Igor Shafarevich
Игорь Ростиславович Шафаревич
Russian mathematician who has contributed to algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry. He has written books and articles which criticize socialism, and was an important dissident during the Soviet regime.
from
"The Vexing Case of Igor Shafarevich, a Russian Political Thinker"
by Krista Berglund
Birkhäuser; 2012 edition
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(Shafarevich’s Early Years in the Young Soviet State)
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| SR (30'). intoclassics.net |
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33 Monsaingeon 2001, 40; Shafarevich 2002a.
34 Neigauz 2000a, 35; Shafarevich 2002a.
35 Shafarevich 1994b.
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That night, taking a stroll, Shafarevich and his friend Rikhter saw tanks, all going eastwards. The next morning the stream intensified: “it was the beginning of some sort of a flight from Moscow”. Indeed, on that day, 16 October, the government was evacuated to Kuibyshev. Suddenly they announce on the radio that at 12 o’clock Molotov will make a speech. I wait, but at 12 o’clock they announce it’s put off for an hour. At 1 o’clock an entirely different decree of some commander is read, saying that the irregular work of hairdressers, public baths and some other things had been noticed, and such things should not occur, all services should work. Something happened during those hours and even minutes in Moscow and in the country. [. . .] It was the beginning of a turn in the war. [. . .] I then understood that apart from the number of mobilised soldiers, the amount of ammunition and other visible material things, a mental posture, some sort of ‘idealistic push’ can also be materialised, becoming a real factor of life.68
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68 Shafarevich 2001g, see also 1994 [1991]e for his memories about the war.
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(Mathematics and Music – Two Islands of Beauty in the Soviet Union)
Sviatoslav Rikhter, living at the Shafareviches at the time, told his biographer about another walk he took with Shafarevich already before this, five days after the German attack. They had been planning a long expedition for some time and decided to go before it was too late. Forty kilometres from Moscow they were
stopped by local peasants.
[They] took us to be saboteurs of spies sent by Hitler and bundled us off to the nearest police station. They discovered the word ‘German’ on my ID card. And when he saw Shafarevich’s, the chief of police couldn’t conceal his surprise: ‘What’s all this, then? Nineteen and already in your second year at university? That’s rum.’69 I tried to explain:
‘It’s because he’s very gifted. . .’ Shafarevich found this irresistible and burst out laughing. The police chief, who had been extremely threatening until now, suddenly relaxed: ‘You know what you’re going to do? Get on the first train home without delay.’ We were escorted to the station. Having been disciplined, we followed them to the station, gossiping with them as we went. It seemed these peasants had taken a liking to us. Everything was sorted out, though it was two in the morning when we finally got back to the Shafareviches’, where I was staying at the time.70
Like many mathematicians in the Soviet Union, Shafarevich also loved mountain hiking.71 For instance, he took part with Rikhter in an “Alpiniade” dedicated to the 20-year-history of Soviet mountain hiking in the summer of 1944. In the words of Militsa Neigauz, the two youths hiked in the mountains, enjoyed the beauty of the heights, waded across mountain rivers, lived in tents, cooked porridge on a camp-fire and went on foot through the Klukhori pass to Sukhumi [in Abkhazia, Caucasus].72 In his youth Shafarevich also went mountaineering in Central Asia, Karelia and other parts of the country.73 He retained this custom all his life, as he explained in 1989: “I still go hiking with my students. I stopped hiking in the mountains because it has become difficult for me. [. . .] But we go outside of Moscow, always with students.”74 Yet another passion of his was music:
Like many mathematicians in the Soviet Union, Shafarevich also loved mountain hiking.71 For instance, he took part with Rikhter in an “Alpiniade” dedicated to the 20-year-history of Soviet mountain hiking in the summer of 1944. In the words of Militsa Neigauz, the two youths hiked in the mountains, enjoyed the beauty of the heights, waded across mountain rivers, lived in tents, cooked porridge on a camp-fire and went on foot through the Klukhori pass to Sukhumi [in Abkhazia, Caucasus].72 In his youth Shafarevich also went mountaineering in Central Asia, Karelia and other parts of the country.73 He retained this custom all his life, as he explained in 1989: “I still go hiking with my students. I stopped hiking in the mountains because it has become difficult for me. [. . .] But we go outside of Moscow, always with students.”74 Yet another passion of his was music:
Other than mathematics, I am most interested in history (the applied science, which gives the possibility to understand what is going on now), and then music. I really used to go to
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69 When it comes to details, Rikhter’s memory fails him a little. On 3 June, just a few days before their expedition, Shafarevich had had his 18th birthday. Having got his university diploma the previous year, he was now working on his first dissertation.
