Diaries, 1943–1945

Translated from: А. Н. Колмогоров, Звуков сердца тихое эхо… (Дневники 1943–1945), в кн.: Колмогоров. Юбилейное издание в трёх книгах, Книга 3, под ред. А. Н. Ширяева, Физматлит, Москва, 2003.

Translation note: A translation in progress, working through the diary in date order from its first entry. Kolmogorov quotes Goethe and Mann in German; the German stands in the body as he wrote it, with the English in a sidenote — the 2003 edition’s Russian renderings of those passages were commissioned for its own readers and are not reproduced here. The editors’ notes to the diary appear as sidenotes marked “[Editor’s note:]”; the translators’ as “[Translator’s note:]”. Roughly a quarter of the diary is hand-drawn — diagrams, drawings, facsimiles of his hand — and much of it is invisible to the scanned text layer; those pages are reproduced as figures, and passages he wrote by hand rather than had typeset are noted as such.

1943: August–December#

Das Erlebte weiss jeder zu schätzen, am meisten der Denkende und Nachsinnende im Alter; er fühlt, mit Zuversicht und Behaglichkeit, dass ihm das niemand rauben kann.

— Goethe

Kolmogorov copied both epigraphs into the front of the notebook himself, citing the Weimar edition: Goethes Werke: II, 6 (1891), p. 218.

Alles Gescheite ist schon gedacht worden, man muss nur versuchen es noch einmal zu denken.

— Goethe

Goethes Werke: I, 42 (1907), p. 167.

Dedicated to myself on my eightieth birthday, with the wish that by then I shall have kept sense enough, at least, to understand the writings of my own self — the forty-year-old — and to judge them with sympathy, but also with severity.

Kh.G., entering upon the “Olympiad of Flourishing” (1943–1947) [Editor’s note:] Kh.G. — this abbreviated signature beneath the dedication stands for Kholmogorsky Gus, the Kholmogory Goose, the household name of A. N. Kolmogorov. We leave without comment why Andrei Nikolaevich declares the coming four-year period (1943–1947) an Olympiad of Flourishing. The Kholmogory goose is a real Russian breed, and the name puns on his own surname. An Olympiad [Olimpiada] is, in classical reckoning, not a contest but the four-year interval between the Games, used by the Greek historians as a unit of dating — and 1943–1947 is exactly four years. The joke is compounded by the setting: a man announcing his own four-year plan, in the country of the Five-Year Plan. The same word returns in its ordinary modern sense on the diary’s very last page, where he is setting problems for the Moscow schools Mathematical Olympiad, which he founded. [Editor’s note:] On 25 April 1943 A. N. Kolmogorov turned forty.

Das Beste

Wenn dir’s in Kopf und Herzen schwirrt, Was willst du Bess’res haben! Wer nicht mehr liebt und nicht mehr irrt, Der lasse sich begraben.

— Goethe

Goethes Werke: I, 2 (1888), p. 282. Goethe’s irrt — errs, strays, wanders — opens a thread that runs through the whole first fortnight: it is the same verb behind Mann’s verdict on Tonio Kröger, ein verirrter Bürger, “a bourgeois gone astray”, which Kolmogorov turns on himself on 6 August to decide that he is instead a mathematician gone astray in the worlds of love.

August 1943#

Sunday, 1 August 1943#

New moon

Half past six in the morning. A slightly misty, but still sunny morning. Pusya[Editor’s note:] Pusya — the household name of Pavel Sergeevich Alexandrov. and Oleg have run off to bathe, while I sit at home on account of ill health (which is ending).

Anya again has a working day, and she will not come. I feel on this account both vexation and awkwardness (for the second time our Sunday “readings” will take place without Anya). [Editor’s note:] Anya — Anna Dmitrievna Kolmogorova (Egorova) — the wife of A. N. Kolmogorov.

Why does this notebook begin precisely now?

There are two reasonable grounds for it:

1. The idea of a diary as a disciplining device has long attracted me. To record what has been done, what one wants to change in one’s life, what needs to be done, and then to check the execution — the idea is not new, but it is equally useful at 16 and at 40.

2. Towards forty I have begun to feel more keenly how life flows ... and passes away; how far what has been lived through already has a value of its own in comparison with what still lies ahead (at 16, and indeed at 30, everything still presents itself as a preparation for a more significant future). Hence there has arisen the need to fix the present at the very moment of its passing over out of non-being, as that which has not yet been, into non-being, as that which has already gone by.

It is possible that a third ground, a more doubtful one, joins itself to these:

3. It has been decided that the period of “psychological investigations” which began in February (see Kh.G., P.I.Ch. — “Love and Creative Work”)A bibliographic self-citation, in scholarly form, to his own unpublished manuscript: author (Kh.G. — the Kholmogory Goose, his household self-name), short title (P.I.Ch.), subtitle. The initials decode only through transliteration: Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovskii — the composer whose name English spells with a T. The deadpan is the form; he footnotes himself in his own private diary, under a joke pseudonym.[Editor’s note:] Kh.G., P.I.Ch. — a composition by A. N. Kolmogorov: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Love and Creative Work (written in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death, dedicated to P. S. Alexandrov; unpublished). is time to bring to a close. In July it brought both Pusya and me to a certain slackness. And so the setting-up of a diary, while pursuing the aims of the restoration of discipline, gives at the same time a more organised and regulated outlet to this passion for psychological investigations. Only let there not be too many of them!

Gradually there may appear in this notebook, besides the current short entries, memoirs too, and reflections, and psychological analyses — but only after order has been brought into life.

For now the immediate tasks are:

I) Quickly to deal with the immediate small jobs (gunnery, acceptance sampling, Lobachevsky). [Editor’s note:] Gunnery, acceptance sampling, Lobachevsky — see the Note to the entries of 16 August and 19 October 1943. Brakovka, here and throughout, is acceptance sampling — the problem, as the editors’ forward note of 19 October 1943 defines it, of constructing economical plans for inspecting batches of production, weighing two kinds of loss: accepting defective batches, and rejecting good ones. It is never defined in this month’s apparatus, only deferred forward.

II) To carry through smoothly all the family and household rearrangements (to bring Vera[Editor’s note:] Vera, Varya, Nadya — the sisters of Maria Yakovlevna Kolmogorova, Andrei Nikolaevich’s mother. Vera and Varya had to be brought from Kazan, where they had remained in the evacuation. and Varya, to take Varya to Nadya, to get Anya away from her job, and so on). [Editor’s note:] Yakov Stepanovich and Yuliya Ivanovna Kolmogorov had seven children — six daughters: Sofya, Vera, Nadezhda, Lyubov, Varvara, Maria, and a son, Stepan.

III) To establish constant and calm work on the great designs (the analysis course, turbulence, spectra).

And only then — the joining of mathematics with all the wealth of purely personal human interests and enthusiasms that has flourished these last two years.

For now, though, the main thing is:

1. Discipline in the carrying out of boring work.

2. Confident and consistent clearing of the ground for calm work on the great designs.

3. The struggle with “temptations” (sweets, reading at the wrong time), including immoderate writing in this notebook. (An agreement with Pusya on the limitation of chatter!)

And where, then, is love (Christian and non-Christian), on which I reflect so much and of which I perhaps talk too much (to Oleg, for instance)? But it seems that it is precisely for its sake that one must now concentrate on the disciplinary rules set out above! These two paragraphs are not typeset in the 2003 edition: they are reproduced photographically, as a facsimile of the notebook page in Kolmogorov’s hand, and so are absent from the text layer of the scan. He underlines love himself. The word answers the three numbered points above it — the whole disciplinary programme is declared to be for love’s sake — and it is the same word that titles the Tchaikovsky essay cited three paragraphs earlier, and the same word he will pursue through Mann for the rest of the month.

And so, enough of reasoning! But to record not only labour feats, but analyses too, and shades of mood (briefly!) — is not forbidden. Trudovye podvigi, “labour feats” — the Stakhanovite phrase of the Soviet production campaign, applied to his own desk work. Of a piece with the “output” of 3 August and the “norm” of 2 August.

Monday, 2 August 1943#

On Sunday from the morning, after breakfast, I sat down to occupy myself with the problems of acceptance sampling, but soon Anya arrived (the fears that this Sunday too would be declared a working day at Lyublino[Editor’s note:] At Lyublino was situated the Laboratory attached to the Lyublino filtration fields, in which A. D. Kolmogorova worked in those years. were not borne out). We walked down along the Klyazma[Editor’s note:] Klyazma — the next station (from Moscow) after Tarasovka on this line. In the settlement of Klyazma A.N. and P.S. lived (in the Alexandrovs’ family house, 27 Nekrasovskaya, or in the half of a house rented from V. A. Ponomareva) for several years before the purchase of the house at Komarovka. as far as the ski slopes, sat on the bank, bathed.

Before and after dinner I read “Tonio Kröger” to Anya and Oleg. We got as far as Tonio’s departure from his native town, further north. Anya was charmed at once by the first chapter (Hans Hansen). Then, probably, the “crumb of contempt” for people, so characteristic not only of Tonio but of Mann himself, disturbed Anya somewhat, but in conclusion she said that she “had not thought such works were possible in contemporary literature”.[Author’s note:] Just before this, on our walk, Anya was asking whether she was right in thinking that Russian literature of the nineteenth century (Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) is “special” and differs in principle from Western literature. [Translator’s note:] Kolmogorov footnotes himself with *) markers throughout the notebook, ruling the notes off below the entry. They are given here as [Author’s note:] sidenotes at their anchors; the sidenote number absorbs his asterisk. Krokhotka prezreniia — a crumb of contempt. He is quoting the Russian translation he is reading aloud; the diminutive krokhotka (“little crumb”) is the Russian translator’s vividness. He will quote Mann’s own German for the same phrase on 6 August, where it reads ein klein wenig Verachtung — “a little contempt”. The crumb is the translator’s, and he keeps it.

