Vadim, aka Vadim Anatolievich Yankov, was a mathematician by education, but in real life he was a topologist, philologist, philosopher, polyglot, mathematician, physicist, chemist, brainiac, or, to put it more succinctly and affectionately—an –ist and an –ian. He was also one of the most talented and erudite people I’d ever known. My brother Dato named him Cos, and this is what we Georgians called him. Dato loved him deeply, I believed he was a post-Nietzschian übermensch, Zhora argued with him constantly, and Johnny chuckled softly at his expense.
Arrested in 1982, Vadim Yankov was sentenced to four years in a maximum-security prison and three years of internal exile. After finishing his prison sentence, he was exiled to Buryat ASSR.
Even though he was born in Taganrog, in prison Vadim was the star of the Moscow group, which included other intellectuals, such as Sasha Chernov, Zhora Khomizuri, Misha Ryvkin, and Yasha Nefediev, and was an integral part of our political prison. (ThoughVadim was the true star of the Moscow group, he wasn’t its leader. Moscow political prisoners never had a leader in any of the political prisons. The same was true of the Georgian prisoners.)
Vadim knew English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. He was fully versed in questions of general and Indo-European linguistics, especially the Romance languages. He was familiar with old and new Georgian linguistics, often quoting works by the Georgian linguists Tamaz Gamkrelidze, Givi Machavariani, and Bakar Gigineishvili. He could talk for hours about the systems of sonants and the ablaut in Old Georgian. He knew Ancient Greek so well that during our joint seminars, which we gave in turn for anyone who was interested, Vadim read excerpts from Homer in impeccable hexameter, and I don’t remember him ever making a single mistake. (Specialists in classical philology would understand the level of knowledge this requires.)
Vadim was a friend of Merab Mamardashvili and also a “Socratesian,” in the broadest meaning of this word. Like Socrates, he put writing above speaking, however, he used to joke that the Latin idiom “Nulla dies sine linea” (no day without a line) sounded different for him—“Nulla dies cum linea” (no day with a line, meaning that there shouldn’t be a day for writing even a single line, or never write anything). Vadim’s wife suffered the most from this principle when, in response to her long letters, she’d receive the shortest possible letter filled with enigmas—her husband would spare no time in creating these laconically expressed paradoxes.
After many elaborate tests, I finally concluded that Vadim knew practically everything we would ever need to know. The entire prison population addressed their most controversial questions to him. Arnold Anderson, the father of Soviet multivitamins, consulted Vadim on vitamins and bio-supplements; Yuri Badzyo, the leader of the Ukrainian Social-Democrats, wanted him to clarify the meaning of History; Zhora Khomizuri, our chief geologist, passionately argued with him about geosynclines; Dmitro Mazur, one of the leading theoreticians of Ukrainian nationalism, talked to Vadim about positivism, which Dmitro himself considered to be totally unacceptable; Borya Manilovich, the psychologist, psychiatrist, poet, and underground Zionist, asked him to reveal secret arms information about the Israeli Army; Kan-Chan-Kho, the Japanese spy and Korean Communist, conversed with him on the subject of yellow dog as an ideal dish; and the Balkarian Ruslan Ketenchiyev asked him for a futurological analysis of the situation in the North Caucasus. I can say with certainty that in our political prison, Vadim Yankov, omnipotent and always ready to help, embodied in the pre-Internet era the combined capabilities of Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia.
His wife was Armenian, and he had a lot of respect for the Armenian people, but, as he used to say, he loved Georgians and had many Georgian friends in Moscow as well as in Tbilisi. I once asked him: “You know so many languages, but why, out of respect for your wife, wouldn’t you learn Armenian?” And he answered me: “If I learn Armenian, I’ll have to learn Georgian, as well as Mingrelian and Svan, and then Abkhaz, Ossetian, and the North Caucasian languages. How can I handle so many?” I don’t know if this was what he said to his wife, but the fact remains: Only in prison did he show any interest in the Armenian and Georgian alphabets and asked Rafik and me to teach him. He quickly learned all three Georgian alphabets and could read better than Khomizuri.
