One day eight animals were traveling, each in their own vehicle.
And as they drive along, they laugh and suddenly a huge cockroach comes out to meet them. And he says that I will eat you. And then a big panic began. Who does what, and only crayfish, of all animals, are not afraid. The hippopotamus says, “Whoever fights a cockroach will give you two frogs and welcome.” fir cone. And everyone attacked the cockroach.
Then the animals order the hippopotamuses to pick him up, but everyone is afraid. After that, the cockroach became the ruler. And his first order was dinner. Moreover, he said that dinner should be from your children. And then a huge panic began, everyone was surprised how anyone could give their own child to a giant for dinner. Everyone around is crying, how difficult it is to part with your children. Then the Kangaroo galloped up. And she started being rude and laughing about the cockroach. Some time has passed. And then, luckily, a sparrow flies in and swallows the mustachioed one. Everyone around began to rejoice. And they are sure that everything will be fine with their children.
Tchaikovsky admires life about our little brothers. After all, without them there would be no life on earth.
Read the summary of Chukovsky Cockroach
The fairy tale “The Cockroach” is one of the most popular and famous works of Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky.
In a magical land, various animals, birds and insects lived and did not grieve. And their whole life was like one holiday. No one ever offended the little ones, quarreled or fought.
But one day the evil and terribly scary Cockroach entered this happy country and instantly intimidated all its inhabitants. All the animals huddled in their holes and began to tremble with fear, but the Cockroach did not let up, he began to demand small children for dinner. And no one could go and drive out the evil Cockroach; even the big animals were afraid of the red mustache of the villain. And most likely this would have continued for a very long time. for a long time if only a kangaroo had not galloped into a magical land and began to open everyone’s eyes that the cockroach was not scary at all, but rather small and simply disgusting. The animals, of course, did not believe the kangaroo and continued to hide and be afraid. However, a simple gray sparrow flew in, and without even talking to anyone, he picked up and pecked the evil and terrible cockroach.
And that sparrow became the winner and savior of the entire magical land. All the animals began to sing songs to him, give him food and rejoice at his freedom. This is where the fairy tale ends, and the animals of the magical land again began to have fun, sing and dance.
Picture or drawing of a cockroach
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L.-M., Raduga, 1923. 16 p. with ill. Circulation 7000 copies. In publisher's chromolithographed cover. 28.2x22 cm. Rare first edition!
Who doesn't remember the legendary lines:
The bears were driving
By bike.
And behind them is a cat
Backwards.
And behind him are mosquitoes
On balloon.
And behind them are crayfish
On a lame dog.
Wolves on a mare.
Lions in a car.
Bunnies
On a tram.
Toad on a broom...
They drive and laugh
They are chewing gingerbread.
Suddenly from the gateway
Scary giant
Red-haired and mustachioed
Cockroach!
Cockroach, Cockroach, Cockroach!
He growls and screams
And he moves his mustache:
"Wait, don't rush,
I'll swallow you up in no time!
I’ll swallow it, I’ll swallow it, I won’t have mercy.”
The animals trembled
They fainted.
Wolves from fright
They ate each other.
Poor crocodile
Swallowed the toad.
And the elephant, trembling all over,
So she sat on the hedgehog.
“The Cockroach” is a fairy tale for children by Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky. He talks about how all the animals were afraid of the cockroach, for completely unknown reasons. He seemed to them huge, mustachioed and, well, very scary. One day a sparrow flew to those places and ate a cockroach. That was the joy the animals had...