Oleg’s impressions of “Tonio Kröger” are not yet clear to me: I am afraid that he is too much inclined to judge a work by the “ideas” plainly expressed in it, and with such an attitude to the matter one can only get tangled up in Tonio’s utterances to Lizaveta Ivanovna. [Editor’s note:] Lizaveta Ivanovna — a character in Thomas Mann’s novella “Tonio Kröger”.

Pusya meanwhile was writing Lobachevsky.

[Editor’s note:] Pusya was writing Lobachevsky — different things may be meant here: first, in 1943 there appeared a booklet by P. S. Alexandrov and A. N. Kolmogorov, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. 1793–1943 (Moscow–Leningrad: GTTI); secondly, in the entry of 9 August 1943 an article by P. S. Alexandrov on the geometry of Lobachevsky is mentioned. Finally, on 6 October 1943 a lecture by P. S. Alexandrov on N. I. Lobachevsky took place at the Moscow House of Scientists, the written text of which is preserved in P.S.'s archive.

Subsequently it was proposed to publish this lecture in a mass edition (for schoolchildren), in connection with which the Central Committee of the Komsomol asked Academician N. N. Luzin to express his opinion of this lecture. In P. S. Alexandrov’s archive there is preserved a typewritten text of 5 pages under the title: “Remarks on the lecture of the Stalin Prize laureate, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences P. S. Alexandrov, ‘The great Russian mathematician Lobachevsky’, by Academician N. N. Luzin”. The text consists of 12 points and a conclusion, which we give here in full: “All the passages noted in Pavel Sergeevich’s lecture are especially telling, and combine a high contemporary scientific quality with the property of a beneficial influence upon young minds. The scientific quality, the pictorial vividness and the ‘accessibility’ to the consciousness of the listeners make Pavel Sergeevich’s lecture a valuable invention and an unconditional contribution to our national literature” (5 November 1945).

We dined with Pusya at the sanatorium. Then I fed Anya and Oleg at home. [Editor’s note:] At the sanatorium “Sosnovy Bor”, next to the Komarovka house, A. N. Kolmogorov and P. S. Alexandrov took their meals during the war on coupons (against their food ration cards).

Briefly discussed various provisioning matters with Anya. To Margarita Mikhailovna, on Anya’s proposal, her August dry dinner ration is being handed over, against July and August. This both corresponds to the established “norm” and removes the necessity of deciding what exactly to give away. Unfortunately, in the taking of such decisions jointly there is not to be observed in us a sufficient simplicity. I am perhaps insufficiently tactful, but Anya, unexpectedly given her extreme selflessness, displays a (in its essence highly egoistic) persistent wish not to soil herself in dry and calculating activity of this kind. [Editor’s note:] Margarita Mikhailovna (Egorova) — the mother of Anna Dmitrievna Kolmogorova (Egorova).

Incidentally, Anya about her “egoism”, and I about her “aristocratism of a special kind”, were talking in the morning apropos of her aversion to a bathing costume.

(Of Anya’s impressions of “Arrowsmith” later, when she finishes reading.)

I saw Anya off to Tarasovka for the 18.50 train almost as far as the footbridge. I went back because of the rain that was starting, while Oleg ran on barefoot with Anya further towards Tarasovka. [Editor’s note:] Tarasovka — the station nearest to Komarovka on the main branch of the Yaroslavl direction.

Then I saw Pusya off to Klyazma, had supper at the sanatorium, received S. V. Fomin (was somewhat excitedly talkative with him, as, for that matter, with many people just now), fed Oleg sour milk.

In conclusion of the day we cheerfully sawed and chopped firewood with Oleg and Shurka. [Editor’s note:] Marina — M. A. Kozlova, help with the household at the Komarovka house from the moment of its purchase. Shurka — her husband.

Oleg on this visit is livelier and more sure of himself. He managed his affairs of the preceding week well, once went to Lyublino to work (without Anya’s pressure, apparently). He has tanned a little and is coming little by little to a taste for going barefoot, for running, for demonstrating to Shurka and Marina his skill at sawing and chopping firewood. Sometimes he shows off a little, both with his tramp-like appearance with darned trousers and with his frightful tarpaulin coat.

Oleg’s declaration that among his comrades at Voskresenskoye[Editor’s note:] Voskresenskoye — a settlement in Bashkiria where Oleg Ivashev-Musatov was in the evacuation with the Moscow Art School at which he was studying. a “Karamazov spirit” prevailed, and that the majority of them had lost the human likeness just as Fyodor Pavlovich had (it was I who in conversation had insisted on the difference between Mitya, for example, and Fyodor Pavlovich[Editor’s note:] Fyodor Pavlovich, Mitya — characters in F. M. Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”. — whereas Oleg “likes nobody” there), alarmed both Pusya and me somewhat.

I asked Oleg whether he had read the “Gospel”. It turned out — no (so much for the absurdity of Seryozha’s “religious-philosophical-ethical” upbringing!). [Editor’s note:] Seryozha — Sergei Nikolaevich (by passport Mikhailovich) Musatov — a painter, Oleg’s father. From 1936 he officially bore the surname Ivashev-Musatov (Ivasheva being his mother’s maiden name); he always signed his pictures “S. Musatov”.

After the somewhat offensive letter sent last Monday, I sent Seryozha a note with an invitation to come to Komarovka some time. [Editor’s note:] Komarovka is so situated that from Moscow one could get there by various means and routes: along the main line of the Northern (Yaroslavl) railway as far as Tarasovka station or Klyazma station; along the Shchelkovo branch of that line — as far as Bolshevo station, and then by the little steam train (the “cuckoo”) that runs to Ivanteevka. Nowadays a branch runs from Moscow through Bolshevo to Fryazino, and one can reach Komarovka by electric train, getting off at the platform “Fabrika 1 Maya”. In those days, though, the way from Tarasovka or from Klyazma (and often from Bolshevo too) was covered on foot. The inhabitants of Komarovka, as a rule, met their guests and saw them off to the station. Mentions of this occur often in the “Diaries”.

Towards dark Pusya came. Talked with him about his prospective doctoral candidates. Doktoranty — not doctoral students in the English sense. Under the Soviet two-doctorate system a doktorant already holds the kandidat degree and is working towards the higher doctorate, the doktor nauk. Fomin in 1943 already held the kandidat.

Tuesday, 3 August 1943#

After the long wet from Monday morning, it is clear and sunny. Today the morning is cold and extraordinarily transparent (already autumnal), and in the daytime a heat.

In two days I have written 20 pages of “The Choice of a Rational System of Acceptance Sampling — I”. [Editor’s note:] “The Choice of a Rational System of Acceptance Sampling” — see the Note to the entry of 19 October 1943.

This is adequate output, but with my affairs in their neglected state one wants to work faster still. We bathe, we run, I chop firewood. On the whole, I am satisfied with these two days.

Pusya is writing Lobachevsky very slowly and with difficulty; for some reason he has come to loathe him utterly.

Today Spitsyn and his friend restored the electricity at Komarovka; at this moment he is sitting in the kitchen and trying to swindle us over the payment. How much more trouble and unpleasantness will this electricity cause? [Editor’s note:] Spitsyn, Nikolai Ivanovich — a neighbour at Komarovka, who sometimes helped with the household work.

Also — an exact regime of nutrition and physical culture is needed, so that there should be neither colitis, nor nervous “perfatigation”, nor sleeplessness! Perfatigatsiia — a macaronic mock-Latin coinage of his own (per-, thoroughly + fatigare, to weary), dressed as a clinical diagnosis and set between a real colitis and a real insomnia. The scare quotes are his: he knows it is not a word.

Friday, 6 August 1943#

The playbill stands boxed at the head of the entry, above the three-day catch-up. The “(?)” is in the source — his own uncertainty about the actress’s name, not a defect of the text. Scribe’s character is the Marquis de Torcy; “Toren” is as printed. The designer, V. I. Kozlinsky, is his Komarovka neighbour and a co-owner of the house.

Wednesday <4 August>#

Morning — collection of provisions on the limits;

evening — the faculty council with the defence of Perepelkin’s doctoral dissertation, and a visit from Oleg with Yura[Editor’s note:] Yura — Yuri Mikhailovich Smirnov.. Limity — a privileged entitlement booklet issued to academicians and others of comparable standing, against which special provisions could be drawn. Not an ordinary ration book: the privilege is the point. The first of two Yuras in this household. This one is Yu. M. Smirnov — the topologist, the translator of Goethe whose verses Alexandrov edits through this month, and the Strausenok or “Little Ostrich” of the parody on 16 August. The editors gloss a second Yura on folio 43 — Yuri Andreevich Egorov, Anya’s nephew. In August every Yura named in the diary is Smirnov.

Thursday <5 August>#

Morning — earthing up the potatoes and bathing with Oleg on the Sparrow Hills;

day — the savings bank, dinner at the House of Scientists, the library, Borya;

evening — “Le Verre d’eau” at the Maly Theatre (with Natasha[Editor’s note:] Natasha — Natalya Konstantinovna Gnedenko. and Borya[Editor’s note:] Borya — Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko.).

At dinner at the House of Scientists I conversed with the younger Meiman (the mathematician), taking him for the elder (the political economist).

Friday (today)#

Morning — nonsense with the warm things; left for Komarovka by the 10.40 train.

