DMITRY Petrovich Chepyzhin, Viktor’s teacher, played an important role in his life.
One of the most gifted of Russian physicists, a scientist with a worldwide reputation, he had big hands, broad shoulders and a broad forehead; he looked like an elderly blacksmith.
At the age of fifty, with the help of his two student sons, he had built a log house out in the country. He trimmed the heavy logs himself. He dug a well nearby. He built a bathhouse and cleared a track through the forest.
He enjoyed telling people about an old man, a village doubting Thomas who had, for a long time, refused to recognize Chepyzhin’s competence as a carpenter. And then one day this old man had clapped him on the shoulder, as if acknowledging him as a brother, as a fellow skilled labourer, and said slyly, “All right, my boy, you come and build me a little shed. And don’t worry—I’ll pay you fair and square.”
But Chepyzhin preferred not to spend his summers in this house. Usually he and his wife, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, went on long, two-month journeys together. They had been to Lake Baikal and to the far-eastern taiga; they had been in the heights of Tian Shan near Naryn and on the shore of Lake Teletskoye in the Altay Mountains. They had set off from Moscow in a rowing boat and gone down the Moscow, Oka and Volga rivers as far as Astrakhan. They had explored the Meshchersk forest beyond Ryazan and they had walked through the Bryansk forest from Karachev to Novgorod-Seversky. They had gone on journeys like this as students, and they had continued even after reaching the age when you are expected to stay in a sanatorium or a dacha rather than to be trekking through forests or mountains with a pack on your back.
Chepyzhin did not like hunting and fishing, but he always kept a detailed diary during these journeys. One section, titled “Lyric,” was devoted to the beauty of nature, to sunsets and sunrises, to night-time storms in forests, to starry and moonlit nights. The only person to whom he ever read these descriptions was his wife.
In the autumn, when he chaired meetings in the Physics Institute or sat on the presidium during sessions of the Academy of Sciences, Chepyzhin looked strangely out of place amid white-haired colleagues and already greying students who had spent the summer in a house of recreation—in Barvikha or Uzkoye—or in a dacha in Luga, in Sestroretsk on the Gulf of Finland or in the countryside not far from Moscow. He still had barely a strand of grey in his dark hair, and he would sit there frowning severely, supporting his large head on a brown, sinewy fist while he ran his other hand over his broad chin and thin, sunburnt cheeks. His was the kind of deep tan more often seen on navvies, soldiers or turf cutters. It was the tan of someone who seldom sleeps beneath a roof, that comes from exposure not only to the sun but also to frosts, chilling night winds and the cold mist just before dawn. Compared with Chepyzhin, his sickly-looking colleagues, with their pink, milky skin threaded by deep blue veins, seemed like silly old sheep or blue-eyed angels beside a huge brown bear.
Viktor remembered how, long ago, he and Pyotr Lebedev had often talked about Chepyzhin.
Studying with Chepyzhin had been one of Pyotr’s cherished dreams. He had longed both to work under his supervision and to argue with him about the philosophical implications of modern physics.
Both opportunities were denied him.
People who knew Chepyzhin did not find it surprising that he enjoyed hiking through forests, that he liked working with an axe or a spade, that he wrote poetry and enjoyed painting. What astonished people, what they wondered at more than anything, was that, for all his extraordinarily wide range of interests and enthusiasms, he was a man with a single guiding passion. People who knew him well—his wife and his close friends—understood that all his interests had one and the same foundation: his love for his native land. His love for Russian fields and forests, his collection of paintings by Levitan and Savrasov,71 his friendships with old peasants who would come to visit him in Moscow, the huge amount of work he had done in the 1920s to help establish workers’ faculties, his knowledge of folk songs, his interest in the development of new branches of industry, his passionate love of Pushkin and Tolstoy, his touching concern (a source of amusement to some of his colleagues) for some of the lesser inhabitants of his beloved fields and forests, for the hedgehog and the blue tits and finches that chose his house as their dwelling—all of this constituted a foundation, the one and only possible foundation for the apparently supraterrestrial edifice of his scientific thought.
An entire universe of abstract thought—of thought that had reached an altitude from which it was impossible even to make out the terrestrial globe, let alone its seas and continents—this whole universe had solid roots in the soil of his native land. It drew vital nourishment from this land and could probably not have survived without it.
From their early youth people like Chepyzhin are moved by a single powerful sentiment. This feeling, this consciousness of a single aim, accompanies them to the end of their days. Nikolay Nekrasov evokes just such a feeling in his poem “On the Volga,” about the vows he made as a boy, when he first saw a group of barge haulers. And it is this kind of feeling that moved the young Herzen and Ogaryov when they swore their famous vow on the Sparrow Hills.72
There are people to whom this sense of an overriding aim seems a naive vestige of the past, something that just happens to have survived for no good reason. These, however, are people whose inner world is filled by the trivia of the day; enthralled by the bright colours of life’s surface, they are blind to the unity that lies beneath them. Such people often achieve small material successes, but they never win life’s real battles. They are like a general who fights without any real aim, without the inspiration of love for his people. He may capture a town, he may defeat a regiment or a division, but he cannot win the war.
