
  - I'll die.
  - Will they bury you in a hole?
  - They'll bury it.
  - Deep?
  - Deep.
  - That's when I'll turn your sewing machine!
• - How old are you?
  - It’s almost eight, but for now it’s three.
• - Nanny, what kind of paradise is this?
  - And this is where the apples, pears, oranges, cherries...
  - I understand: heaven is compote.
• - Dad, turn the TV down, I can’t hear the story.
• On her birthday, Yana (4 years old) changes clothes for the arrival of guests:
  - Well, now I’ll be so beautiful that you all won’t think it’s enough.
• - Daddy, daddy, buy me a drum!
  - Well, I already have enough noise!
  - Buy it, daddy, I will play it only when you sleep!
• - Volodya, you know: the rooster’s nose is its mouth!
• Lyalechka was sprayed with perfume:
  I'm so smelly
  I'm all so stuffy.
  And spins around the mirror.
  - I, mommy, am beautiful!
• The upset father reports that he crashed the car. Five-year-old Nyura consoles him:
  - But now you don’t have to buy gasoline!
• - Dad, look how your pants are frowning!
• - Oh, mom, what fat-bellied legs you have!
• - Mom, give me a thread, I’ll string beads.
• - Our grandmother slaughtered geese in winter so that they would not catch a cold.
• - Mom, how I feel sorry for the horses that they can’t pick their noses.
• - At first I was afraid of the tram, but then I got used to it and got used to it.
• The grandfather admitted that he does not know how to swaddle newborns.
  - How did you swaddle your grandmother when she was little?
• - Oh, mom, what a lovely thing!
• - Well, Olya, that’s enough, don’t cry!
  - I’m not paying to you, but to Aunt Valya.
• - What did you scratch yourself on?
  - About the cat.
• - When will you play with me? Dad comes home from work and goes straight to the TV. And my mother is such a lady! - I started washing right away.
• - You know, dad, all animals have their backs up and their bellies down!
• - Who is more beautiful - dad or mom?
  - I won’t answer you because I don’t want to offend my mother.
• - Grandma, look how stupid the ducks are - they drink raw water from a puddle!
• On the bus, a four-year-old boy sits in his father’s arms. A woman enters. A polite boy jumps up from his father’s lap:
  - Sit down please!
• A first-grader returns from school on September 1st. Mom asks her:
  - Daughter, what did you learn today?
  - I learned to write!
  - On the first day? What a child! And what did you write?
  - Don't know. I haven't learned to read yet.
• Nastya, 4 years old.
  - Mommy, please give me a sister, but only an older one!
• Masha (3 years old) saw the wrinkles on her father’s forehead, stroked them and said:
  - I don’t want you to be angry!