For decades, Korney Chukovsky stood at the center of Russian literary life and knew virtually everyone who set the course for 20th-century Russian art and literature, from Maxim Gorky and Ilya Repin to Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He lived through two tsars and four Soviet leaders, each with their own sizeable dictatorship, three revolutions, four wars, famine, terror, and evacuation. The lives of Chukovsky and his family were shaped by this torrent of historical events and political upheavals.

In the skilled hands of writer Petra Couvée, The Days Burn Like Paper tells the story of the Russian twentieth century through the Chukovsky family, of which Korney and his daughter Lydia, also a writer, became the most famous members. It asks the reader for a more nuanced assessment of loyalists and dissidents, good and bad writers. Korney Chukovsky was born in 1882 in the Russian Empire, under Tsar Alexander III, and died in 1969 in the Soviet Union, when Leonid Brezhnev was in power. Chukovsky was an all-round man of letters: critic, children’s book writer, translator, writer of memoirs, and author of a three-volume diary.