Vadim was in charge of the special committee that planned cultural and educational activities. (In the end, I volunteered for this committee too, becoming its youngest member.) The committee gave me the assignment of preparing a lecture series about the poet Vazha-Pshavela. I was pleased. “It’s great that you know who Vazha-Pshavela is!” I said. Cos then responded, trying to shame me: “How could we not know Vazha-Pshavela when he was a poet of cosmic scale and a philosopher of skepticism? And his Aluda Ketelauri was the first dissident! How could someone with any knowledge of Russian literature not know the works of Vazha when Pasternak, Zabolotsky, and Spassky translated him?!”
As is always the case with talented people, there were many strange things about Vadim. One such feature was his relationship to his own ethnicity. The child of a Russian father and a Jewish mother, he identified himself as Russian one moment and as Jewish the next. Most importantly, there was no logic in the choice of his ethnicity du jour, and no one could predict when he would become Russian, and when Jewish. Vicious tongues joked that when Jews were being harassed, he’d become Russian, and when it was beneficial to be Jewish, he would deny his Russian origins and become a Jew. Well-wishers, on the other hand, admired the fact that Yankov would declare himself a Jew as soon as harassment of Jews began. The prison administration was composed entirely of aggressive anti-Semites, and among the inmates, the anti-Semites were in the majority, with the Ukrainian Banderovtsy and the Baltic war criminals heading the list. In such an environment, proclaiming yourself a Jew, even from time to time, was an act of heroism.
I liked to invite Cos to share my meager table, but there was one unexpected difficulty I had to face. At times, with a deep sigh, Cos would refuse half a piece of salo, be it Russian, Ukrainian, or Lithuanian, that I’d managed to score, while on other occasions, with the same deep sigh, he would crave it. In the end, this problem was resolved through the active efforts of his namesake, the hijacker Vadim Arenberg, who openly preached Zionism but was secretly a KGB informant working for the administration. In return for his not-so-kosher actions, a few Jewish yarmulkes appeared in the prison, and so it became fairly easy to detect Vadim’s ethnicity du jour: When he was Jewish, he’d wear his yarmulke, even inside, but when he was Russian, there was no yarmulke in sight.
During the time of Arenberg’s affair with Zionism, Vadim, wearing his yarmulke, would always sit at the same table during dinner as Yasha Nefediev, Grisha Feldman, and, of course, Arenberg himself. Once, the administration, led by the controller Trifonov, burst into the dining room during dinner. “Hats off!” Trifonov yelled. There were two Muslims wearing skullcaps, which they instantly removed. Yankov, Yasha, and Grisha removed their yarmulkes as well, but Arenberg and Ryvkin kept theirs on, ignoring Trifonov’s second order. As a result, Misha Ryvkin was arrested for disobedience, sentenced to eight additional years in prison, and transferred from our camp to the hole. But the professional provocateur Arenberg was left in our camp until, unable to tolerate the atmosphere of total hatred any longer, he requested a transfer to the Perm political prison. From that time on, Vadim Yankov stopped wearing his yarmulke, and I stopped offering him any salo until he invited me to share a piece of black bread, a small piece of Lithuanian smoked salo, and a quarter of a garlic clove.
There was one question that caused serious disagreement between Vadim Yankov and the Georgians. Vadim couldn’t grasp why we were so eager to leave the Soviet Union to form our own independent state. “Don’t you think it’s better to combine our efforts and defeat Communism, build a liberal democracy together, then go merrily our separate ways?” Vadim used to ask. And we would always answer: “Give us our country back, and we’ll take care of the Georgian Reds ourselves.”
Misha Polyakov proposed his own solution—take Russia out of the Soviet Union. But this didn’t change anything for Yankov: “If you exit the Soviet Union, Russia would lose its chance for democratic development. The nationalists would take power and find that the only possible solution for Russia would be to go to war with you. Though, it wouldn’t be a war with nuclear weapons, just tanks and jets,” Yankov said.
I told him, by that time Georgia would be a member of the UN and NATO, and no one would dare start a war with us. “You have a big problem,” Misha said. “Abkhazia!” Needless to say, our visions of the future didn’t change.