Before dinner, conversations with Pusya on the bank of the little river, and bathing with a wash with soap; dinner at the sanatorium (I alone, Pusya’s term has already ended).

With Anya it is all the same: away from home she is bold (she neatly put down an insolent captain in the metro), but she is afraid of me and closes up. And when her unspoken grievances break through, she takes fright all the more and will say nothing by way of explanation. At this I get extraordinarily angry. So it was this morning too (with the warm things).

What does Anya like in “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin”? One would have thought this work was not in her style.

In general, apropos of Anya and Borya (with his Jerome K. Jerome), I reflected sadly on solitude and on my own fate. Probably, I am not “a bourgeois gone astray”, but, perhaps, “a mathematician gone astray (in the ‘worlds of love’)”...

(Pusya claims that he, on the contrary, is a dweller in those worlds gone astray in mathematics.) Lisaveta Ivanovna’s verdict on Tonio Kröger is ein verirrter Bürger, “a bourgeois gone astray” — a Bürger who strayed into art. Kolmogorov inverts it for himself, and Alexandrov inverts it once more. One verb carries all three. Alexandrov’s wit turns on the last word: obyvatel, “bourgeois”, literally means “one who dwells”, and the Russian switches to zhitel, “dweller”, at exactly that point.

Apparently one must, at last, begin to occupy oneself with mathematics and to preserve one’s own “Sehnsucht ist darin und schwermütiger Neid und ein klein wenig Verachtung und eine ganze keusche Seligkeit”. “Longing is in it, and melancholy envy, and a little contempt, and a whole chaste bliss.” From Mann’s “Tonio Kröger”. Ein klein wenig Verachtung — “a little contempt” — is the phrase he quoted on 2 August, in Russian, as a “crumb of contempt”: the crumb was the Russian translator’s touch, and he adopted it.

“Was ich getan habe, ist nichts, nicht viel, so gut wie nichts. Ich werde Besseres machen, Lisaweta, — dies ist ein Versprechen. Während ich schreibe, rauscht das Meer zu mir herauf, und ich schließe die Augen. Ich schaue in eine ungeborene und schemenhafte Welt hinein, die geordnet und gebildet sein will, ich sehe in ein Gewimmel von Schatten menschlicher Gestalten, die mir winken, daß ich sie banne und erlöse: tragische und lächerliche und solche, die beides zugleich sind, — und diesen bin ich sehr zugetan. Aber meine tiefste und verstohlenste Liebe gehört den Blonden und Blauäugigen, den hellen Lebendigen, den Glücklichen, Liebenswürdigen und Gewöhnlichen.” “What I have done is nothing, not much, as good as nothing. I shall do better, Lisaveta — this is a promise. While I write, the sea roars up to me, and I close my eyes. I look into an unborn and shadowy world that wants to be ordered and given form; I look into a swarming of shadows of human figures who beckon me to bind and redeem them: tragic and ridiculous, and some that are both at once — and to these I am much devoted. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and blue-eyed, the bright living ones, the happy, the loveable and the ordinary.” From “Tonio Kröger”. The unborn world “that wants to be ordered and given form” is a design in his sense of the word: it stands to Mann’s writer exactly as the analysis course, turbulence and the spectra stand to him.

“Alle Wärme, alle Güte, aller Humor kommt aus ihr, und fast will mir scheinen, als sei sie jene Liebe selbst, von der geschrieben steht, daß einer mit Menschen- und Engelszungen reden könne und ohne sie doch nur ein tönendes Erz und eine klingende Schelle sei.” “All warmth, all goodness, all humour comes from it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that very love itself of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet, without it, be only a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.” From “Tonio Kröger”. [Translator’s note:] The pronoun dangles in Kolmogorov’s excerpt as it does not in Mann. Ihr and sie refer back to diese meine Bürgerliebe zum Menschlichen — “this bourgeois love of mine for the human” — which stands a few lines above the passage he copied out and is not reproduced here. Mann’s closing clause echoes 1 Corinthians 13:1; the English follows the Authorised Version’s “sounding brass” and “tinkling cymbal”, but keeps love, which is Luther’s Liebe and Mann’s word, rather than the Authorised Version’s “charity”.

I regret not having gone to the concert (I am not working anyway, and have polished off a bar of chocolate):

P. I. Tchaikovsky — Second Suite. Music for “The Snow Maiden”. Variations on a Rococo Theme. First Piano Concerto.

Oleg on the Sparrow Hills.

His fantasy (?) about our walk on the Sparrow Hills (some five years ago), when I astonished him by racing him.

Oleg worked sluggishly at the earthing up and the weeding (perhaps I had “talked him out”). It was hot. He tanned considerably in a single morning.

Verse, by his own admission, he knows little of. He loves Pushkin’s “Anchar”, and A. Tolstoy’s “Ilya Muromets” and “Potok-bogatyr”! More he cannot name.

Of a boy’s life with riding and vagabondage he “was envious at first, but then stopped”.

“Although I studied badly, I decided at once that I was cleverer than everybody.”

The view of Moscow from the Sparrow Hills was news to Oleg: “I didn’t think Moscow was so big” (!)

I read M. A. Kreines’s dissertation, “The Synthesis of Regular Toothed Mechanisms” — good, though elementary, new ideas.

At Pusya’s today S. V. Fomin — they will not release him to the doctorate until the end of the war.

A letter from Varvara Sergeevna. [Editor’s note:] Varvara Sergeevna Alexandrova — the sister of P. S. Alexandrov; at that time she remained in the evacuation in Kazan.

The transport in August only on the 10th–15th. From 1 August they have stopped giving dinners in the canteen to V.Ya. and V.Ya. [Editor’s note:] V.Ya. and V.Ya. — Vera Yakovlevna and Varvara Yakovlevna Kolmogorova, Andrei Nikolaevich’s aunts, were also in Kazan. What is meant is the necessity of transporting them back to Moscow.

How is all this return to Moscow to be organised?

Saturday, 7 August 1943#

A somewhat misty, milky-sunny, warm day.

Over the morning and after dinner I edited the first 15 pages of Gubler’s work (wrote seven anew). Worked satisfactorily. [Editor’s note:] What is meant is I. A. Gubler’s article “The solution of the problem of firing with artificial dispersion for certain cases”. Published in the “Collection of articles on the theory of gunnery. I” under the editorship of A. N. Kolmogorov (A.N. calls it the “Gunnery Collection”). — Transactions of the V. A. Steklov Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1945, vol. 12, pp. 67–94.

Pusya sluggishly writes Lobachevsky, edits Yura’s verses, and grieves over the Kazan difficulties.

Marina fell ill, and Shurka took her to the hospital in a droshky, accompanied by Spitsyn.

From Sergei Musatov a letter with notice of the possibility of coming to Komarovka only in a month, and of an intention to write to me further “on the questions raised”.

Klikushestvo — from klikusha, the shrieking hysteric of Russian village religion: a woman held to be possessed, who cried out during the church service. The word is derisive and specifically religious, not a general term for hysteria. Dostoevsky uses it of Alyosha’s mother in “The Brothers Karamazov”, which Oleg is reading this same fortnight. Sladostnoe blagochestie — “sweet piety”, with the cloying sweetness of sladostny full on it. The root is the same as the sladosti, the sweets, that head his list of “temptations” on 1 August and are named again in the self-assessment of 14 August.

Monday, 9 August 1943#

Today a day of complete collapse: I saw Pusya and Oleg[Editor’s note:] Oleg — Oleg Sergeevich Ivashev-Musatov — the son of Anna Dmitrievna by her first marriage, to S. Ivashev-Musatov. off, read “Arrowsmith”, and did very little of Pusya’s article on the geometry of Lobachevsky. [Editor’s note:] The article on the geometry of Lobachevsky — what is meant is P. S. Alexandrov’s article “What is non-Euclidean geometry” in the book: Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. 1793–1943 (see also the Note to the entry of 2 August 1943).

After dinner I terribly wanted to sleep. Meanwhile, despite the fact that I got up at 5.30, I had slept not a little (on Sunday Oleg and I went to bed very early). Oleg turned up on Saturday from the cuckoo that comes in at eight o’clock, Anya — very late. So I fed them, each separately, Anya — having already got out of bed. The “cuckoo” — the little local steam train, named for its whistle, which ran from Bolshevo to Ivanteevka. Kept here as he has it: the 7.30 cuckoo, the 8.39 cuckoo.

Apparently Sunday tired me.

I acknowledge this as a fact and describe Sunday.

On Sunday I got up at half past five. The sun was only just breaking through the mist. I raised Oleg and took him bathing. With Pusya we prepared breakfast.

Then I worked for four hours. In four hours (8.30–12.30) I edited another 24 pages of Gubler (of them seven written anew).

Anya meanwhile kept house with taste and with pleasure, as she knows how.

Oleg puzzled a little over the conclusion of “Tonio Kröger”, copied out for him in German, and then ... dug out of the cupboard the fourth volume of Plato, which opens with the “Phaedrus”. Pusya came to inform me of this not entirely happy choice, but I could not find a way to intervene. When I passed through the library terrace where Oleg was sitting, he quickly hid the book.

I observed further that Oleg was standing under the birch in gloomy pensiveness. Soon, however, he had already passed on to the Small Soviet Encyclopaedia and the like. It has not so far been established whether it is connected with the reading of the “Phaedrus” that for the rest of the day Oleg was very animated and cheerful, but from time to time covered his face with his hands and then looked up at me in astonishment.

Then I finished reading “Tonio Kröger” to Anya and Oleg.