Every time Chukovsky seems to be completely destroyed, crushed, crushed by a boot and thrown into the dustbin of history, he finds the strength to rise and sit down desk. And the restless Chukovsky muse - either having taken pity, or condescending, or simply having run around and played enough with the ball somewhere over the rainbow - appears, and a miracle occurs, which in the language of writers is denoted by the modest word “is written.” Half-sick, half-starved, K.I. sits in Holguin in the summer of 1922 - and it is written to him: “Rhymes are knocking in my brain all day long. Today I sat all day from 8 o'clock in the morning until half past 8 in the evening - and it seemed that I wrote with inspiration, but now at night I crossed out almost everything. However, in general, “Cockroach” has made a lot of progress.” Then there will be disappointments, as usual: “I didn’t like Cockroach. At all. It seems wooden and dead nonsense - and that’s why I want to get down to “language.” And again, painstaking work on each phrase. The final version of “Cockroach” is five pages of text. Chukovsky worked on them for a very long time, composing (and then rejecting) many options - seemingly good and strong - but unnecessary: “I’ll cuddle, kill, strangle and crush”, “and behind them fallow deer on an airplane”, “and behind them chimpanzees on a goat,” “and behind him are seals on a rotten log, and behind them is a tarantass, in the tarantass is a porcupine. And behind them, on a calf, two lap-dog Amazons galloped in a race: beware...", "the poor elephants shit their pants" (this, it seems, should have followed "the wolves ate each other out of fright"). “The cockroach got scared and climbed under the sofa - I was joking, I was joking, you didn’t understand.” The last option is truly a pity. There were no-go options for a completely different reason:
And the grasshoppers are newspapers
We galloped through the fields,
They shouted to the cranes,
What fun do they have in Tarakanikha,
It’s not their life today, but Maslenitsa,
What from morning until morning
And in every ravine
Flags...
(Remember – “make happy faces”?)
The siskin answers:
I'm going to Paris.
And the jaguar said:
I'm now a commissioner
Commissioner, commissioner, commissioner.
And I ask you to obey, comrades.
Get in line, comrades.
The Cockroach began in 1921 with literary games in the Studio, which Elizaveta Polonskaya described in detail in her memoirs. The author, hiding behind the pseudonym “M. Tsokotukha”, reports the story of the appearance of “Cockroach” in Ex Libris-NG: “Looking through the half-disassembled archive of Korney Chukovsky, an employee of the writer’s museum discovered among the manuscripts sent to him for viewing a 20-page story from the life of a pre-revolutionary village (with a retrograde priest and a smart a man who shouldn’t put his finger in his mouth), signed “N. S. Katkov." The name is in modern encyclopedias could not be found. The author rather boringly and monotonously repeated truths that “have long been known to everyone” to “progressively minded” liberal readers of the beginning of the century... On one side of the manuscript there was a pencil note made by Chukovsky: “N.S. has policemen for the second day.” They don’t let anyone in or let anyone out.” And then followed what only Chukovsky could write: “But there are small children in the house...” We turn the manuscript over - and on the back, near the right margin, we find a studio impromptu written in Chukovsky’s small, clear handwriting: “Bears were driving... gingerbread chewing,” with which now “Cockroach” begins, and then, “unexpectedly for himself,” sweepingly and unevenly, like any draft, Chukovsky writes: “And behind them is a giant / Scary and terrible / Cockroach / With a long mustache / Scary eyes / Wait / Don’t rush / Long mustache / Two-length / I want / I’ll swallow.” And inside the pencil sketch is a formula, a direct focus of intersecting rays, a deafening “Red Cockroach!” The genesis of "Cockroach" is a long story that deserves separate consideration. Any more or less well-read person will instantly establish intertextual connections between Chukovsky’s hero and the numerous cockroaches of Russian literature, certainly focusing on the work of Captain Lebyadkin (that’s right, “Crocodile” is also a reference to Dostoevsky!). You can also find a lot of cockroaches in Chukovsky’s diaries and articles (“A small fish is better than a big cockroach,” etc.), you can discuss the image of a cockroach in Russian literature and even devote a separate study to it, but we will leave these games to those who they are interesting. “The Cockroach” aroused and continues to arouse in readers research aspirations of a completely different kind: this fairy tale - more than any other work of children's literature - is usually interpreted as a political satire. We have already talked about the long-standing tradition of looking for topical