Despite our different visions of the future, Yankov always tried to find positive and peaceful common ground, sometimes even by experimental means. It was his idea to begin the Socratic dialogues, where the presenter would appear in the role of Socrates, and the listeners would be his opponents or his students. I remember one of the lecture-dialogues especially well because I gave a talk to the hungry inmates about the highest achievement of Georgian cuisine—satsivi. To this very day, my former prisonmates tell me, or write to me, that never since have they had the chance to see a spectacle even remotely close to the one about satsivi that Vadim Yankov and I staged in our prison camp.
In that dialogue, I played the role of the ingenuous Socrates who asked the experienced Sophist Vadim Yankov, an expert in international cuisine, questions, and in the end Yankov admitted that there was nothing better than satsivi. I can’t reproduce our entire dialogue, but this is approximately how it went:
Socrates (Me): What do you think, Anaxagoras, how many nations are there in the world?
Anaxagoras (Vadim Yankov): It depends on what you mean, my dear Socrates. If you only count nations with governments, then it’s no more than two hundred, but if you mean ethno-linguistic groups, then it’s about five thousand.
Socrates: Let’s talk about nations with governments. So, you think there are two hundred of them?
Anaxogoras: There are fewer of them now, but when certain separatists win, there will be two hundred and, possibly, even more.
Socrates: What features distinguish nations from one another?
Anaxogoras: According to one short sadist with a mustache, nations differ in terms of language, religion, territory, and culture.
Socrates: I didn’t think you’d quote that sadist, Anaxogoras.
Anaxogoras: He’s from your clan, so why are you picking on me?
Socrates: What do you mean by culture?
Anaxogoras: Everything that is created and cultivated by human hands—colo, colui, coltum, colere—this is Latin for “to cultivate.”
Socrates: Is cuisine a part of culture?
Anaxogoras: I don’t think so, my dear Socrates—culture deals with higher matters.
Socrates: Do people prepare food?
Anaxogoras: Yes, they do, Socrates.
Socrates: Do they do it with their hands?
Anaxogoras: In general, yes, my dear Socrates.
Socrates: What do you mean by in general?
Anaxogoras: They make wine by smashing grapes with their feet, and some tribes use their feet to tenderize meat.
Socrates: But most of the time, they use their hands, do they not?
Anaxogoras: Precisely, my dear Socrates.
Socrates: That means that food is created and prepared by human hands, does it not?
Anaxogoras: Of course.
Socrates: But isn’t that your definition of culture?
Anaxogoras: Therefore, it follows that cuisine is part of culture, my dear Socrates.
Socrates: How many nations did you say there were, my omniscient Anaxogoras?
Anaxogoras: Fewer than two hundred.
Socrates: How many cuisines do we know?
Anaxogoras: About twenty.
Socrates: Do you count Thai and Chinese cuisines as one?
Anaxogoras: Not at all, my dear Socrates!
Socrates: Do you include Iberian cuisine in that twenty?
Anaxogoras: Twice, my dear Socrates—Eastern and Western.
Socrates: How many Spanish restaurants do you have in Moscow?
Anaxogoras: None, my dear Socrates.
Socrates: Argentinian?
Anaxogoras: None.
Socrates: And Mexican ones?
Anaxogoras: Not even one, my dear Socrates.
Socrates: Eastern Iberian?
Anaxogoras: Too many to count, Socrates! And Aragvi is the only one worth going to.
Papayan: Aragvi’s chef is Armenian.
Socrates: You see! Is Georgian cuisine included in the world’s ten great cuisines?
Anaxogoras: Without a doubt, my dear Socrates!
Socrates: Now, Anaxogoras, please list these ten cuisines in alphabetical order so as not to offend anyone.
Anaxogoras: What could be easier? Afghan, Chinese, French, Georgian, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Spanish, and Thai.
Socrates: Georgians say that their best dish is either khachapuri or satsivi. Let’s assume it’s satsivi. What can you say about other outstanding dishes, Anaxogoras?
