For people like him beliefs are not necessary" (left / right, ideology and culture in Korney Chukovsky's diaries of the 1920s)

The article analyses the realization of a writer's ideological position in Korney Chukovsky's diaries of the 1920s. Chukovsky is a representative object for such an analysis as he was a professional writer popular already before the revolution, a typical figure of the so-called “democratic intelligentsia“. Chukovsky wrote diaries throughout all his life. The article investigates the diary as a genre. The author pays attention to the problems of typological variety of diaries and to the question of the originality of Chukovsky’s diary style. The analysis of the diaries shows that Chukovsky's distancing from the Communist regime had political rather than cultural reasons. The conflict with the new power cannot be described through the concepts of Progressive vs. Reactionary or Left vs. Right. The diaries also show how the ideology, the Soviet discourse and the Soviet rhetoric affected the private story of a person or, perhaps, how they controlled the very process of such a storytelling.