lining in innocent fairy tales above, in the chapter “Intellectuals and Revolution,” and we will talk below - where we talk about the fight against “Chukovism.” Who and when first discovered Stalin’s resemblance to the Cockroach is unknown. Several literary scholars, without saying a word, point to the identity of the “cockroach mustache” of Mandelstam’s Stalin and the “cockroach mustache” of the fairy tale hero. By the time the cult of personality was debunked, the myth of anti-Stalinism in Chukovsky’s fairy tale was already in full bloom, as there is an entry in K.I.’s diary (Kazakevich proves to him that the Cockroach is Stalin, and Chukovsky denies it). Elena Tsesarevna Chukovskaya even dedicated an article to this myth, “Shadow of the Future,” where she wrote: “It is unlikely that in those years Chukovsky, far from party affairs, even heard about Stalin, whose name began to sound loudly only after Lenin’s death and rumbled in everyone’s minds at the end 20s. “Cockroach” is the same Stalin as any other dictator in the world... Obviously, the future casts a shadow on the present. And art knows how to reveal this shadow before the one who casts it appears.” Stalin became Secretary General The Central Committee of the RCP (b) very shortly before the publication of “Cockroach” - April 3, 1922 - and indeed remained in the shadows for quite a long time. Truly talent is able to grasp the subtlest vibrations of the atmosphere, and therefore is able to predict and predict; This is not the first and not the last case of such foresight in Chukovsky. By the way, even the atmosphere of horror and terror in “Cockroach” is conveyed perfectly:
“And they sit and tremble under the bushes
They hide behind the swamp hummocks
Crocodiles huddled in nettles
The elephants hid themselves in the ditch.
You can only hear your teeth chattering,
All you can see is how your ears are trembling.”
The tale also contains signs of the post-revolutionary years:
"And the dashing monkeys
Picked up the suitcases
And quickly as fast as you can
Run away..."
“I have a physiological disgust for Trotsky,” Chukovsky later wrote in his diary. “It’s remarkable that he feels the same way about me: in his articles “Revolution and Literature” he scolds me with the same contempt that I feel for him.”
Kondakov notes that Trotsky “directly mocks the critic”:
“But since Chukovsky’s roots are still entirely in the past, and this past, in turn, rested on a moss-covered peasant overgrown with superstitions, Chukovsky puts between himself and the revolution the old iconic national cockroach as a reconciling principle. Shame and disgrace! Shame and shame! We studied from books (at the same man’s neck), practiced in magazines, lived through different “eras,” created “trends,” and when the revolution came in earnest, a refuge for the national spirit was opened in the darkest cockroach corner of a peasant’s hut.”
Kondakov sees hidden attacks against Trotsky in K.I.’s fairy tales: “In the same year, 1923, Chukovsky responded to the all-powerful Trotsky with two “fairy tales for children” - “Moidodyr” and “Cockroach”. In the first of them, in the words:
"And the unclean
Chimney sweeps -
Shame and disgrace!
Shame and disgrace!"
(almost literally repeating Trotsky’s reproaches) the monster Moidodyr preaches “purity,” whose very name contains a grotesque order to “wash” something “to the holes,” that is, to the point of destruction, damage to the object that is being washed. Not every reader, understandably, guessed that we were talking about “ideological purity” and, accordingly, about party-political purges in literature and culture as a whole; Moreover, few could read Chukovsky’s very sophisticated intertext.” The version is extremely seductive. Boris Paramonov also noticed the coincidence of “shame-and-disgrace,” and who wouldn’t? However, intertextual research does not necessarily lead to the truth, although it helps to build very beautiful hypotheses. Paramonov also mentions “that “Moidodyr”, according to the latest research, is a satire on Mayakovsky, with whom Chukovsky also had a rather complicated relationship...”. I.V. Kondakov suggests that Moidodyr is a caricature portrait of Trotsky, the boss’s washbasins and the commander’s washcloths: as soon as he stamps his foot, they will fly at the unfortunate dirty writer, and bark, and howl, and knock with their feet... “Political “washbasins”, barking and howling after the slightest signal from the Bolshevik “bosses” was full in all the editorial offices and publishing houses of Petrograd, with which, alas, the “unclean” writer Chukovsky dealt, this researcher further says. - A whole pack of frenzied dogs. And everywhere the writer was greeted with teachings in the form of the most vulgar copybooks, like the simplest morality:
“We must, we must wash ourselves.”
In the mornings and evenings...”
or
“The little mice wash themselves,
and kittens, and ducklings, and bugs, and spiders."