Anaxogoras: For Afghanis, it would be kebab koobideh, for Spaniards—paella, for Indians—curry, for Japanese—sushi, for Italians—pizza, for Mexicans—tacos, for the Thai—tom yum with shrimp, for the French—escargot, and for the Chinese—tiger and dragon stir-fry.
Socrates: Let’s start from the end. When you speak of the tiger-dragon dish, by dragon do you mean snake?
Anaxogoras: Precisely, my dear Socrates.
Socrates: Do you know many nations in the world that eat snake?
Kan-Chan-Kho: We Koreans eat everything below man on the food chain, including snakes and monkeys.
Anaxogoras: No, if we don’t count the Far East and mythical wood spirits.
Socrates: Then it can’t be an international dish.
Anaxogoras: It appears so, my dear Socrates.
Kan-Chan-Kho: It’s because you’ve never tried it.
Socrates: Does everybody eat escargot?
Anaxogoras: No, and, therefore, it can’t be an international dish either.
Socrates: What would you say about fans of raw fish, Anaxogoras?
Anaxogoras: I believe they are in the minority.
Socrates: What are the chances for sushi?
Japanese Spy Orlov: Sushi isn’t raw, it’s not a completely raw dish.
Anaxogoras: Sushi’s chances are minimal, my dear Socrates.
Socrates: Are there any shrimp in the Volga River?
Anaxogoras: Half the world doesn’t even know what shrimp are.
Socrates: Can you imagine, Anaxogoras, tom yum without shrimp and coconut milk?
Anaxogoras: No, I can’t, my dear Socrates.
Socrates: Think hard, my dear Anaxogoras, and tell me which is better—Spanish paella or well-prepared Uzbek pilaf?
Anaxogoras: I can’t lie in the presence of Rakhimov—Uzbek pilaf, obviously.
Socrates: That means paella is not suited to be an international dish. What do we have left?
Anaxogoras: The magnificent five: Afghani kebab koobideh, Indian curry, Italian pizza, Mexican tacos, and Georgian satsivi.
Socrates: Don’t you think that there are similarities among Italian pizza, Georgian khachapuri, and Russian vatrushka?
Anaxogoras: You know, my dear Socrates, how I feel about khachapuri. Let’s leave pizza out of it—I don’t like it very much.
Socrates: But what is the nature of the Mexican taco? Isn’t it like solyanka? I think it’s almost the same but with more ingredients. But isn’t solyanka better?
Donskoy: I agree, solyanka is better. The pickles alone make it worth it!
Socrates: Let’s take a moment to discuss Afghan kebab and Georgian shashlik, Armenian khorovats, and the pan-Soviet shashlik. Have you ever made shashlik, my dear Anaxogoras?
Anaxogoras: Of course! Didn’t we make shashlik all the time in Peredelkino?
Socrates: But then, koodibeh is what we Georgians call kebab, and Afghan kebab can’t be better than the kind from Azerbaijan.
Anaxogoras: You’re right, my dear Socrates. Anything I can cook well just can’t be the best dish in the world. Not to mention the fact that Armenian khorovats is better than any shashlik.
Socrates: Now, let the competition begin for dishes with nuts. Curry or satsivi?
Anaxogoras: That’s a tough choice. They’re very similar.
Socrates: Tell me, Anaxogoras, what meat is used for curry?
Anaxogoras: Chicken.
Socrates: And for satsivi?
Anaxogoras: Turkey.
Socrates: Which bird is larger?
Anaxogoras: My dear Socrates, what point are you trying to make?
Socrates: Which one is thicker, satsivi or curry?
Anaxogoras: Satsivi.
Socrates: Which one has more nuts?
Anaxogoras: Satsivi.
Socrates: What will fill you up more: one bowl of satsivi or one bowl of curry?
Anaxogoras: Satsivi, my dear Socrates. I admit, satsivi is the best dish in the world. Now you have to tell us how to make it.
