[2][3] Chukovsky's poems Tarakanische ("The Monster Cockroach"), Krokodil ("Crocodile"), Telefon ("The Telephone"), Chukokkala, and Moydodyr ("Wash-'em-Clean") have been favorites with many generations of Russophone children.

He also wrote very popular translations of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, O. Henry, and other authors,[4] and was an influential literary critic and essayist.

He was born in Saint Petersburg as the illegitimate son of Yekaterina Osipovna Korneychukova and of Emmanuil Solomonovich Levenson, a man from a wealthy Russian Jewish family (his legitimate grandson was mathematician Vladimir Rokhlin).

He taught himself English and, in 1903–05, he served as the London correspondent of an Odessa newspaper, although he spent most of his time at the British Library instead of in the parliamentary press gallery.

Back in Russia, Chukovsky started translating English works and published several analyses of contemporary European authors, which brought him in touch with leading personalities of Russian literature and secured the friendship of Alexander Blok.

Korney Chukovsky published several notable literary titles, including From Chekhov to Our Days (1908), Critique stories (1911) and Faces and masks (1914).

The girl from his famous fairy tale poem "Crocodile" was inspired by Lyalya, daughter of his long-time friend, publisher Zinovii Grzhebin.

As his diaries attest, Chukovsky used his popularity to help the authors persecuted by the regime including Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Alexander Galich and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

His daughter, Lydia Chukovskaya (1907–1996), is remembered as a noted writer, memoirist, philologist and lifelong assistant and secretary of the poet Anna Akhmatova.