Everything is fair, everything is beautiful, every bast fits into line. But Chukovsky himself mentioned “vulgar writings” about washing mice (in a letter to Shklovsky, 1938) among his most affectionate and touching lines, saying that in his books there is not only humor, but also kindness and humanity, and tenderness... But Moidodyr, depicted by Annenkov, bears a portrait resemblance not to Mayakovsky or Trotsky, but to Korney Ivanovich himself (as Vladimir Glotser pointed out a long time ago) - and probably with the knowledge of the author; it is known how demanding Chukovsky was with illustrations... But both “Moidodyr” and “Cockroach” were published much earlier than Trotsky’s book... True, it is difficult to establish what happened before and what then: “Literature and Revolution” - 1923, and the fairy tales are from December 1922, but Trotsky’s articles in Pravda are from the autumn of 1922, but “The Cockroach” was conceived in 1921... And is it necessary to establish who was the first to say “e”... And is there really the dialogue between the storyteller and the people's commissar, and whether to accept the witty hypothesis about Trotsky-Moidodyr on faith - everyone is free to decide for themselves. It remains for us to follow Umberto Eco and remind us that a work gives rise to many interpretations for which its creator is in no way responsible. Chukovsky talks about the history of the creation of “Cockroach” quite simply (in the preface to the 1961 collection): “Once in 1921, when I was living (and starving) in Leningrad, the famous historian P. E. Shchegolev invited me to write for the magazine “ The Past" an article about Nekrasov's satire "Contemporaries". I became fascinated by this most interesting topic... and began to study the era when the satire was created. I spent whole days writing with ecstasy, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, poetry came to me... and it went, and it went... In the margins of my scientific article, I wrote, so to speak, smuggled:
So the cockroach became the winner,
And the ruler of forests and fields.
The animals submitted to the mustachioed one,
(May he fail, damned one!)."
The history of the creation of "Moidodyr" is almost unknown. Perhaps Chukovsky himself in “Confessions of an Old Storyteller” talked about how long he worked on each line, how he crossed out sluggish and helpless couplets, how long it took to achieve a good sound. “The other day I leafed through my old manuscripts and, reading them, became convinced that the clearest phraseology of a fairy tale was possible for me only after I had first composed so many weak poems that would be enough for several fairy tales,” he admitted. – After hundreds of different-sized lines had accumulated in my notebooks, I had to select the fifty or forty that most corresponded to the style and concept of the fairy tale. Between them there was, so to speak, a struggle for existence, with the strongest surviving, while the rest died ingloriously.” What about inspiration? Indeed, extraordinary joy and creative passion, and the amazing state of “writing” when everything turns out as it should - this was familiar to Chukovsky and, perhaps, helped him out in the worst moments, giving him faith in himself, his rightness, his destiny. “But in most cases, that joyful nervous upsurge, in which one writes with extraordinary ease, as if from someone’s dictation, did not last so long for me - most often ten to fifteen minutes,” he shared his introspection. “During these short moments, it was possible to put on paper only a small fraction of the poetic text, after which an endless search began for a definitive, clear imagery, a clear syntactic structure and the most powerful dynamics.” In a word, work, work and work – versification and editorial. This fairy tale was published with the subtitle “Cinematography for Children” (cinematography meant episodes that quickly succeeded each other; let’s remember the “cinema” of Leva Lunts in the Studio - fast-paced funny scenes). The dedication was as follows: “To Murka, to wash herself. K. Chukovsky. - Irushka and Dymka - to brush their teeth. Yu. Annenkov.” “Cockroach” was illustrated by Sergei Chekhonin. Both fairy tales were published simultaneously, before the new year, 1923, in the Raduga publishing house of Lev Klyachko. Critics focused on the shelling of Moidodyr, which was blamed for disrespect for chimney sweeps, treating children as idiots, and the seditious exclamation in the era of anti-religious propaganda: “God, God, what happened?” (in the end, Chukovsky was forced to replace it with “What is it, what happened,” sacrificing