He was fascinated by herbariums and collections of insects. His desk drawers were always full of samples of metals and minerals. Once he had almost drowned in a pond, forgetting as he jumped into the water about all the pieces of granite, quartz and feldspar in his pockets. It was only with difficulty that his friends managed to drag him back into the boat.
Olga Ignatievna also had two large aquariums. The fish grazing amid the underwater copses and forests were no less beautiful than the butterflies and ocean shells. There were lilac or mother-of-pearl gourami; telescope-eye goldfish; red-, green- and orange-striped paradise fish with sly, catlike faces; glassy perch inside whose transparent mica bodies could be seen dark gullets and skeletons; pink veiltails—living potatoes that liked to wrap themselves in their long delicate tails, which seemed as insubstantial as cigarette smoke.
Anna Semyonovna wanted both to indulge her son and to instil in him the habit of long, disciplined daily work. Sometimes she thought he was spoiled, capricious and lazy and, if he got bad marks at school, she would call him an idler, shouting out the German word Taugenichts! He liked to read, but there were times when no power on earth could make him open a book. He would eat his lunch and run out into the yard—and she wouldn’t see him again until he ran home in the evening, excited, breathing heavily, as if he’d been pursued to the front door by a pack of wolves. He would bolt down his supper, go to bed and fall asleep instantaneously. Once, standing by the window, she had heard her weak, shy little son down in the yard below. Sounding like a barefoot street urchin, he was shouting, “You rat, for that you’ll get a brick through your skull!”
Once, she hit him. He had told her he was going to a friend’s, so they could do their homework together, but he had gone instead to the cinema, after taking some money out of her purse. During the night he woke up as she was looking at him. Shaken by her long severe gaze, he got up onto his knees and threw his arms round her neck. She pushed him away.
The little boy began to grow up. His body changed, and so did his clothes. And as his bones grew thicker, as his voice deepened, so his inner world changed too. His love of nature changed; he developed new passions.
Towards the age of fifteen he fell in love with astronomy. He got hold of some lenses and set about making himself a telescope.
There was a constant struggle within him between his desire for practical experience and a pull towards the abstract, towards pure theory. Even then, it was as if he were unconsciously trying to reconcile these two worlds. His interest in astronomy went with dreams of building an observatory high in the mountains; the discovery of new stars was linked in his imagination to difficult and dangerous journeys. The conflict between his romantic desire for activity and his abstract, monastic cast of mind was deep-rooted; it was many years before he even began to understand it.
As a child, he had admired things greedily. He had split stones with a hammer; he had stroked the smooth facets of crystals; he had sensed with amazement the extraordinary weight of lead and mercury. Observing a fish had not been enough for him; he used to turn up his sleeve and put his hand into the water to seize the fish, holding it carefully and not taking it out of the water. He wanted to catch the wonderful, shining world of material objects in the nets of touch, smell and vision.
Aged seventeen, he felt excited and moved by books on mathematical physics. There were pages with almost no words—only a dozen pallid conjunctions: “thus,” “therefore,” “and so on.” The real thrust of the thought was expressed entirely through differential equations and transformations as unexpected as they were inevitable.
It was at this time that Viktor became friends with Pyotr Lebedev. Pyotr was at the same school, though a year and a half older, and he shared Viktor’s love of mathematics and physics. They read textbooks together and dreamed of making discoveries about the structure of matter together. Lebedev passed the university entrance exam but then joined a Komsomol detachment to fight in the Civil War. Soon after this he was killed, in a battle near Darnitsa. Viktor was deeply shaken; he never forgot his friend who had chosen the path of a soldier of the Revolution over that of a scientist.
A year later, Viktor began his studies at Moscow University, in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. What interested him most were the laws governing the behaviours of atomic nuclei and electrons.