The dinner prepared by Anya (warmed-up soup, sanatorium leftovers, fried eggs with bread) was a success. At dinner Anya said that all the time, listening to “Tonio Kröger”, she had been waiting for “them, in the end, to throw themselves into each other’s arms”. Pusya and I could not restrain ourselves and asked with one voice: “And who are ‘they’?”

I took Anya bathing and saw her off to the 19.30 cuckoo before the sanatorium supper.

On the way to the cuckoo Anya asked seriously whether I love her. I said that if I get so angry and swear so, it is precisely because I love her.

After supper we sawed firewood with Oleg and bathed.

Before supper there had also been a thunderstorm — in general, the days are very colourful!

This morning at half past five we set off into a still greater mist to bathe. The blue mists in the west and the golden ones in the east, pierced through with sun, were really fine. Oleg settled himself many times, shading his eyes with his hand, standing and squatting, to examine them, having declared that “some savage might think that the end of the world was there”.

Then we swam downstream (towards the sun) as far as the fallen birch.

Swimming back, I examined Oleg, sitting against the background of the sunny mist with his feet in the water and smeared with duckweed — really, rather like a savage.

If only he could be like that more often!

With the 8.39 cuckoo Pusya and Oleg left together.

Anya found that in “Arrowsmith” “the problem of joining scientific work with family life is not solved”. Apropos of Gottlieb she pronounced: “It must be very interesting to work with passion like that”, but then dragged in Pavlov with his “modesty”.

She seriously hopes that S. P. Stroganov will be elected to the Academy of Sciences and is “sure that then they will set up a laboratory attached to the Academy”. There she would like to work.

This last week Anya has been occupied at Lyublino only with “the river”, i.e. the dissertation, but so far tells me nothing about it. I only fished out of her that she has decided to replace the “literature review” with the “present state of the question”.

Tuesday, 10 August 1943#

Comrade Kolmogorov!

Your acquaintance military technician Seliverstov, Nikolai Alexandrovich, was killed in the performance of his official duties on 22.07.43. His relatives have been informed.

Clerk of unit No. 92966 Sergeant-major

25.07.43[Editor’s note:] Seliverstov, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1902–1943), whom the death notice calls an “acquaintance”, was in fact a comrade and classmate of A. N. Kolmogorov at the gymnasium. Andrei Nikolaevich was especially close friends with his brother, Gleb Alexandrovich Seliverstov (he later worked with him jointly on the theory of trigonometric series; the result of that work was the well-known Kolmogorov–Seliverstov theorem). Both brothers were called up into the army, and both were killed. A. N. Kolmogorov corresponded with the Seliverstov brothers and kept their letters, visited their parents and helped them.

(The last (unsent) letter of Andrei Nikolaevich to Nikolai Seliverstov, which seems to us consonant with the diary entries of this time:) This parenthesis is the editors’ own voice, printed inside the body of the diary. The letter that follows was placed here by them, not by Kolmogorov: he did not file his dead friend’s unsent letter into his own notebook.

A letter of A. N. Kolmogorov to N. A. Seliverstov

(Typed, on two sides of half a sheet)

Komarovka, 12 July 1943

Dear Kolya!

To my last two letters I have had no answer from you, whether because they were lost, or because you have no time to write just now. I have only now realised that, not being prompted by the receipt of letters from you, I have not written to you for a very long time.

My life flows on as before. Tomorrow and the day after are the last examinations at the university. Then I shall be finishing off a piece of military-scientific work, and in August, presumably, I shall go to Kazan, in order to bring Vera and Varvara Yakovlevna from there to Moscow by the beginning of September.

Our life together with Anya has, over the past year, quite taken shape, but it will receive more final forms when, with Vera Yakovlevna’s arrival, Anya leaves her job at Lyublino (such are our plans); whereas for the present, despite our complete inner unity, we simply spend too little time together.

Anya’s relations with Vera Yakovlevna will undoubtedly turn out very good. The relations arising out of our joint existence at Komarovka with Pavel Sergeevich have, in essence, been established as good from the very beginning; the household details arising out of the undividedness of property that formerly existed between Pavel Sergeevich and myself are being put in order: at present, with my having the most various material obligations that do not concern Pavel Sergeevich, such undividedness would be burdensome to me.

Less satisfying to me are my relations with the Musatov family. These relations are unavoidably rather close, since Oleg lives with Polina Alexandrovna and studies painting with Seryozha, but is supplied with a money and food allowance and with clothing, and also has his washing done — by Anya and me. He spends Sundays with us at Komarovka, and approximately once a week, on a weekday, works with us on our vegetable plots (at Lyublino and on the Sparrow Hills).

The boy I have quite sincerely come to love, but to have to do with a fifteen-year-old person who, for example, at the present time:

1. is himself reading “The Brothers Karamazov”,

2. at his grandmother’s listens to a reading aloud of Anatole France’s “Thaïs” (I do not know how Polina Alexandrovna swallows and arranges it all there, but in reality “Thaïs” is a brilliant treatise on psychiatry, in which it is convincingly recounted how the whole frenzy of Christianity, with its self-tortures, its standing for years on a pillar, its mystical visions and diabolical wiles, arises on the soil of sexual experiences that find no outlet — such is precisely Anatole France’s design, and not my interpretation),

3. at Seryozha’s listens to “philosophical readings” from the writings of Vladimir Solovyov and the dialogues of Plato,

— is, as you yourself understand, not simple.

To tear him away from Polina Alexandrovna would probably be quite difficult. It is consoling that he treats her in many respects protectively, is very solicitous of her — this last month he cooked dinner daily for the whole dear family, and of Polina Alexandrovna he is continuously solicitous in all such respects. At present the family has divided into two parts, living in different places and with a strictly separate household: Seryozha with Alla, and Oleg — with Polina Alexandrovna.

For now I finish, and shall write about more abstract matters separately. I was at Alexander Nikolaevich’s and Nina Vasilievna’s a fortnight ago. With the coming of summer they (like all of us, to some degree) are naturally anxious about you and Gleb especially, but there is nothing to be done about that.

Write. Anya sends her greetings.

Your Andrei

Wednesday, 11 August 1943#

I still cannot master myself and work properly.

Not even because of Kolya (although I think much about his death!), but because of a feeling of uncertainty in my family affairs.

I intend to ask Anya orally (and, for exactness, in writing too) approximately the following:

Dear Anya!

You and I intend to live together another forty years or so, if not more. Permit me therefore, in answer to your question (whether I really love you), to put a question to you as well, concerning these coming forty years:

Do you picture your future life in such a way that at the centre of it stand:

1. our common personal life together and our family,

2. our common circle of friends, including my closest comrades at work and my pupils,

3. my work, which you support by your cares,

or do you picture it somehow otherwise?

This “query” is made, to a known degree, in cancellation of my excessive nervousness and heat over various current occasions.

Saturday, 14 August 1943#

2 p.m.

Yesterday I left Moscow by the 21.54 train.

The full moon approaches. The moon lit the little river at Tarasovka and the forest glades along the road to us most fantastically through the rapidly thickening mist.

I slept in until 10 in the morning, glancing out of the window at the poplars: at first they showed grey in the mist, quite colourless, then they drew themselves more clearly against a pale blue sky with cloudlets pink from the dawn, then the distant ones (Spitsyn’s) were lit by the sun; I got up when the forest behind the poplars was already being veiled in the haze proper to a hot day.

Marks on points 1)–3) (p. 4 [p. 28 in this edition]) for 1–14 August. The bracketed cross-reference is the editors’, mapping his notebook’s page 4 onto the printed edition’s page 28 — where the numbered points 1)–3) of 1 August indeed stand.

1. fair, [Author’s note:] See the current entries above.

2. good, [Author’s note:] That is, I took no new burdens upon myself.

3. poor. [Author’s note:] Immoderate consumption of sweets, writing in this notebook, and daydreaming at the wrong time.

To be added:

4. regular physical culture, correct nutrition.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I finished Gubler, worked a little on my old gunnery writings.

On Wednesday I made my own dinner (Masha was away, Pusya in Moscow). [Editor’s note:] Masha (Marina) — M. A. Kozlova — help with the household at the Komarovka house from the moment of its purchase.

To Anya at Lyublino I came by 16.30. We observed on the little potato plot a potato jungle without the slightest sign of tubers: instead of forming tubers, the roots come out again to the surface and form green shoots with leaves. We earthed up and weeded the cabbage, which grows well. Anya recounted that her Tanya is being left by her husband (a university soil scientist who always seemed to me rather disgusting — and now his first name, patronymic and surname have slipped my mind). [Editor’s note:] Anya’s Tanya — apparently T. Nikolskaya — the niece of Nina Petrovna Nikolskaya, an acquaintance of A. D. Kolmogorova who looked after Oleg.

By Anya’s account, P.S. and Oleg do nothing but say “how Andrei, how Andrei”.

On Thursday with Oleg we quickly (by 11) finished the earthing up and the weeding, then bathed. With greater ease than before Oleg talked about Seryozha, Alla and so on. [Editor’s note:] Alla — the second wife of S. Musatov.

Called in at the institute, spoke with Bermant and Vasilkov, received money.

Dined at the House of Scientists. Was at Oleg’s with Polina[Editor’s note:] Polina Alexandrovna, P.A. — the mother of S. M. Musatov, Oleg’s grandmother. Ivasheva by birth, Musatova by her husband, from 1936 — Ivasheva-Musatova. Alexandrovna. (Oleg’s sketches for a “composition”, Seryozha’s spring landscape of 1941.) [Editor’s note:] Oleg Ivashev-Musatov intended to become, like his father, a painter, and studied at the Moscow Art School. Hence here and subsequently his artistic compositions are discussed.