the internal rhyme to the next line “why is everything going around…”). Almost no complaints were made against “Cockroach”, which was much more unreliable from our point of view. One can notice how often and consciously Chukovsky uses dactylic endings in the tale, about which he thought and wrote a lot at that time in relation to Nekrasov’s work. “Cockroach” is replete with them: “Cockroach, Cockroach, Cockroach”, “I’ll swallow, I’ll swallow, I won’t have mercy”, “And they backed away even further...”, “Mosquitoes - on a ball”, “in bushes - hummocks”, “huddled - buried” , “the winner is the ruler”... Chukovsky’s thoughts on dactylic rhymes are most fully formulated in the book “Nekrasov as an Artist,” which was published a little earlier than “Cockroach.” “In general, dactylic endings of words and poems are one of main features our common folk poetry, for at least 90% of all our folk songs, lamentations, epics have just such an ending,” writes Chukovsky. He also notes that “these endings in Russian speech give the impression of soul-weary whining.” Whining is, first of all, of course, about cries, lamentations and Nekrasov’s related lyrics; but in “The Cockroach” dactylic rhymes are used primarily in the poems in scenes of fear and horror. K.I.’s observations of children’s speech (the Polar Star publishing house was going to release them in 1922 a separate book“On Children’s Language” - it was announced in “Oscar Wilde”, but was never released) result in a rapid whirlwind of trochees in “Moidodyr”, theoretical discoveries in the field of metrics of folk poetry find practical application in “Cockroach”, Nekrasov’s biographical studies echo own misfortune. Everything that Chukovsky writes is always interconnected and fit into a broad cultural context, nowhere is it limited to the mainstream of a highly specialized topic. That is why he moves so easily from one activity to another; therefore he manages to notice what others do not see - and let it pass through himself, express it excitedly, inspiredly and simply. This year laid the foundation for his fame as a critic and children's writer. And yet, Chukovsky wrote on the night of January 1, 1923: “1922 was a terrible year for me, a year of all kinds of bankruptcies, failures, humiliations, insults and illnesses. I felt that I was growing callous, I stopped believing in life, and that my only salvation is work. And how I worked! What I didn’t do! With sadness, almost with tears, I wrote “The Beaten Man” - I completely remade my Nekrasov books, “The Futurists.” Wilde”, “Whitman”. Founded “Modern West” - he wrote almost the entire Chronicle of the 1st issue with his own hand, got newspapers and magazines for him - translated “Kings and Cabbage”, translated Synge - oh, how much wasted energy, without a goal, without a plan! And not a single friend! There were claws, teeth, fangs, horns everywhere! And yet for some reason I became attached to Murka this year, I was not so tormented by insomnia. , I began to work with greater ease - thanks to the old year!"
Valentina Oberemko Article from the newspaper: Weekly "Arguments and Facts" No. 13 03/28/2012
Korney Chukovsky among children. 1961 Korney Chukovsky among children. 1961 / Lev Nosov / RIA Novosti
“Chukovsky The roots of a vaunted talent are 2 times longer than a telephone pole” - this is how his friend Vlad Zhabotinsky described the future author of the most popular children's poems Korney Chukovsky.
They say that the children's writer Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky did not really like to celebrate birthdays, sometimes he did not even go down to guests, although he accepted gifts with joy.
Fatherlessness
One of the things that upset Chukovsky all his life was his origin. After all, his real name and surname are Nikolai Korneychukov. But there was a problem with the middle name. Kolya Korneychukov was the illegitimate son of peasant woman Ekaterina Korneichukova and Emmanuel Levenson. The rich gentleman “lived” with his servants for about three years, gave birth to two children - Marusya and Kolya - and married a woman of noble birth. Although the father did not officially abandon his son and daughter, he did not give them his first and last name. Therefore, in different documents, Kolya Korneychukov’s patronymic sounded in different ways: he was Vasilyevich, and Stepanovich, and Emmanuilovich, and Manuilovich, and even Emelyanovich.
In his “Diary” Chukovsky wrote: “It seemed to me... that I was the only one - illegal, that everyone was whispering behind my back and that when I showed someone my documents, everyone internally began to spit on me...
