The book "Cockroach" with a handwritten wish and autograph by poet Korney Chukovsky

The book "Cockroach" with a handwritten wish and an autograph

The artist V. Konashevich. Moscow. Detgiz. The year is 1934
A book with a handwritten wish and an autograph, presented to actress Tamara Alyoshina on her 20th birthday.

On one of the pages of the book there is a handwritten wish:
"Tomka Alyoshina, who has become big, nevertheless I will remind you of such a fairy tale
Korney Chukovsky".

Korney Chukovsky is a Russian Soviet poet, publicist, literary critic, translator and literary critic, children's writer, journalist. The most published author of children's literature in the Soviet Union and Russia.

In 1921, children's writer Korney Chukovsky began work on one of his most famous works — "Cockroach". The tale in verse was published two years later, and it made a splash not only in a very young audience, but also among adults. Over time, many researchers of Chukovsky's work noticed that the author probably put political overtones into the "Cockroach", showing the negative hero as a self-confident dictator, whose prototype was considered Joseph Stalin.

Korney Ivanovich himself recalled the history of the creation of the "Cockroach" in this way: "Once in 1921, when I was living (and starving) in Leningrad, the famous historian P. E. Shchegolev invited me to write an article for the magazine "Bygone" about the Nekrasov satire "Contemporaries". I got carried away by this most interesting topic... and began to study the era when satire was created. I wrote for days with ecstasy, and suddenly, for no reason at all, poems "rolled over me... and it went, and it went."

It was no coincidence that Stalin got into the "prototypes" of the Cockroach; he knew Chukovsky's poem for sure, and it even turned out to be unexpectedly close to him — in any case, Stalin used it in the closing speech at the XVI Congress of the CPSU(b) on July 2, 1930, where he smashed the right opposition:

"A cockroach rustled somewhere, before it had time to get out of its hole properly, and they already shied back, were horrified and began to scream about the catastrophe, about the death of the Soviet government."