At the Academy of Sciences spoke with Bruevich (acceptance sampling [see the Note to the entry of 19 Oct. 1943] — a report for Wednesday 25 August, the election of academicians, Anya’s safety in the event of her leaving her job, the flat).

On Friday we met Varvara Sergeevna. Pusya made a scene with Sergei[Editor’s note:] Sergei Lvovich — S. L. Sobolev. Lvovich. Was at the university at Azarov’s (Pusya’s room). Petrovsky is satisfied with the faculty’s affairs (112 people admitted, and so on). Dined, was at the Nyubergs’ (Kolya’s dissertation), at the philological faculty at Dean Gudzy’s on Lyova[Editor’s note:] Lyova — Lev Dmitrievich Egorov, the brother of A. D. Kolmogorova (Egorova).‘s affairs (Gudzy was deferential before an academician to the point of indecency), at Trubnikovsky Lane (handed over the paper for the house manager), at the Seliverstovs’ (did not find them in), at Varvara Sergeevna’s. [Editor’s note:] Yura — Yuri Andreevich Egorov, the nephew of A. D. Kolmogorova (Egorova). [Translator’s note:] The editors’ note on Yura is printed at the foot of this page, but no Yura occurs anywhere on it — the printed page confirms this is not a defect of the scan. It is given here at the Egorov family’s only mention. This second Yura, Anya’s nephew, is not the Yura of 4 and 7 August, who is Yu. M. Smirnov. [Editor’s note:] The Seliverstovs — Alexander Nikolaevich and Nina Vasilievna — the parents of Nikolai and Gleb Seliverstov, friends of A.N. since his gymnasium years. “Kolya’s dissertation” is unglossed, and the Kolya meant is presumably one of the Nyubergs — not the Kolya whose death notice stands three pages earlier.

For insufficient energy over Thursday–Friday I cannot reproach myself, although I still had to ask Oleg today to run to Gudzy and to the Academy of Sciences, and to leave Anya and Oleg on their own to collect on the ration cards.

Today over the morning I only wrote letters to Varya and Petya and inserted the formulae into the report on Nyuberg’s dissertation. [Editor’s note:] Petya — Pyotr Savvich Kuznetsov (1899–1968) — philologist, professor of Moscow State University, was brought up together with A.N. in his grandfather’s house from early childhood and then studied at the same gymnasium.

Monday, 16 August 1943#

Sunday — a muddled day, ending with a certain scene between Pusya and me (see our picture-book). [Editor’s note:] Our picture-book — what is meant is one of the “artistic notebooks” (many of them survive in the Komarovka house), filled with pen drawings. Andrei Nikolaevich loved to draw in this way, and Pavel Sergeevich — to look these drawings over.

[Editor’s note:] Dimetrusya — Dmitri Dmitrievich Romashov, a friend of A. N. Kolmogorov and of S. M. Musatov since their gymnasium years.

The conversation with Anya on the theme marked out earlier (see the entry for Wednesday, 11 August) went well. An affirmative answer seemed to Anya self-evident, and my doubts — idle.

But it was precisely our sitting shut away over this conversation at the moment of Varvara Sergeevna’s arrival that seemed to Pusya an inadmissible inattention to her.

Afterwards we sat very well, the three of us (with Anya and Oleg), over tea. With Pusya a complete reconciliation.

This morning rain and cold. We ran with Oleg to bathe by the little bridge (Pusya has boils on his leg). We wrestled. Oleg took “Arrowsmith” away to read.

I worked middlingly today — drew up the plan of the article “The number of hits with several shots and the general principles of assessing the effectiveness of a system of fire”.

It is coming out beautifully and interestingly. I wrote five pages and arranged ten out of the old material. The article ought to go first in the collection with which I am so tediously fussing.

Pusya in the daytime read Yura’s verses (his selection and light editing, 25 items).

Really, it seems to me precisely that which ought imperceptibly to take shape in contemporary good young people, and, consequently, being well made, to carry them along too. [Editor’s note:] The Collection of articles on the theory of gunnery appeared as a separate volume of the Transactions of the V. A. Steklov Mathematical Institute with the subtitle: “Collection of articles on the theory of gunnery. I” under the editorship of A. N. Kolmogorov (Leningrad–Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences Press, 1945; 106 pp.). As Andrei Nikolaevich planned, the collection consists of four articles, a preface (unsigned) and an appendix (tables and diagrams). We give the titles of these articles: A. N. Kolmogorov, The number of hits with several shots and the general principles of assessing the effectiveness of a system of fire; A. N. Kolmogorov, Artificial dispersion in the case of destruction by a single hit and dispersion in one dimension; A. A. Sveshnikov, The determination of the best method of laying with artificial dispersion in firing (for certain particular cases); I. A. Gubler, The solution of the problem of firing with artificial dispersion for certain cases.

[Translator’s note:] This line, like the close of the 1 August entry, is reproduced in the edition as a facsimile of his hand rather than typeset, and is invisible to the scan’s text layer. It reads, so far as it can be made out: “The evening quite clear, with a [greenish?] and pink afterglow [over?] the whole sky. Our poplars [stand out?] sharply in the last rays of the sunset.” The bracketed words are uncertain and want the original notebook.

Where armfuls of autumn leaves The sunrise waters with red water, A little ostrich chick scrubs its feet Diligently with a loofah.[Editor’s note:] Strausenok [“Little Ostrich”] — the household name of Yu. M. Smirnov.

[Editor’s note:] Here A.N. has made over Yesenin’s quatrain:

There, where the cabbage beds The sunrise waters with red water, A little maple chick sucks At its mother’s green udder.

[Translator’s note:] The parody keeps Yesenin’s second line verbatim and twists the other three. Its hinge is a pun that cannot be carried across: Yesenin’s klenyonochek, “little maple chick”, becomes strausenochek, “little ostrich chick” — and Strausenok, “Little Ostrich”, is Yuri Smirnov’s household name, so the verses Alexandrov was editing that afternoon become the creature washing its feet. Both quatrains are anapaestic and rhyme akhapki/lapki, voskhod/tryot; the English keeps the sense and the bathos, not the metre.

September 1943#

Monday, 6 September 1943#

From the Poems of the Little Ostrich (August–September 1943)#

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Read against the marks: nE-bo-po-krY-to | tU-cha-mi-se-dY-mi, stressed syllables capitalised. The row of dots is the source’s mark of omitted lines.

[Editor’s note:] The notations occurring here and below — (—) for a stressed syllable in the line, (∪) for an unstressed syllable, and ( | ) the word-division mark [znak slovorazdela] — are those adopted in the analysis of verse. For example, the first of the lines marked up by Andrei Nikolaevich (p. 46):

нЕ-бо-по-крЫ-то | тУ-ча-ми-се-дЫ-ми

is written in the form:

— ∪ ∪ — ∪ — ∪ ∪ ∪ — ∪

Я прошагиваю улицу За воротами ворота, ⁠ Дом за домом. Надо мною вечер хмурится ⁠ В небе черном.

Я жалею о потерянном И грущу, о чем не знаю сам. Я иду путем рассеянным Голошеим глупым страусом.

The last line is where the nickname comes from: Strausenok, “Little Ostrich”, in the poet’s own self-description. Kolmogorov had already made it over into a parody of Yesenin on 16 August.

... Снова ранние зори Освещают леса и поля. В бледно-синем, чуть желтом просторе Розовеют, цветут тополя. ⁠ Снова ветер, прохладный и свежий... ⁠ Белой пеной плывут облака, ⁠ Слыша зовы морских побережий... ⁠ Им дорога вольна и легка.

Read against the marks: ria-dY-pro-zrA-chnykh-to-po-lEi. No word-boundary is marked in this poem.

Мне двадцать один год. Мне жить бы, влюбляясь и радуясь! Смотреть бы только вперед, ⁠ Не оглядываясь! Мне двадцать один год, А ветер свистит, непоседа, И в дальние страны зовет, ⁠ Меня, соседа...

Smirnov was indeed twenty-one.

От дум тяжелых не уйти Они стоят и смотрят строго: Беда и горе впереди, Тоска и дальняя дорога.

За туманными далями снов Дни за днями упрямо толкутся...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Read against the marks: gnE-tsia-be-rE-zka-strOi-na-ia.

⇑

Read against the marks: nEt-ne-ver-nE-shsia-na-zAd. [Editor’s note:] ⟨Here the stressed vowels of the last quatrain are written out.⟩ [Translator’s note:] A double-shafted arrow points up from the table at the quatrain above it, and each row gives the stressed vowels of one line, in order: нет / вернёшься / назад = е ё а; мы / разошлись / прощай = ы и а; чертят / червонный / закат = е о а; линии / птичьих / стай = и и а. On top of the metrical experiment he is reading the poem’s vowel colour down the column — which is a second reason the Russian must stay: an English quatrain would have different vowels, and the table would be describing a text that is not there.

⁠ Этим утром покой и прохлада. ⁠ Побыстрее, сестренка, вставай! ⁠ За окном суета и трамвай, ⁠ И людей беспокойное стадо.

⁠ И спешить нам не нужно на службу: ⁠ Ведь сегодня у нас выходной! ⁠ Проведем его вместе с тобой, ⁠ Обновим нашу старую дружбу!

⁠ Нам бы жить, чудакам, и смеяться... ⁠ Дай, покрепче тебя обниму! ⁠ Вижу, знаю: опять одному ⁠ Вдалеке мне придется скитаться.

⁠ Погляди — распахнулось окно ⁠ В мир иной без тоски и печали... ⁠ Что таят недоступные дали, ⁠ Нам с тобою узнать не дано.

Если сердцу очень больно, Если сердцу тяжело, Друг обидел ли невольно, Заупрямился ль назло, ⁠ Это все — ничего!