There was poetry in nature’s deepest mysteries. Little violet stars flickered for a second on a dark screen; invisible particles hurtled by like comets, leaving behind them only misty tails of condensed gas; the fine needle of an ultra-sensitive electrometer shivered in response to the upheaval brought about by invisible demons endowed with insane energy and velocity. Seething beneath the surface of matter were enormous powers. These flashes on a dark screen, the mass spectrograph readings that made it possible to figure out the charge of an atomic nucleus, the dark spots on a photographic film—these were the first scouts, the first prospectors for tremendous forces now beginning to stir, if only for a moment, in their sleep.
Sometimes Viktor imagined these flashes and dark spots as a fine cloud of breath, exhaled by a huge bear asleep in its lair. Sometimes he imagined them as the splashes of tiny fish over a bottomless pool where monstrous pike and catfish had been dozing for centuries. He wanted to glance beneath the pool’s green surface, to disturb its silty bottom and compel the great fish to the surface. He wanted to find the long pliant withe that would make the bear roar, that would make it emerge from its dark lair, shaking its shaggy shoulders.
A two-way passage across the boundary that both bound matter to quanta of energy and separated it from them, within the framework of a single mathematical transformation! And the bridge between the high cliff of our ordinary, common-sense picture of the world and the still mist-shrouded, silent realm of nuclear forces was an experimental apparatus that—for all its apparent complexity—was in its basic principles absurdly simple.
It was strange and surprising to think that it was here, in this deaf-mute realm of protons and neutrons, that the material essence of the world was to be discovered.
At one point, Viktor suddenly informed his mother that study alone was no longer enough for him. He got himself a job at the Butyrsky chemical factory, in the paint-grinding workshop, where conditions were particularly harsh. During the winter he both worked and studied; during the summer he worked full-time, not taking any holiday.
On the face of it, Viktor appeared to have changed a great deal over the years. Yet whenever a new theory appeared to him—amid contradictory hypotheses, amid the inaccurate experiments that can lead a researcher towards sound conclusions, amid the subtle, sophisticated experiments that can throw one against a wall of absurdity—he felt the same as he had in childhood. He had glimpsed a small gleaming miracle in the dense green water. Soon he would seize hold of this miracle.
Matter was no longer something to be seen or grasped—but the reality of its being, this reality of atoms, protons and neutrons, shone no less bright than that of the earth and the oceans.
There was one other constant in Viktor’s life, a quiet light that illuminated his whole inner world. It was his mother who had given him this light, but he did not realize this. She felt Viktor’s life was more important than her own; nothing made her happier than to sacrifice herself for her son’s happiness. For Viktor, however, nothing was more important than the science he served. He appeared gentle, incapable of saying a harsh word or acting coldly and brutally. Nevertheless, like many people with a sincere belief in the absolute importance of their work, he could be cold and unfeeling, even merciless. He saw his mother’s love, and the sacrifices she made for him, as entirely right and natural. One of his mother’s cousins once told him that, when she was a young widow, a man she very much liked had tried for several years to persuade her to marry him. She refused, afraid this would prevent her from devoting all her love and attention to her son. She had doomed herself to loneliness. And she had said to this cousin, “It doesn’t matter. When Viktor�
��s grown up, I’ll live with him. I won’t be alone as an old woman.” Viktor was touched by this story, yet it did not move him at all deeply.
Viktor appeared to have realized the dreams of his youth. And yet, deep down, he remained unsatisfied. There were moments when he felt that the main flow, the central current of life was passing him by and he wanted to find a way to fuse his research with the work being carried out in the country’s factories, mines and construction sites. He wanted to build a bridge that would bring together his theoretical research and the difficult, noble labour of the country’s millions of workers. He remembered his friend Lebedev, wearing the helmet of a Red Army soldier and with a rifle on his shoulder. This memory burned into him.
33
DMITRY Petrovich Chepyzhin, Viktor’s teacher, played an important role in his life.
One of the most gifted of Russian physicists, a scientist with a worldwide reputation, he had big hands, broad shoulders and a broad forehead; he looked like an elderly blacksmith.
