The remarkable children's writer Lydia Charskaya was very famous in the Russian Empire, during the reign of Nicholas II. Her talented stories, poems, fairy tales were read by female students of girls' gymnasiums throughout the country. Sentimental stories described in Charskaya's books teach kindness, courage and nobility. These books have fans today.
Charskaya's life before she became a writer
Lydia Charskaya (real name - Voronova) was born in January 1875 in Tsarskoe Selo. Lydia's father was a poor nobleman (his name was Alexei Voronov), and her mother, about whom there is practically no information, probably died in childbirth.
For seven years, from 1886 to 1893, Lydia was educated at the Pavlovsk Women's Institute in St. Petersburg. And the memories of the life and customs of this institution were later reflected in her prose. After leaving the institute, eighteen-year-old Lydia first married the military Boris Churilov. The couple had a child - a son, Yura. But soon after the birth of the baby, Lida and Boris divorced. The reason is banal: the husband could no longer stay in St. Petersburg, he was sent to serve in distant Siberia. And Lydia did not want to leave the capital and follow him. Subsequently, the writer was married two more times, but both marriage unions were rather short.
In 1897, Lydia went to theater courses and successfully completed them in 1898. In the same year, she got a job as an actress at the Alexandrinsky Theater, where she ended up working until 1924. Directly in the theater, Lydia came up with a sonorous pseudonym - Charskaya.
"Schoolgirl Notes" and other literary works
The actress Charskaya got mainly minor roles, and the salary, respectively, was modest. To improve her financial situation, the girl decided to start writing. In 1901, the magazine "Heartfelt Word" published the first story of Charskaya, based in part on her diary, which she kept as a teenager. The story had an unpretentious title - "Notes of a Schoolgirl." This publication brought phenomenal success to the writer. Since then, Charskaya's works have appeared in the Heartfelt Word every year.
In just twenty years of active creativity, the writer created eighty stories, twenty fairy tales and about two hundred poems - she was a very prolific writer. Among her most significant books are "Princess Javakh" (about the adventures of a Georgian girl living in the city of Gori), "Siren" "Lizochka's happiness", "Sibirochka", "Lesovichka", "Javakhov's nest", "House of rascals", "Luda Vlassovskaya "," The Mystery of the Institute ".
Charskaya after the revolution and the fate of her books in the USSR and in the Russian Federation
After the Bolshevik Party came to power, Charskaya ceased to be published. She was accused of "bourgeois views." Charskaya's works were removed from the library network. But some people, as before, read her books, although they were officially banned and it was not easy to get them.
In 1924, Charskaya ended her theatrical career and all subsequent years lived on a modest pension, which the famous Korney Chukovsky procured for the writer (which did not prevent him from strongly criticizing her prose). From 1925 to 1929, Charskaya, with incredible difficulty, managed to publish four tiny books under a new pseudonym - N. Ivanova.
Lydia Charskaya died in 1937 in Leningrad, her grave is located at the Smolensk cemetery.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the books of this amazing children's writer began to be actively published again. In the 2000s, one of the publishing houses even published a large collection of her works in 54 volumes. It is also worth noting that in 2003 the director-producer Vladimir Grammatikov shot the feature-length film "Sibirochka" based on the work of the same name by Charskaya.