⁠ К берегам пойду зеленым, ⁠ Где под солнечным лучом ⁠ Летом знойным, опаленным, Хорошо — горячо!

Забияка-ветер гонит Стаи легких облаков, И березка ветки клонит ⁠ Надо мной — высоко!

⁠ Все обиды и печали ⁠ Улетают тихо вдаль. ⁠ Вот и звезды заблистали И река — как сталь!

Каждую ночь барабанит дождь, И каждую ночь я слышу (Сквозь сон), как небо — лохматый пес — Когтями скребется в крышу.

⁠ Бездомный бродяга, холодный нос, ⁠ Скулит, напевает тоскливо, ⁠ И крупные капли собачьих слез ⁠ По кровле бегут торопливо.

И странные сны, занятней задач, Каждую ночь мне снятся, Что будто по лестнице из неудач Упрямо хочу подняться.

⁠ Туда, где воля любым мечтам: ⁠ Писать ли стихи иль влюбляться ⁠ (Но чаще всего смеются там)... ⁠ Ах, нужно только подняться!

⁠ Я уезжать собрался. ⁠ Недолго здесь прожил. ⁠ Все нужные мне вещи ⁠ В мешок свой уложил

⁠ Белье, бумаги, книжки, ⁠ Соль, мыло и табак — ⁠ Взял все, что очень нужно, ⁠ А что и просто так.

⁠ Но самой нужной вещи ⁠ Потерян даже след: ⁠ Оставил где-то сердце — ⁠ Назад дороги нет.

Monday, 13 September 1943. Kazan#

Set in italic capitals between two rules, right-aligned. The = before the signature is telegraphic convention and is kept.

I left Moscow by the Academy carriage on the evening of the 6th.

Twenty days (16 August – 6 September) in Moscow and Komarovka were muddled and wearisome, though not so useless in the sense of work and of the stabilisation of family affairs as it seemed in the course of those days themselves.

1. I gave lectures on acceptance sampling at the Mathematical Institute and at Bruevich’s. Beyond that I have not yet worked. [Editor’s note:] The Collection of articles on the theory of gunnery — see the Note to the entry of 16 August 1943.

2. After a fashion I finished the collection of articles on the theory of gunnery, out of four articles (2 — mine, 1 — Sveshnikov’s, 1 — Gubler’s, my preface).

3. I wrote my own part (rather tedious, but it seems not useless) of Pusya’s and my little book on Lobachevsky. [Editor’s note:] The little book on Lobachevsky came out in that same year, 1943: P. S. Alexandrov and A. N. Kolmogorov, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. 1793–1943 (Moscow–Leningrad: Gostekhizdat, 1943, 100 pp.); the collection consists of two articles by P. S. Alexandrov (“Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. A short sketch of his life and activity” and “What is non-Euclidean geometry?”) and an article by A. N. Kolmogorov (“Lobachevsky and the mathematical thinking of the nineteenth century”).

4. I fussed a great deal over Yurka’s poems. I even wrote him a whole treatise on the foundations of Russian versification, as an appendix to a letter. The treatise is mentioned, not reproduced; nothing of it survives in the notebook. The verses of the 6 September entry are its occasion.

5. Anya and I in Staropimenovsky moved into the former rooms of Mikhail Semyonovich, settled in there well, celebrated the house-warming, joined with our wedding anniversary, received Seryozha with Alla. [Editor’s note:] A. N. Kolmogorov and A. D. Egorova were married on 3 September 1942.

6. On one of the Sundays (4 September) with Borya[Editor’s note:] Borya — Boris Dmitrievich Egorov, the brother of A. D. Kolmogorova.‘s help we stacked the firewood Pusya had bought. Not the Borya of August, who is B. V. Gnedenko. From here to the end of the month every Borya is Anya’s brother.

7. I spent a very great deal of nervous energy on inducing Anya to occupy herself seriously with getting away from Lyublino. Just before my departure I was at Bruevich’s on this account, and he promised to sign the corresponding letter. Earlier Anya and I had been to S. N. Stroganov’s.

8. I was angry at the drag over Oleg’s “holidays” at Komarovka. I was worried about his flu and the “complications on the heart” from that flu.

On the road and here I have read Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Jewish War”. The modernisation of the ancient world is witty and, apparently, well-grounded: Editions which “sell out” in 300 or 4200 copies; the case of three innocent old men, like the case of the six Negro youths from Scarboro; universities, artillery, telegraphists — all this is sufficiently documented.

Pictures, of the sort of Josephus wandering about Jerusalem with the right of life for 70 people, are very vivid.

But on the whole — a repellent book, and the general conception

is narrow: against a refined Judaism there comes forward only a coarse Rome, and not Turkey,

⁠ there is no Christianity at all.

The philosophy of the word, hostile to the visual and tangible image, is interesting. Josephus himself is extremely repellent, and, to my mind, it is difficult to find a more intelligent antisemitic book than this one. [Translator’s note:] The book is Lion Feuchtwanger’s Der jüdische Krieg (1932), the first novel of his Josephus trilogy, which Kolmogorov read in the Russian translation. Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) was a German-Jewish émigré antifascist, widely translated and celebrated in the USSR, and the novel’s design is philosemitic; Kolmogorov’s verdict inverts the book’s intention. Whether he means that the book is so intelligent that it serves antisemitism despite itself, or that it is intelligent and antisemitic in tendency, the sentence does not resolve. The centred lines are his summary of Feuchtwanger’s conception, which he calls narrow in the same sentence; they are not a schema of his own, and the sentence runs through them without resuming after the second. Iudeistvo in the display is the civilisational term, “Jewry”; iudaizm in the next clause is the religion, “Judaism” — the distinction is his. The “six Negro youths from Scarboro” is almost certainly the Scottsboro case (Alabama, 1931), which concerned nine defendants; the number and the spelling are as printed.

In Kazan the first days I slept myself out, packed things, was angry at the dirt and disorder at Vera and Varya’s, though sometimes I talked well with them, was once at the Kazanka, talked with Anatoly Ivanovich about all sorts of things, and, on the whole, rested and came to myself. [Editor’s note:] Anatoly Ivanovich — A. I. Maltsev.

Yesterday I was at “La Traviata”. They sang decently.

Today I wrote letters to Petya, Pusya, Anya, Nadya.

Today I give a lecture on acceptance sampling at the local branch of the Institute.

I have re-read the preceding pages from 1 August. Interesting. To strain to restore the omitted days (were they not omitted because of Oleg’s flu?) in more detail is not worth while; better simply to write on. A four-sided ruled box. The diary auditing itself, a fortnight in: he reads his own notebook back from its first page and decides against backfilling. The days he means are 16 August – 6 September, which the numbered list above has just covered.

Tuesday, 14 September 1943. Kazan#

Morning. Under the sun’s rays the hoar-frost is melting on the neighbouring roofs. It seems that at last there will be a clear sunny day.

Yesterday I appended to my lecture a little moral about applied mathematics:

Chebotaryov naturally observed that there is no such thing as any consecutive development of mathematics “in layers”, but that the researcher at random “bites into” some point of the region of the “unknown”, separate from everything known before. Vgryzaetsia — to bite or gnaw one’s way in; vgryzat’sia v porodu is what a drill or a miner does to a rock face. Kolmogorov lays down a stratum, Chebotaryov bites through it. Both halves of a mining image, split between two men, in scare quotes on both sides.

In the evening, however, Anatoly Ivanovich and I discussed the question of how long one would have had to wait for this or that mathematical discovery, if it had not been made by precisely the given mathematician.

Pro domo mea, I expressed the opinion that without me the everywhere-divergent Fourier–Lebesgue series would not have been constructed at all in the past 20 years. Pro domo mea — Latin, “as regards myself”; literally, “in defence of my own house”. The editors gloss it in Russian for their reader; the gloss is dropped and this is ours. He writes the surnames in Latin script and hangs a Russian case-ending on them with an apostrophe: ряд Fourier—Lebesgue’а, and below книгу Weyl’я, по Weyl’ю; on 29 September, со Schnellverschluss’ом. English has no equivalent gesture and the device is simply lost in translation. Noted once here.

As a more significant and more long-drawn-out example A.I. puts forward Hilbert’s theorem on a finite system of invariants.

A.I. (following Weyl) told of the general problem of a finite system of invariants for any group of linear transformations.

Wednesday, 15 September 1943. Kazan#

Bekehrte

Bei dem Glanz der Abendröthe Ging ich stillen Wald entlang, Damon sass und blies die Flöte, Dass es von den Felsen klang. ⁠ So la la! le rala! Und er zog mich zu sich nieder Küsste mich so hold, so süss. Und ich sagte: blase wieder! Und der gute Junge blies. ⁠ So la la! le rala! Meine Ruh’ ist nun verloren, Meine Freude floh davon, Und ich hör’ vor meinen Ohren, Immer nur den alten Ton, ⁠ So la la! le rala!