At the age of fifty, with the help of his two student sons, he had built a log house out in the country. He trimmed the heavy logs himself. He dug a well nearby. He built a bathhouse and cleared a track through the forest.
He enjoyed telling people about an old man, a village doubting Thomas who had, for a long time, refused to recognize Chepyzhin’s competence as a carpenter. And then one day this old man had clapped him on the shoulder, as if acknowledging him as a brother, as a fellow skilled labourer, and said slyly, “All right, my boy, you come and build me a little shed. And don’t worry—I’ll pay you fair and square.”
But Chepyzhin preferred not to spend his summers in this house. Usually he and his wife, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, went on long, two-month journeys together. They had been to Lake Baikal and to the far-eastern taiga; they had been in the heights of Tian Shan near Naryn and on the shore of Lake Teletskoye in the Altay Mountains. They had set off from Moscow in a rowing boat and gone down the Moscow, Oka and Volga rivers as far as Astrakhan. They had explored the Meshchersk forest beyond Ryazan and they had walked through the Bryansk forest from Karachev to Novgorod-Seversky. They had gone on journeys like this as students, and they had continued even after reaching the age when you are expected to stay in a sanatorium or a dacha rather than to be trekking through forests or mountains with a pack on your back.
Chepyzhin did not like hunting and fishing, but he always kept a detailed diary during these journeys. One section, titled “Lyric,” was devoted to the beauty of nature, to sunsets and sunrises, to night-time storms in forests, to starry and moonlit nights. The only person to whom he ever read these descriptions was his wife.
In the autumn, when he chaired meetings in the Physics Institute or sat on the presidium during sessions of the Academy of Sciences, Chepyzhin looked strangely out of place amid white-haired colleagues and already greying students who had spent the summer in a house of recreation—in Barvikha or Uzkoye—or in a dacha in Luga, in Sestroretsk on the Gulf of Finland or in the countryside not far from Moscow. He still had barely a strand of grey in his dark hair, and he would sit there frowning severely, supporting his large head on a brown, sinewy fist while he ran his other hand over his broad chin and thin, sunburnt cheeks. His was the kind of deep tan more often seen on navvies, soldiers or turf cutters. It was the tan of someone who seldom sleeps beneath a roof, that comes from exposure not only to the sun but also to frosts, chilling night winds and the cold mist just before dawn. Compared with Chepyzhin, his sickly-looking colleagues, with their pink, milky skin threaded by deep blue veins, seemed like silly old sheep or blue-eyed angels beside a huge brown bear.
Viktor remembered how, long ago, he and Pyotr Lebedev had often talked about Chepyzhin.
Studying with Chepyzhin had been one of Pyotr’s cherished dreams. He had longed both to work under his supervision and to argue with him about the philosophical implications of modern physics.
Both opportunities were denied him.
People who knew Chepyzhin did not find it surprising that he enjoyed hiking through forests, that he liked working with an axe or a spade, that he wrote poetry and enjoyed painting. What astonished people, what they wondered at more than anything, was that, for all his extraordinarily wide range of interests and enthusiasms, he was a man with a single guiding passion. People who knew him well—his wife and his close friends—understood that all his interests had one and the same foundation: his love for his native land. His love for Russian fields and forests, his collection of paintings by Levitan and Savrasov,71 his friendships with old peasants who would come to visit him in Moscow, the huge amount of work he had done in the 1920s to help establish workers’ faculties, his knowledge of folk songs, his interest in the development of new branches of industry, his passionate love of Pushkin and Tolstoy, his touching concern (a source of amusement to some of his colleagues) for some of the lesser inhabitants of his beloved fields and forests, for the hedgehog and the blue tits and finches that chose his house as their dwelling—all of this constituted a foundation, the one and only possible foundation for the apparently supraterrestrial edifice of his scientific thought.