70 Monsaingeon 2001, 44.
71 He said, “My love for hiking was Delone’s influence. He was a well-known lover of mountainhiking. His feeling for natural beauty was surprisingly strongly developed. If you wanted to travel in the mountains where it is beautiful, the best way was to ask Delone. You could rely on him 100% there. He would always recommend a route, a pretty pass. He would say: ‘Everyone goes that way, but you go this way, it is more beautiful.’” (Zdravkovska 1989, 28. Almost identically in
Shafarevich 2004f, 224.) Delone himself reminisced how he, Shafarevich who was “still a boy”,and a mathematician named Nikolskii once walked a full 110 kilometres in one go, making just short breaks for eating and swimming in the middle (Delone 2005, 143. The story is recounted byNikolskii as well, see Nikolskii 2003, 29).
72 Neigauz 2000a, 36.73 Shafarevich 1994 [1990]d, 221.
74 Zdravkovska 1989, 28. See also Shafarevich 1994 [1990]d, 219.
the Conservatory very often.[. . .] [A]t that time, before Stalin’s death, music had a special place in culture because it was in some sense uncontrollable. Not everybody could understand it.75
Shafarevich’s close friendship with Sviatoslav Rikhter also made him friends with the family of the outstanding piano pedagogue Genrikh Neigauz [Heinrich Neuhaus], Rikhter’s teacher. In her reminiscences Neigauz’s daughter mentions how her family and friends got to know Shafarevich through Rikhter and how, “in his student years Slava [i.e., Rikhter] spent much time with Shafarevich, often bringing himto our home. Igor became particularly friendly with Vera Prokhorova, a relative of the Neigauz children, and a member of the two famous dynasties of prerevolutionary merchants, politicians and patrons of art, the Guchkovs and the Prokhorovs] and her family.”76 Shafarevich himself mentioned with gratitude that at the Neigauzes he was introduced to music he would not have otherwise heard at that time, Stravinskii’s [Stravinsky] Symphony of Psalms, for instance.77 He also recounted how “at that time, devotees of music gathered in somebody’s home and played by four hands or performed in other ways works which were not performed in concerts. It was something like the future samizdat [see Ch. 3], just musical.”78 Late in 1941, Genrikh Neigauz, a native German, was arrested,79 and in the same year Rikhter’s German father was shot 80 – in both cases the allegations had to do with collaboration with the Germans. In the paranoid atmosphere of the Soviet Union of that time the fact that Rikhter was living with the Shafareviches was evidently not without a risk to their family either.
The few encounters the Shafareviches had with the secret police led to nothing serious, however. In a film made in 1994 Shafarevich, underlining the innocence of the incident as opposed to the numerous tragedies people had to bear at that time, explains how the secret police once searched their home while the family was away at their dacha. Everything was left upside down and the German textbooks of young Igor confiscated as evidence of suspect contacts abroad. However, as Shafarevich said with some amusement, his father was later asked to come and pick them up at the Lubianka, and was even offered an apology for the intrusion. Another time their doorbell rang around 2 or 3 at night – an infallible sign that the men of the state security service were coming to arrest someone. The family anticipated the worst but, as Shafarevich later learnt, the secret police had a habit of ringing the doorbell
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75 Zdravkovska 1989, 28.
76 Neigauz 2000a, 35. Militsa Neigauz describes in a charming way how the Neigauzes had a big, lively family and their home was a meeting place for talented young musicians. And as it usually is the case, the circles of cultural intelligentsia were small: the first wife of Genrikh Neigauz had married the poet Boris Pasternak, and the two families had much interaction.