⁠ Goethe

— “By the glow of the evening red / I walked along the quiet wood; / Damon sat and blew the flute, / so that it rang back from the rocks. / So la la! le rala! / And he drew me down to him, / kissed me so sweetly, so sweet. / And I said: play again! / And the good boy played. / So la la! le rala! / My peace is now lost, / my joy has fled away, / and I hear before my ears / always only the old tune, / So la la! le rala!” Goethe’s speaker is a girl; Damon is a conventional shepherd’s name out of Greek pastoral. ⟨Goethes Werke: I, 1 (1887), S. 21⟩, per the editors’ note below. [Editor’s note:] Here J. W. Goethe is quoted from the Soviet one-volume edition (“from Pusya’s little book with the photograph of the flood of the Dnieper at Smolensk”), and the quotations differ somewhat from the edition of 1887, where this poem has the address ⟨Goethes Werke: I, 1 (1887), S. 21⟩. For A. N. Kolmogorov’s own remark on this score see the entry of 10 October 1943. [Translator’s note:] Because he is copying from a pocket Soviet one-volume Goethe, the German of folios 53–55 is textually variant from the Weimar edition, and the variants are given here exactly as printed, unemended: Bekehrte without Goethe’s article Die; Abendröthe; ss for ß throughout; and on the next page Mein Eingemeide for Eingeweide and Alle das Neigen for Alles. The divergence is evidence, not damage, and he remarks on it himself on 10 October 1943. One variant will not construe: Eigenthum‘s first line is printed “Ich weiss, das ich nichts angehört”, where the Weimar text reads “Ich weiß, daß mir nichts angehört” — “I know that nothing belongs to me”; the sidenote there renders that sense.

Eigenthum

Ich weiss, das ich nichts angehört, Als der Gedanke, der ungestört Aus meiner Seele will fliessen, Und jeder günstige Augenblick, Den mich ein liebendes Geschick Von Grund aus lässt geniessen.

⁠ Goethe

— “I know that nothing belongs to me but the thought that wants to flow undisturbed out of my soul, and every favourable moment that a loving destiny lets me enjoy from the ground up.” The first line is given in the Weimar sense; see the note above. ⟨Goethes Werke: I, 1 (1887), S. 103⟩ — the address as printed beneath the poem, though the editors’ page-foot note gives S. 21 for “this poem”, which is most coherently Bekehrte.

Thursday, 16 September 1943. Kazan#

Vier Jahreszeiten (Sommer)

⁠ 19. Grausam erweiset sich Amor an mir! O, spielet, ihr Musen, Mit den Schmerzen, die er, spielend, im Busen erregt! ⁠ 35. Warum bin ich vergänglich, o Zeus? So fragte die Schönheit. Macht’ ich doch, sagte der Gott, nur das Vergängliche schön. ⁠ 36. Und die Liebe, die Blumen, der Thau und die Jugend vernahmen’s; Alle gingen sie weg, weinend, von Jupiters Thron. ⁠ 37. Leben muss man und lieben; es endet Leben und Liebe. Schnittest du, Parze, doch nur beiden die Fäden zugleich!Four Seasons (Summer). — 19. “Cruelly does Amor show himself to me! O play, you Muses, with the pains that he, in play, stirs up in the breast!” 35. “Why am I transient, o Zeus? So asked Beauty. — Why, said the god, I made only the transient beautiful.” 36. “And Love, the flowers, the dew and Youth heard it; all of them went away, weeping, from Jupiter’s throne.” 37. “One must live and love; life and love come to an end. Would that you, Parca, cut both their threads at once!” ⟨Goethes Werke: I, 1 (1887), S. 348, 350⟩. He takes four epigrams out of the sequence and keeps Goethe’s numbers; the two page-references are for the two places he took them from. (Sommer) is letter-spaced in the source — the Russian razryadka, an emphasis device with no English equivalent; it is given as italics here, as everywhere in this edition.

Dieselbe

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt Weiss, was ich leide! Allein und abgetrennt Von aller Freude, Seh’ ich an’s Firmament, Nach jener Seite. Ach! Der mich liebt und kennt. Ist in der Weite. Es schwindelt mir, es brennt Mein Eingemeide. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt. Weiss, was ich leide![In the margin:] This is always sung by Pusya.

⟨Goethes Werke: I, 2 (1888), S. 114⟩. The title “Dieselbe” (“The same woman”) is his source’s running title for Mignon’s song, carried over from the poem preceding it there. [Editor’s note:] What “Pusya always sings” is a well-known romance (to Goethe’s words, in the translation of L. A. Mey, music by P. I. Tchaikovsky (1869)) — Mey’s quatrain runs: “No, only he who has known / the thirst for meetings / will understand how I suffered / and how I suffer still ...” [Translator’s note:] Tchaikovsky’s Op. 6 No. 6, known in English as “None but the Lonely Heart”. Alexandrov habitually sings the Tchaikovsky setting of the Goethe poem Kolmogorov is sitting in Kazan copying out — in the year Kolmogorov is writing Tchaikovsky. Love and Creative Work, dedicated to Alexandrov. The margin note is four words and ties the thread.

These last three days I have been sitting over Goethe’s verses (from Pusya’s little book with the photograph of the flood of the Dnieper at Smolensk).

And the form too is astonishing! I am especially privately proud of the discovery of the unbroken dactyl [bespereboinyi daktil’] in “Rastlose Liebe”: Bez- (“without”) + pereboi. A pereboi is an interruption of a regular series of beats: of an engine, a misfire; of a pulse, an arrhythmia — pereboi v serdtse is the everyday Russian for heart palpitations; and in verse theory, a rhythmic inversion that breaks the established metre. So: a dactyl with no arrhythmia, in a month whose pages carry Oleg’s “complications on the heart”, “poor Oleshka with his heart”, Mandelstam speaking “with pain in his heart”, and an acute endocarditis — in a volume called The quiet sound of the heart. Offered as the translator’s inference, not asserted.

Dem Schnee, dem Regen, Dem Wind entgegen, Im Dampf der Klüfte, Durch Nebeldüfte, ⁠ Immer zu! ⁠ Immer zu! ⁠ Ohne Rast und Ruh’!

Lieber durch Leiden Möcht’ ich mich schlagen, Als so viel Freuden des Lebens ertragen. Alle das Neigen von Herzen zu Herzen, Ach, wie so eigen Schaffet das Schmerzen!

Wie soll ich fliehen? Wälderwärts ziehen? Alles vergebens! Krone des Lebens, Glück ohne Ruh’, Liebe, bist du!

[Translator’s note:] Down the margins of this poem Kolmogorov spells three words vertically, one letter to a line, each stretched to span the region of verse it applies to rather than to label a single line. ЯМБ — iamb — runs down the far left beside “Dem Schnee, dem Regen, / Dem Wind entgegen, / Im Dampf der Klüfte,”. ХОРЕЙ — trochee — is indented to mid-column beside “Immer zu! / Immer zu! / Ohne Rast und Ruh’!”, running two lines past the text. ДАКТИЛЬ — dactyl — is spread down the right margin with irregular gaps across the second and third stanzas, from “Lieber durch Leiden” to “Liebe, bist du!”. The letters cannot be set against English lines without fabricating an alignment the source does not have, and are given here as the figure above. [Editor’s note:] In our publication we give our own translations from Goethe only if it is not clear where the quotations are taken from. In the present case, since the work is named, the translations can be found in any Russian edition of Goethe. [Editor’s note:] We do not give a translation of the verse from “Rastlose Liebe”, since only the form of the verse matters here (metre and rhythm), and that would inevitably be violated in translation. The editors’ abstention is the object-language rule in their own voice, and it is the warrant for this edition’s handling of the Smirnov anthology of 6 September. They decline to translate a poem because only its metre and rhythm matter and translation would violate them. Our English readers are owed the sense all the same, and get it above; the German stays because the German is what he is scanning. ⟨Goethes Werke: I, 1 (1887), S. 84⟩.

I wrote Yura a letter about the translations of Goethe’s verses.

It is possible that this is only a literary form, and that in fact it will not even be sent, as one already has been rejected [zabrakovano], written before my departure from Moscow. The verb is that of brakovka, acceptance sampling — the culling of defective goods — and he is applying it to his own letter, in the same week he lectures on acceptance sampling twice.

Saturday, 18 September 1943. On the road to Moscow#

We travelled on a beautiful, sunny day.

The Volga, the Chuvash oak forests, the Observatory stay in the memory.

I read Vera Goethe’s verses — she knows them and loves them, with a good selection.

Sunday, 26 September 1943. Moscow#

Early morning. I sit at the open window in the Moscow room.

By the little piece of sky visible on the right — pink clouds in little fleeces. Anya is still asleep.

Over the floor of the room is scattered the potato brought yesterday. On the table a disorder, among which the recently acquired “Problems of Form in the Fine Arts” of Hildebrand and “Bondage and Bondmen in the Muscovite State in the 17th Century” of Yakovlev. Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (1893); A. I. Yakovlev, Kholopstvo i kholopy v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVII v. (1943).

A goose, rather [brown?], with its middle taken out — it too stands on the table and serves as a stand for pens and pencils:

Yesterday may be counted a success. In the morning with Anya, Borya and Tatyana (spouse No. 2 of B. Egorov) we dug the potatoes on the Sparrow Hills. [Translator’s note:] This band of the page is not typeset: two pen drawings of a goose — the first hollowed out into an open oval, the second with two pens stuck into it — and three lines of Kolmogorov’s hand between them, reproduced photographically and therefore invisible to the scan’s text layer. The colon introduces the second drawing: text and drawing are one sentence. Tatyana, whom the next typeset paragraph discusses, is named nowhere but here. The word after “rather” will not resolve at any available resolution between buryi (“brown”) and burnyi (“stormy, wild”); sense favours the first, the strokes may favour the second, and it wants the original notebook. The Kholmogory Goose is his own emblem and his signature: here it is a piece of furniture on his desk, holding his pens.

Tatyana — a creature with painted little lips and a snub-nosed, though comely, physiognomy. On her return from the trip (Krasnodar, the Kuban stanitsas, Gelendzhik on the eve of the taking of Novorossiysk, Rostov-on-Don) she tries very hard to “enter into the family”. She has a good attitude to Dima. By the same thing is explained her readiness to go with us too. Having got herself up in a ski suit and flirting with her own appearance with a spade, [Editor’s note:] Tatyana — B. D. Egorov’s second wife. Dima — B. D. Egorov’s son by his first marriage.

she worked, however, well. With enthusiasm she told of the pleasures of camp and country life; asserted that she wants to live in the provinces (“if Boris agrees”).