The recipe for satsivi then followed. Hungry people wept and congratulated us on the success of our first Socratic dialogue. Yankov and I, emotionally spent and artistically exhausted, drank two thermoses of strong black tea and swore that, after leaving the prison, we’d find the best curry and satsivi cooks and then, on the culinary field of battle, determine the winner. (This simple gastronomical dream of ours has yet to be fulfilled.)
As I mentioned before, Vadim was close to an expert on Ancient Greek, but in some ways he was more of an amateur than a professional. For example, he theoretically understood accusativus cum infinitive, but in a text, he might miss it. In the prison, he had a copy of the Ancient Greek textbook by Sobolevsky and had read all the texts a thousand times and knew them inside and out. This is why I decided to give him a real gift for his birthday. In the Books-by-Mail system, there was a famous books series, Teubneriana, from the German Democratic Republic, that had all the works of Ancient Greek literature in red covers, and all the works of Roman literature in blue. Despite my dubious return address, the Leningrad House of Books accepted my order and sent me a red volume of Euripides that included the Ancient Greek scholarly edition of Alcestis, one of the author’s masterpieces. I can’t even describe Yankov’s emotions when he received this gift of the original, unabridged Greek text. In addition to having a reasonable dictionary in Sobolevsky’s textbook, Yankov also had me (a certified specialist with almost a Ph.D.) as a bonus!
Before all that happened, Vadim had tested me on his own “life paradigm,” as he called it. “Imagine that God gave you just enough water to cross a desert, not one drop more, not one drop less. You’re crossing the desert when a thirsty man approaches and asks for some water. What do you do?” Vadim asked. I answered that I’d give the man some water and we’d continue the journey together. “In this case, both of you will die. There won’t be enough water, and you won’t be able to leave the desert,” Vadim said. “No, God gave you life in the form of water, and you have to save it for yourself. You shouldn’t let another man drink it!” I answered that I would share my water anyway, and the argument ended there.
Vadim dove into the book I gave him. The idea of Alcestis captivated him—making sacrifices for someone you love, dying in someone else’s place. He was mad at Euripides, whose ideas didn’t align with his “life paradigm,” but Alcestis, the literary progenitor of Antigone, attracted him intensely and at the same time irritated him tremendously. He said that Admetus’s elderly mother was right to not die in place of her son, and that his father was right as well when, following the paradigm, he, too, refused to die in place of his son. “But how could his wife, Alcestis, so young, not save her God-given life? I don’t understand it! I don’t want to understand it!” Yankov exclaimed.
This was probably the reason Aristotle called Euripides the most tragic poet. “How could he write something like that, how was it even possible?” Vadim kept asking himself. “If we assume that such a sacrifice is possible, then we shouldn’t compare Alcestis with Antigone, who died for an idea.” And here Vadim quoted the first line of the wonderful French song “Mourir pour des idées” by Georges Brassens: Mourir pour des idées, l’idée est excellente [To die for your ideas—is an excellent idea].
Once, Boris Manilovich suggested we organize an evening of poetry when every inmate would have five minutes to present his favorite poet. In those five minutes, a participant should be able to recite a verse or an excerpt from a poem and, in a few words, tell us about the poet’s work or about the participant’s own relationship with the poet. To keep track of the time, we used an hourglass that had been quickly made by the prison’s chief handyman Rafael Papayan. Zhora and Misha presented a husband and wife: Khomizuri introduced Nikolay Gumilyov with a masterpiece about a worker who made a bullet that pierced the poet’s chest, and Polyakov introduced Anna Akhmatova’s poem “The Sentence,” from Requiem (“Today I have so much to do . . . ”).16 The evening’s organizer chose his favorite poet, Osip Mandelstam (“For whom winter is arak and blue-eyed punch”), while I chose Galaktion Tabidze’s “Mary” (“You were married that night, Mary! Mary, that night your eyes were dimmed . . . ”),17 Rafik—“Liturgy for Three Voices” by Paruyr Sevak, Heliy Donskoy—Alexander Blok (the appropriate, but sad, “A Young Girl Sang in a Church Choir”), Sasha Chernov—Boris Pasternak’s “Sunrise” (“You were my life sometime ago . . . ”), and Vadim—Marina Tsvetaeva.
