An appeal to the diaries of K. I. Chukovsky makes it possible to get an idea of ​ ​ the social and literary life of the USSR in 1930-1953, the way of thinking of Soviet writers, to trace how their extraordinary fates developed in comparative analysis, in the socio-historical aspect of the era under consideration. In this work, for the first time, an attempt was made with the help of comparative historical analysis, the specifics of the diary images of K. I. Chukovsky, the spatio-temporal structure of the diary narrative 1930-1953. reveal the social and professional activities of Soviet writers as representatives of the capital and provincial intelligentsia in the writer's diary entries.