The autumn day, damp and somewhat misty on the Sparrow Hills, was also very fine. And poor Oleshka with his heart and the prohibition of physical work stood all day in the queue at the Chief Administration of the Militia for permission for Vera Yakovlevna’s residence registration. [Editor’s note:] What is meant is the final return to Moscow from the evacuation to Kazan, where until this time Vera Yakovlevna and Varvara Yakovlevna had remained. The August errand, completed: on 1 August the second of his immediate tasks was “to bring Vera and Varya”. Oleshka is a new diminutive; August has only Oleg.

We caught a lorry and brought everything home (for 400 r.). I immediately changed and went off to the House of Scientists.

[Editor’s note:] At the House of Scientists there took place at that time the voting for the election of full members (academicians) for the Physico-Mathematical Division of the USSR Academy of Sciences. A.N. gives the results of that voting, round by round, here in the form of a table. The source underlines the count with which each man was elected; underlining is rendered as bold here and throughout the three election tables. The Smirnov of these tallies is V. I. Smirnov, the Leningrad analyst, elected academician in 1943 — not Yura Smirnov, the Little Ostrich of 6 September, who was twenty-one and an undergraduate. The diary settles it itself on 28 September, where the initials are given.

With Papaleksi and Fesenkov I was on the tellers’ committee.

In snatches during the sitting I dined.

Although the result of the elections is satisfactory, the impression from our public life [obshchestvennost’] is a sad one. And not only from the group now ruling (A. F. Ioffe), but from the old men too, of the sort of Bernstein and Mandelstam, who cannot rise above defending their personal candidates by every means. O.Yu[Editor’s note:] O.Yu. — Otto Yulievich Schmidt.. was effective, but demagogic (in the question of Kurchatov). Obshchestvennost’ is the collective body of the professionally engaged, the “public” acting as a body — not publika, the audience, and not obshchestvo, society at large.

We supped with Kapitsa and Sobolev. With Kapitsa it is all the same easier to come to an agreement on a line of principle.

At the general assembly the only interesting thing was Asratian’s speech with a criticism of L. S. Stern (whose works were highly assessed in Bruevich’s report) and Frumkin’s subsequent proposal to approve the report only “in the main”. On this occasion Baikov showed himself a coarse and unintelligent boss, but Bruevich and Komarov turned out to be cleverer.

Monday, 27 September 1943#

The election of full members.#

Alikhanov — 77 of 95 ( — 18 party members?) Ivanov 55 Korneichuk 52 Sergeev-Tsensky — 56[Editor’s note:] ⟨Here are given the results of the elections at the general assembly of the Academy.⟩ A block set between two rules. His parenthetical aside is as printed.

S. N. Bernstein’s speech and the shameful spectacle Abram Fedorovich made. Pozorishche — pozor, “shame”, with an augmentative suffix; but the archaic pozorishche is “a spectacle” (from the root “to see”), and the older sense is still audible. Ioffe’s performance was both a sight and a disgrace.

In the evening — the enlarged expert commission. Unanimously they earmarked Kurchatov for the second place in nuclear physics. [Editor’s note:] ⟨On the supplementary election of full members.⟩ [Translator’s note:] Kurchatov had lost the ordinary ballot the day before, placing fourth in all three rounds; the expert commission now creates a second nuclear-physics seat and puts him in it unanimously, and on 28 September he is elected 13 of 14. This is the documented 1943 engineering of his election, and he was by then head of the Soviet atomic project.

For the second place in applied mathematics, after a short discussion, Abram Fedorovich’s roll-call vote proceeded thus:

Vavilov — Smirnov

Mandelstam — Smirnov

Bernstein — Smirnov

I — Lavrentiev

Kapitsa — Smirnov, since Lavrentiev is a Ukrainian academician

Sobolev — abstains

Fock — Smirnov

Vul — abstains

Ioffe — Smirnov.Every name in the roll-call is underlined in the source, including his own — the same device that on the previous folio marks who was elected, here marking who is speaking. It is invisible to the scan’s text layer in both places.

I declared after this that, to avoid splitting the vote, I would support Smirnov.

Then I waited for Anya a long time senselessly, in order to go to Sergei Ivanovich Preobrazhensky’s, thinking that she was listening to the reports of Obruchev and Pavlovsky.

Tuesday, 28 September 1943#

The assembly of the Division at the Neskuchny.#

I was somewhat late. Before my arrival Ivan[Editor’s note:] Ivan Matveevich — I. M. Vinogradov. Matveevich had spoken sharply against V. I. Smirnov and for Mikh. Aleks. Lavrentiev. [Editor’s note:] The Neskuchny ⟨palace⟩ — so A.N. calls the building of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences at 14 Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya Street. The adjoining part of the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest has always been called the Neskuchny Garden.

A single large brace groups the three counts against “of 14” — the device recurs at folios 78 and 207. [Editor’s note:] ⟨The supplementary election of full members in the Division of Physico-Mathematical Sciences.⟩ Three tallies for one election, three different bodies: 26 September is the House of Scientists ballot, 27 September the general assembly of the Academy, and this the Division’s supplementary election [dovybory] — an additional round filling the seats left unfilled. The brace is what explains the arithmetic: 13 + 11 + 6 = 30 out of 14, because each elector votes for more than one candidate.

The candidates for corresponding membership had been arranged the day before thus:

The Alexandrov of the Physics column is A. P. Alexandrov, the physicist — not Pusya, who is P. S. Alexandrov and is named in his own right on 13, 14 and 16 September. The Keldysh is M. V. Keldysh, not his sister L. V. Keldysh, also a mathematician.

S. N. Bernstein spoke for Kuzmin, considering him no worse than Petrovsky and referring to A. N. Krylov’s opinion. I, for my part, gave my opinion of him as the strongest mathematician in the USSR of a purely “sporting” type (number theory, trigonometric series, interpolations and mechanical quadratures — the latter, however, in a style far from the needs of practice).

At the general assembly of the Division Nikolai Mitrofanovich ⟨Krylov⟩ spoke yet again, extremely plaintively and at the same time pretentiously, for N. N. Bogolyubov. It was I, again, who answered (extremely amiably and gently). Two Krylovs on one page: A. N. Krylov the naval architect, cited above for his opinion of Kuzmin, and N. M. Krylov, the Ukrainian mathematician, whose surname the editors supply in the body in angle brackets.

In the first round were elected:

Petrovsky Kikoin Mikhailov Kibel Kobeko Keldysh Alexandrov

It remained to elect

a) Andronov or Kravets b) Orlov or Mansurov.

Mandelstam, though with pain in his heart, spoke out for Kravets, which decided the matter, notwithstanding my own, Sergei Lvovich’s and Lev Semyonovich’s speeches.

In the second round were elected:

Kravets, Orlov.

In the evening Anya and I were at Sergei Ivanovich’s. He is a sensible and pleasant man, a doctor, apparently decent, but no more. He approved the appeal to Tareev, supported sponging-down with room-temperature water and moderate hardening [Editor’s note:] Sergei Ivanovich — S. I. Preobrazhensky.

and training in the future. The acute endocarditis he ascribes to the flu. It is astonishing how far both Sergei Ivanovich and his spouse look at everything through Polina Alexandrovna’s eyes (and Elizaveta Rodionovna likewise!). [Editor’s note:] Elizaveta Rodionovna — the mother of D. D. Romashov (Dimetrusya).

I got excessively heated and expressed my whole attitude to Polina Alexandrovna. Needlessly, perhaps, I also declared my intentions of taking Polina Alexandrovna to live with us. The latter, however, called forth warm sympathy.

Wednesday, 29 September 1943#

The supplementary election of academicians and the confirmation of corresponding members at the general assembly.#

My speech on the subject of mechanics, Ilyushin and Chetaev.

A. Ya. Vyshinsky’s remark: “A strange speech!” (The result of a confusion of two Ilyushins? — if so, then everything has been explained to Vyshinsky by Nikolai Ivanovich Muskhelishvili and others.). Helpless speeches (on the subject of Chetaev) by Terpigorev and Galerkin. The two Ilyushins are A. A. Ilyushin (1911–1998), the mechanician, who headed the Moscow University chair of elasticity theory and was elected a corresponding member in this very election, and S. V. Ilyushin (1894–1977), the aircraft designer. Kolmogorov’s conjecture is that Vyshinsky took the one for the other. The question mark is his. A. Ya. Vyshinsky (1883–1954) — Procurator General of the USSR and the prosecutor of the Moscow Trials, at this date a Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and an academician since 1939.

On a separate vote I insist only in application to Chetaev: 7 against, including Orbeli, 17 — abstained.

In the evening Oleg at the reports of Terenin, Kapitsa and Speransky.

I preferred Shirinsky’s concert.

The first half from Asafiev, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

In the second half Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky. The piano part was performed by Jacobson — very beautiful, “with the face of a medusa”, a very spiteful one, according to the remark of S. N. Nyberg, who was sitting next to me. Specially for the Tchaikovsky a handsome sixteen-year-old fair-haired boy in a short jacket with a Schnellverschluss came to turn the music for her. Schnellverschluss — German, a zip fastener. The editors gloss it in Russian in the body; the gloss is dropped and this is ours.

The “Variations on a Rococo Theme” (for cello) in the first redaction made a great impression.

With them I left, not staying for the Mussorgsky.