That day, Vadim surprised us all. Usually composed and ironic, he recited with rare emotion several absolutely amazing excerpts from “The Poem of the End” by the great Marina Tsvetaeva. He finished his presentation by reminding us about the tragic events of the last year of her life. When pushed to the edge of despair and starving, Tsvetaeva was about to take a job as a cleaning lady in the House of Writers, which her few remaining friends were able to find for her, when the great poet learned that she wouldn’t be getting even that job. It turned out the famous writer Ilya Ehrenburg thought there was a worthier candidate. And with that, her fate was sealed. Vadim mentioned the last place she lived, Yelabuga—a tragic little town in the middle of nowhere that no one had heard of before, but that Marina Tsvetaeva made immortal in the same way that Napoleon immortalized Waterloo as the site of his only defeat. Few remember Austerlitz, Marengo, Rivoli, and the pyramids, but no one can ever forget Waterloo. Her exuberant life in Moscow, Koktebel, Berlin, Prague, and Paris ended with her quiet death in Yelabuga as a reproach to all the living.
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.
There were ten seconds left at the end of his presentation, during which Cos managed to say that these final words from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” resonate with the final lines of Tsvetateva’s “The Poem of the End”:
So, into the hollow waves,
Of darkness—hunched over—
Without a sound, without a trace,
As a ship sinks.18
At that moment, the last grain of sand in Papayan’s hourglass fell.
Vadim had never shown any love for poetry before, let alone for the poetry of Tsvetaeva. After the performance, almost everyone changed their opinion of Vadim, who was definitely a science-driven man (our poet and psychologist Manilovich was fond of the term “science-driven.” It had only been used in the technological and industrial spheres until perestroika, when it became more broadly applied). Most excited of all was Zhora, who made no effort to hide his feelings. Despite the centuries-long competition between the two capitals, the leading Petersburger Misha Polyakov had to admit: “Wow, Vadim surprised us all.”
Johnny was the only person who wasn’t moved by the tears welling up in Yankov’s eyes during his talk about Tsvetaeva. “He’s an actor,” he tried to explain to me. “Why are you so surprised? You Gurians are very strange people. As soon as you see a tear, you’re ready to forgive everything! This is the same man who, according to his idiotic ‘life paradigm,’ wouldn’t give you any water in the desert and would leave you to die. Didn’t Solzhenitsyn say that in prison true heroism is not finding some extra soup, but sharing that soup with someone else?” How could I explain to the skeptical Johnny that by quoting the final lines of “The Poem of the End,” Vadim had shared a part of his soul?
In 1986, Vadim Yankov was released from prison and sent into exile. According to prison tradition, he gave away all his possessions before he left. I got his library, almost one hundred books, among them, the Ancient Greek textbook and Alcestis by Euripides, its pages covered with his notes and comments in Ancient Greek, documenting his sharp polemic with the writer.
Today, the seventy-four-year-old Vadim Yankov teaches at the State Humanitarian University of Russia, giving lectures on the history of philosophy and mathematics. He has forgotten his old principle, Nulla dies cum linea; however, he didn’t go back to the classical sine linea—he wrote and published several articles. Experts most often cite his article “The Structure of Matter According to Anaxogoras.” During the Yeltsin era, he attempted to go into politics but lost when he ran for the State Duma—he ended up behind a communist from Zuganov’s party and a liberal-democrat from Zhirinovsky’s party. In my opinion, the Russian Duma is not ready for such high standards. Just like in our conversation about the final year of Marina Tsvetaeva’s life, Vadim said that in Russia (and in neighboring countries as well), there is always “a worthier candidate.”
16 Akhmatova, Anna. “The Sentence.” In Poems. Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, Zephyr Press, 1990, p. 105.
17 Tabidze, Galaktion. Discover Galaktion. Galaktion Tabidze: A Selection of His Poems in a New Parallel Translation. Translated by Innes Mirabishvili, Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2017, p. 59.
18 Tsvetaeva, Marina. The Poem of the End. Translated by Nina Kossman, Ardis, 1998, p. 93.