[1] Her deeply personal writings reflect the human cost of Soviet repression, and she devoted much of her career to defending dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

The daughter of the celebrated children's writer Korney Chukovsky, she was wife of scientist Matvei Bronstein, and a close associate and chronicler of the poet Anna Akhmatova.

Chukovskaya was born in 1907 in Helsingfors (present-day Helsinki) in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then a part of the Russian Empire.

Their house was frequently visited by leading literary figures, such as Alexander Blok, Nikolay Gumilyov and Akhmatova.

The city was also home to the country's finest artists—Lydia saw Feodor Chaliapin perform at the opera, for instance, and also met the painter Ilya Repin.

Chukovskaya got into trouble with the Bolshevik authorities at an early age, when one of her friends used her father's typewriter to print an anti-Bolshevik leaflet.

In 1939–1940, while she waited in vain for news, Chukovskaya wrote Sofia Petrovna, a harrowing story about life during the Great Purges.

[4] Chukovskaya's next major work Spusk pod Vodu (Descent Into Water) described, in diary form, the precarious experiences of Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko.

By the time of Stalin's death in 1953, Chukovskaya had become a respected figure within the literary establishment, as one of the editors of the cultural monthly Literaturnaya Moskva.

"[5] In September 1973, unable to publish in the Soviet Union, Chukovskaya sent a letter abroad deploring the officially sponsored campaigns against Boris Pasternak in 1958, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1969, and the physicist Andrei Sakharov in 1973, and "professional stool pigeons" who supported them.

In her old age, she shared her time between Moscow and her father's dacha in Peredelkino, a village that was the home to many writers including Boris Pasternak.