Only in their last days and hours do such people realize that they have been deceived. Only then do they see the simple realities they had previously dismissed as irrelevant. But this does them little good. “Oh, if only I could begin life afresh!”—these words, pronounced bitterly as one draws up the balance sheet of one’s days, change nothing.
The simple wish for working people to live freely and happily and comfortably, for society to be ordered freely and justly—this simple desire determined the lives of many of the most remarkable revolutionary thinkers and fighters. And there were many other important Soviet figures—scientists, travellers, agriculturalists, engineers, teachers, doctors, builders and reclaimers of deserts—who were guided, until their last days, by an equally clear, childishly pure sense of purpose.
•
Viktor never forgot Chepyzhin’s first lecture. He had not sounded like a professor of physics; his deep, slightly hoarse way of speaking, at times slow and patient but more often quick and impassioned, had seemed more like that of a political agitator. Similarly, the formulae he wrote on the blackboard were far from being cold, dry expressions of the new mechanics of an invisible world of extraordinary energies and velocities; they sounded more like political appeals or slogans. The chalk squeaked and crumbled. Chepyzhin’s hand was as accustomed to axes and spades as to a pen or to delicate instruments made from quartz or platinum. Sometimes, when he nailed in a full stop or sketched the graceful swan’s neck of an integral—∫—it was as if he were firing a series of shots. These formulae seemed full of human content; they could have been passionate declarations of faith, doubt or love. Chepyzhin reinforced this impression by scattering question marks, ellipses and triumphant exclamation marks over the board. It was painful, when the lecture was over, to watch the attendant rub out all these radicals, integrals, differentials and trigonometric signs, all these alphas, deltas, epsilons and thetas that human will and intelligence had shaped into a single united regiment. Like a valuable manuscript, this blackboard should surely have been preserved for posterity.
And although many years had passed since then, although Viktor now gave lectures and wrote on a blackboard himself, the feelings with which he had listened to his teacher’s first lecture were still present within him.
Viktor felt a sense of excitement every time he went into Chepyzhin’s office. And when he got back home, he would boast, just like a child, to his family and friends, “I went for a walk with Chepyzhin. We went all the way to the Shabolovka radio tower”; “Chepyzhin’s invited me and Ludmila to see in the New Year with him”; “Chepyzhin approves of the path we’re following in our research.”
Viktor remembered a conversation about Chepyzhin with Krymov, a few years before the war. After a long period of particularly intensive work, Krymov and Zhenya had come to visit Viktor and Ludmila in their dacha.
Ludmila had persuaded Krymov to take off his rough tunic and put on a pyjama top of Viktor’s. Krymov had been sitting in the shade of a flowering linden. On his face was the blissful look of a man who has just got away from the city, a man who has spent long hours in hot smoke-filled rooms and to whom fresh, fragrant air, cool well water, and the sound of the wind in the pines have brought a sense of simple and complete happiness.
Nothing, it appeared, could have disturbed such a sense of peace. And so the sudden change in Krymov—the moment the conversation turned from the joys of strawberries with cold milk and sugar to more work-related themes—was all the more startling.
Viktor had talked about how he had seen Chepyzhin the previous day. Chepyzhin had discussed the tasks of the new laboratory that had just been set up in the Institute of Mechanics and Physics.
“Yes, he’s an impressive figure,” said Krymov. “But when he leaves the world of physics and tries his hand at philosophizing, he ends up contradicting everything he knows as a physicist. He has no understanding of Marxist dialectics.”
This enraged Ludmila. “What do you mean? How can you talk like that about Dmitry Petrovich?”
Krymov had retorted, “Comrade Luda, what else can I say? When it comes to matters like this, there’s only one thing a revolutionary Marxist can say—whether he’s talking about his own father, about Chepyzhin or about Isaac Newton himself.”
Viktor had known that Krymov was right. His friend Pyotr Lebedev had more than once made the same criticism of Chepyzhin.
But he had been upset by Krymov’s harsh tone. “Nikolay Grigorievich,” he had said, “however right you may be, you need to think a bit more about how people with such a weak grasp of the theory of knowledge can be so very strong when it comes to actual knowledge.”
Glaring furiously at Viktor, Krymov had replied, “That is hardly a philosophical argument. You know as well as I do that there are many scientists who, in their laboratories, have been disciples and propagandists of dialectical materialism, who would have been helpless without it, but who then start cobbling together some homespun philosophy and become unable to explain anything at all. Without realizing it, they undermine their own remarkable scientific discoveries. If I am uncompromising, it is because men like Chepyzhin—and his remarkable work—are as precious to me as they are to you.”
Years had gone by, but Chepyzhin’s connection to his students, who were now doing independent research of their own, had in no way weakened. These connections were free, vital and democratic. They bound teacher and student together more firmly than any other tie that man has created.