An entire universe of abstract thought—of thought that had reached an altitude from which it was impossible even to make out the terrestrial globe, let alone its seas and continents—this whole universe had solid roots in the soil of his native land. It drew vital nourishment from this land and could probably not have survived without it.
From their early youth people like Chepyzhin are moved by a single powerful sentiment. This feeling, this consciousness of a single aim, accompanies them to the end of their days. Nikolay Nekrasov evokes just such a feeling in his poem “On the Volga,” about the vows he made as a boy, when he first saw a group of barge haulers. And it is this kind of feeling that moved the young Herzen and Ogaryov when they swore their famous vow on the Sparrow Hills.72
There are people to whom this sense of an overriding aim seems a naive vestige of the past, something that just happens to have survived for no good reason. These, however, are people whose inner world is filled by the trivia of the day; enthralled by the bright colours of life’s surface, they are blind to the unity that lies beneath them. Such people often achieve small material successes, but they never win life’s real battles. They are like a general who fights without any real aim, without the inspiration of love for his people. He may capture a town, he may defeat a regiment or a division, but he cannot win the war.
Only in their last days and hours do such people realize that they have been deceived. Only then do they see the simple realities they had previously dismissed as irrelevant. But this does them little good. “Oh, if only I could begin life afresh!”—these words, pronounced bitterly as one draws up the balance sheet of one’s days, change nothing.
The simple wish for working people to live freely and happily and comfortably, for society to be ordered freely and justly—this simple desire determined the lives of many of the most remarkable revolutionary thinkers and fighters. And there were many other important Soviet figures—scientists, travellers, agriculturalists, engineers, teachers, doctors, builders and reclaimers of deserts—who were guided, until their last days, by an equally clear, childishly pure sense of purpose.
•
Viktor never forgot Chepyzhin’s first lecture. He had not sounded like a professor of physics; his deep, slightly hoarse way of speaking, at times slow and patient but more often quick and impassioned, had seemed more like that of a political agitator. Similarly, the formulae he wrote on the blackboard were far from being cold, dry expressions of the new mechanics of an invisible world of extraordinary energies and velocities; they sounded more like political appeals or slogans. The chalk squeaked and crumbled. Chepyzhin’s hand was as accustomed to axes and spades as to a pen or to delicate instruments made from quartz or platinum. Sometimes, when he nailed in a full stop or sketched the graceful swan’s neck of an integral—∫—it was as if he were firing a series of shots. The
se formulae seemed full of human content; they could have been passionate declarations of faith, doubt or love. Chepyzhin reinforced this impression by scattering question marks, ellipses and triumphant exclamation marks over the board. It was painful, when the lecture was over, to watch the attendant rub out all these radicals, integrals, differentials and trigonometric signs, all these alphas, deltas, epsilons and thetas that human will and intelligence had shaped into a single united regiment. Like a valuable manuscript, this blackboard should surely have been preserved for posterity.
And although many years had passed since then, although Viktor now gave lectures and wrote on a blackboard himself, the feelings with which he had listened to his teacher’s first lecture were still present within him.
Viktor felt a sense of excitement every time he went into Chepyzhin’s office. And when he got back home, he would boast, just like a child, to his family and friends, “I went for a walk with Chepyzhin. We went all the way to the Shabolovka radio tower”; “Chepyzhin’s invited me and Ludmila to see in the New Year with him”; “Chepyzhin approves of the path we’re following in our research.”
Viktor remembered a conversation about Chepyzhin with Krymov, a few years before the war. After a long period of particularly intensive work, Krymov and Zhenya had come to visit Viktor and Ludmila in their dacha.
Ludmila had persuaded Krymov to take off his rough tunic and put on a pyjama top of Viktor’s. Krymov had been sitting in the shade of a flowering linden. On his face was the blissful look of a man who has just got away from the city, a man who has spent long hours in hot smoke-filled rooms and to whom fresh, fragrant air, cool well water, and the sound of the wind in the pines have brought a sense of simple and complete happiness.
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