77 Shafarevich 2003a; 2011a.
78 Shafarevich 2005b, 205.
79 Neigauz 2000b.
80 Prokhorova 2000, 46.
not of the unsuspecting victim but that of a neighbour of the same communal apartment.81 Yet another account of Shafarevich from 1942 onwards is from the pen of the writer Iurii Nagibin, albeit written much later. He describes the Prokhorov home, where the circle of friends of the Prokhorov girls, Rikhter, Shafarevich and Nagibin himself regularly gathered 82 as a place where “Pasternak was deified – here a pure spirit of universalism reigned”. “These were”, he continues, “the last Mohicans of the spirit, intelligence, and joyful kindness, which had matured in the soil of the society of pre-revolutionary Moscow’s patrons”. Here, he confesses, he was almost healed of his personal traumas.83
To Shafarevich, however, Nagibin is anything but willing to extend his nostalgic admiration. He is introduced as “a most unattractive personality”; a brilliant mathematician who turned into the author of the infamous Russophobia – “a theoretician of Jewish pogroms and one of the fiercest Judophobes of the country”.
Nagibin explains that at the time Shafarevich was still hiding [his alleged anti-Semitic convictions] or had not yet been affected by the sacred faith of his teachers [here Nagibin mentions the academicians Pontriagin, “a
zoological anti-Semite”, and Vinogradov, “the grandfather of new anti-Semitism”.]
“But”, he continues, one thing sounded the alarm: he did not have the naturalness and openness characteristic of us all. He played a man of another epoch, thrown by chance into our coarse reality, from which he defended himself with an antiquated slightly off-putting politeness, whistling the ‘s’ after pronouncing a word like in the old times, narrowing his eyes with the absent-mindedness of a person who has woken up in the middle of the night. Later he added to this some madness.84
To Shafarevich, however, Nagibin is anything but willing to extend his nostalgic admiration. He is introduced as “a most unattractive personality”; a brilliant mathematician who turned into the author of the infamous Russophobia – “a theoretician of Jewish pogroms and one of the fiercest Judophobes of the country”.
Nagibin explains that at the time Shafarevich was still hiding [his alleged anti-Semitic convictions] or had not yet been affected by the sacred faith of his teachers [here Nagibin mentions the academicians Pontriagin, “a
zoological anti-Semite”, and Vinogradov, “the grandfather of new anti-Semitism”.]
“But”, he continues, one thing sounded the alarm: he did not have the naturalness and openness characteristic of us all. He played a man of another epoch, thrown by chance into our coarse reality, from which he defended himself with an antiquated slightly off-putting politeness, whistling the ‘s’ after pronouncing a word like in the old times, narrowing his eyes with the absent-mindedness of a person who has woken up in the middle of the night. Later he added to this some madness.84
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81 Shafarevich 1994b.
82 Close friendships on this scale were relatively rare at the time. As Alekseeva writes: “During the Stalin era, when informing was the norm, informal socialising between people was cut to the minimum. In Moscow were practically no homes where there were many regular guests. As a rule, active socialising was usual among just two–three families.” (Alekseeva 1992, 199.)
83 In Nagibin’s posthumously published autobiographical Darkness at the End of the Tunnel, cited here, he relates how his own identity as a Jew evolved in the Soviet reality, particularly through what he experienced as traumatic incidents of hostility or distrust towards Jews. He also explains in detail how he was later devastated by the discovery that his real father had been a Russian just like his aristocratic mother, not a Jew as he had believed, and how he refused to feel he belonged to what he perceived as the mass of Russian idiots and sycophants.
84 Nagibin 1994, 34–35. In this piece written after the scandals around Shafarevich’s Russophobia Nagibin assesses Shafarevich primarily in the light of the theme of Jewishness: “Shaparevich [i.e., Shafarevich], dark-haired, dark-eyed and with a darkish skin, makes believe he is a Belorussian but it seems to me that he is typical proof of Weininger’s law: anti-Semites are often people carrying a Jew in themselves.”
With an eye on the future twists of Shafarevich’s life, companionships and reputation(s), it is not without interest that much later Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published a piece on Nagibin, Solzhenitsyn 2003a. His assessment is not very flattering, but the reader will hardly be much more sympathetic to the protagonist of the review than is Solzhenitsyn. This is because Solzhenitsyn, himself sparing in his use of adjectives, reproduces in direct citations from Nagibin an amazing wealth of dismissive
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