Portrait of Korney Chukovsky, painted by I. E. Repin, 1910. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
When the children talked about their fathers, grandfathers, and grandmothers, I just blushed, hesitated, lied, confused.” In the end, to stop the confusion, Nikolai took a different name, came up with a middle name and a new last name. By the way, according to some evidence, Chukovsky nevertheless met with his father several times and even once brought him, already a very old man, to the Finnish village of Kuokkala, where he then lived with his family. True, the new father did not stay away for a long time - Chukovsky lost his temper and literally pushed the biological father out the door, and the children were forever forbidden to mention their grandfather’s name.
Chukovsky began writing children's poetry when he was already a venerable critic. He could not even imagine that simple quatrains would forever eclipse all his previous and subsequent serious works. Sometimes the writer disagreed seriously about this: “...I am secretly jealous of my adult books for children’s books. I am sure that my book about Gorky is better than “Moidodyr” and the book about Nekrasov is better than “Crocodile”. But no one believes this. “Crocodile” sold 250,000 copies, but “Nekrasov” didn’t sell even two thousand!!! ...I am ready to punch with my fists those mothers who, smiling slobberingly, tell me that their Tamara knows my “Confusion” by heart. “And you,” I ask, “do you know my book about Walt Whitman by heart?” - "About what?" - “About Walt Whitman.” - “Do you also write for adults?” - Bastards!
Erotic fly
Despite the childishness, in the works of Korney Chukovsky more than once “skilled” guardians of the Soviet regime found “forbidden elements”. For example, the book “Mukhin's Wedding” was banned. “Gublit (the state censorship body of that time - Ed.) banned me from the book “A Fly’s Wedding” on the grounds that the fly in the picture was supposedly placed too close to the spider - and this could cause erotic thoughts in a child!” - Chukovsky himself wrote about this stupid incident.
Osip Mandelstam, Korney Chukovsky, Benedikt Livshits and Yuri Annenkov, farewell to the front. Random photo of Karl Bulla. 1914 Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
And Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya did not like the same “Crocodile” that “walked the streets” - she saw an “anti-Soviet element” in the alligator. Although Chukovsky, when he composed the poem, did not even think about anything like that. "My little son got sick,” recalled Korney Ivanovich. “I was taking him home on the train and, in order to somehow calm his pain, I began to tell him under the rhythmic roar of the train: “Once upon a time there was a crocodile. He walked the streets...” But “The Cockroach” was considered the most acutely satirical work of the poet. And although the fairy tale was written in 1922 - when Stalin’s power had not yet gained its power, the lines “The animals submitted to the mustachioed man. (Let him fail, damned one!)” sounded prophetic and topical.
By the way, in the late 1990s it became known that Chukovsky wrote to the “mustachioed prototype.” A letter was published in one of the Russian magazines where Korney Ivanovich complained to the leader of the peoples that during the war children were left without education, without the support of their parents, that they had gone wild, began to rob and steal, and proposed to employ such children who had gotten out of hand in agricultural work. labor. Then they attacked the writer and accused him of being hard-hearted. In fact, Chukovsky adored children, but believed that they needed to be raised correctly. At his dacha in Peredelkino he constantly organized “creative meetings” with children and invited famous people for them.
Korney Chukovsky walks with children near the children's library in Peredelkino. 1959 Photo: RIA Novosti/Semyonov
Chukovsky never sympathized with the Soviet regime, and the government did not really welcome him. Moreover, Chukovsky’s daughter, Lydia, became a dissident, and her husband, the outstanding physicist Matvey Bronstein, was called an enemy of the people and shot in 1938. These were dark years for the Chukovskys. The family believed that Matvey Bronstein was alive for two whole years, because they were “given” a sentence: “10 years without the right to correspondence.” And so Korney Ivanovich wrote letters asking for mercy for his already executed son-in-law, and his friends asked for him - Marshak, Landau, Mandelstam, Ioffe. But the only thing they achieved was a note: “to compensate L.K. Chukovskaya for the cost of the binoculars seized during the search on August 1, 1937”...
According to the recollections of those close to him, he always had a heightened sense of justice. Korney Ivanovich died in 1969 from viral hepatitis. And before his death, he made a list of those whom he would not want to see at his funeral...
Anecdote about Chukovsky
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky comes to Lenin.
Vladimir Ilyich! I wrote a poem here. I would like to publish.
Read, Korney Ivanovich.
Fly, Fly, clattering, gilded belly, The fly walked across the field, The fly found the money. Mucha went to the market and bought a samovar...
Wait, Comrade Chukovsky! Why to the market and not to the cooperative? Disorder. Rewrite immediately!
Chukovsky comes to Stalin.
Caricatures of K. Chukovsky performed by V. Mayakovsky. 1915 Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
Joseph Vissarionovich! I wrote a poem here, I would like to publish it.
Read it, Korney Ivanovich.
A fly, a fly, a clattering sound, a gilded belly, a fly walked across the field, a fly found some money...
Eh, stop, Comrade Chukovsky. We have money with a portrait of the leader. Who could have thrown them onto the field? Rewrite!
Chukovsky comes to Khrushchev.
Nikita Sergeevich...
Read, Korney Ivanovich.
Fly, Fly, clattering, gilded belly, The fly went across the field...
Stop it, Comrade Chukovsky! If everyone tramples our fields, the corn will never grow. Rewrite this place.
Chukovsky comes to Brezhnev.
Well, read it, Korney Ivanovich.
Fly, Fly, clattering, gilded belly...
Wait, Comrade Chukovsky! In our country, gold is not held in high esteem, all citizens dress very modestly, do not keep bullion at home, and you have a fly with a whole gilded belly. Rewrite.
Chukovsky comes to Andropov.
Fly, fly, click...
What did you say about the Central Committee?!
Khazarin's note: Prophecy about Stalin
"Is this a giant?
(Ha ha ha!)
It's just a cockroach!
(Ha ha ha!)"
Korney Chukovsky (Nikolai Emmanuilovich Levenson), author of such hilarious children's classics as Doctor Aibolit and The Crocodile, wrote The Cockroach in the early 1920s. Did he mean Stalin? For some readers, the cockroach's mustache is reminiscent of the famous mustache of the Soviet dictator. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, arrested and hounded to death during Stalin's purges, extended this metaphor when he wrote in 1934:
We live without feeling the country beneath us,
Our speeches are not heard ten steps away,
And where is enough for half a conversation,
The Kremlin highlander will be remembered there.
His thick fingers are like worms, fat
And the words, like pound weights, are true,
Cockroaches laughing whiskers
And his boots shine.
And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders,
He plays with the services of demihumans.
Who whistles, who meows, who whines,
He's the only one who babbles and pokes,
Like a horseshoe, he gives a decree after a decree:
Some in the groin, some in the forehead, some in the eyebrow, some in the eye.
No matter what his punishment is, it’s a raspberry,
And the broad chest of an Ossetian.
November, 1933
Chukovsky's prophetic insight is amazing. In 1921, when Chukovsky began writing “The Cockroach,” Stalin was a relatively little-known Georgian thug who had just begun to make his way to the top of the communist hierarchy. Only after many years will he earn that bloody glory that could give rise to satire. Chukovsky himself denied the presence of such allusions in his tale, even at a time when their existence could already be safely recognized. The question also remains: how could The Cockroach get past Soviet censorship, which did not allow much more harmless works? According to one theory, the satire - if it really was present - was so harsh that to admit its presence would mean to discredit the authorities.
Stalin himself used the image of a cockroach for his own political purposes. In 1930, speaking at the congress Communist Party, he attacked dissident communists. “A cockroach rustled somewhere, not yet having had time to properly crawl out of the hole, and they were already running back, becoming horrified and starting to scream... about death Soviet power, Stalin told the congress delegates. “We reassure them and try to convince them... that it’s just a cockroach that they shouldn’t be afraid of.” Many years later, Chukovsky grumbled in his diary about “plagiarism” on Stalin’s part: “He retold my entire fairy tale and did not cite the author.”
On March 9, 1956, shortly after Khrushchev’s “Secret Report” at the 20th Congress, K. Chukovsky made the following entry in his diary: When I told Kazakevich that, in spite of everything, I loved Stalin very much, but wrote less about him than others, Kazakevich said:
And "Cockroach"?! It is entirely dedicated to Stalin.
Vadim Kozhinov recalled a funny incident from his youth, which occurred precisely during the years of Khrushchev’s “thaw”. “At that time, hiding the irony, I successfully assured other simple-minded interlocutors that the year 1937 is excellently depicted in the popular poetic fairy tale “The Cockroach” by Korney Chukovsky. First, it paints a joyful picture of the “achievements of the first five-year plans”: “Bears were riding a bicycle... Bunnies were on a tram, a toad was on a broom... They were riding and laughing, chewing gingerbread cookies,” etc. But, alas, 1937 comes: “Suddenly from the gateway - a terrible giant, red-haired (here I reported that Joseph Vissarionovich was red-haired before he turned grey) and a mustachioed ta-ra-kan. He purrs and growls and moves his mustache: “Bring your kids to me, I’ll eat them for dinner today.” The animals trembled and fainted. The wolves ate each other out of fright (what an accurate picture of 1937! - I commented), and the elephant, all trembling, sat on the hedgehog - of course, on the famous People's Commissar with a “lucky” surname!
At the same time, I naturally kept silent about the fact that the fairy tale “The Cockroach” was published not in 1938, but back in 1923, and many of those to whom I read the lines just quoted admired both the accuracy and the rare courage of the composition Chukovsky... And ultimately, it is precisely this “interpretation” of 1937 that is presented in the works about Stalin, written by the son of Antonov-Ovseenko, or by the high-ranking army party official Volkogonov, or by the writer Radzinsky - works that to this day are captivated by wide circles of people who do not give realize that the basis of the “methodology” of these authors seems to be the same “model” that formed the basis of the “Cockroach” that fascinated them in their childhood...”
Every word in the poem is prophetic! Don't forget - written in 1921, published in 1923!
The bears were driving
By bike.- bears in the circus ride bicycles. Well - “Life has become better - life has become more fun,” - these words were spoken by Stalin in 1935 - people began to go to the circus, watch comedies (like Merry Fellows, Volga-Volga)
And behind them is a cat
Backwards. - a clear hint at the opposition
And behind him are mosquitoes
In a hot air balloon. - on balloons began to conquer the stratosphere
And behind them are crayfish
On a lame dog.- The “old specialists”, painted red, who ate the dog, also strived for a bright future. They don't have long left!
Wolves on a mare.- small party workers.
Lions in a car.- major party bosses
Bunnies
On a tram.- ordinary people.
Toad on a broom... It would be more correct - “by metro” - the Moscow Metropolitan opened in 1935.
The fairy tale Cockroach is a shocking poem by a children's writer. Bright unusual paintings, replacing one another, amaze the imagination of the little listener and evoke a lot of emotions in him. We recommend it for online reading with children.
Fairy tale Cockroach read
The fun of animals and birds was disrupted by a mustachioed monster. The cockroach intimidated everyone and became the ruler of the forests and fields. In panic, the animals run away and the birds fly away. And the villain will become even more impudent. He demands to bring the kids to him to eat. While everyone was trembling with fear, Sparrow flew in. He didn’t know that everyone was afraid of the cockroach, so he pecked it. You can read the fairy tale online on our website.
Analysis of the fairy tale Cockroach
The plot of the tale is reminiscent of folk tales about the struggle of animals against evil. The cockroach is evil, believing in its impunity. Sparrow is a hero-savior. Animals are fools, out of fear they have lost the ability to resist the impunity and arrogance of the “monster”. Against the backdrop of animal cowards, Sparrow appears as a super hero who defeated evil in the form of an impudent insect. The funny thing is that he defeated the cockroach enemy unintentionally. What does the fairy tale Cockroach teach? Do not panic, objectively assess the danger, resist evil.
Moral of the story: Cockroach
The main idea of the fairy tale The Cockroach can be formulated using the apt saying “A coward will mistake a cockroach for a giant.” Often in extreme situations, people panic and become slaves to their fear instead of “using their brains” to solve the problem.
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