Alexander Men, a Jewish convert to Orthodoxy, was a catacomb priest in the late Soviet period. ‘He was the man sent from God to be a missionary to the wild tribe of the Soviet intelligentsia,’ the scholar Sergei Averintsev once said. The elderly Nadezhda Mandelstam was baptised by him, and often came from Moscow to take communion at his little wooden church in Novaya Derevnya, the village, not far from the capital, where he was parish priest. Father Men’s intellectual passion was natural science. As a young man in the late 1950s, he had hoped to study biology, but he was excluded from university as a Jew, and had to settle for enrolment in the Institute of Fur. ‘From my early childhood, contemplation of nature has been my theologia prima,’ he said. ‘I used to go into a forest or a museum of paleontology in the same way I went into a church.’ Nature was an icon of the first quality to him, and he believed that ‘a religious outlook cannot be intellectually justified except somehow on the level of evolution’. Reflecting on the discoveries of his own times, he observed that science’s penetration into the fabric of matter had made ‘the scale of nature’s destructive tendencies ever more apparent’. Thermodynamics, he believed, ‘revealed a tendency in the movement of the cosmos opposed to the process of becoming’. Early one morning in September 1990, Father Men was murdered with a single axe-blow to the back of the head, as he walked alone in the mist on a forest path from his home towards the suburban train station. He was on his way to Moscow to celebrate the liturgy at a church on Sretenka Street. No one has ever been charged with Father Men’s murder, but his many devoted followers in the intelligentsia believe that the crime was most likely the work of xenophobic elements within the KGB, afraid of his charisma, his Jewishness, his openness to other faiths and the wider world, his ‘inner freedom’. ‘Nothing can be ultimately proved,’ Men once wrote, ‘real scientists know that …’
The interior of the church at Lutsino, clean and newly painted, was decorated with bare fir trees, its concrete floor covered with plastic sheeting. The priest, Father Evgeny, in rich vestments of white and silver, anointed the congregation one by one, dipping a paintbrush into a small glass of oil held by a young acolyte. A man with drink-bloated features wiped holy oil over his face with a rough hand, and left the church, muttering. Anointed in her turn, Nina took her place among her friends at the front of the milling congregation, a lighted candle in her hand, her face, framed in its white headscarf, for once reposed, not twitching. (Just as Chekhov observed in his story ‘The Steppe’: the old ‘are always radiant when they come back from church’.) She looked ready to stand all night on her lame leg before the saints, prophets and angels on the iconostasis, the screen of images of transcendent order and community which, according to her faith, brings the world of eternity directly into this world of time and matter. Nina’s Siberian father and grandmother, a biochemist and a capitalist tycoon, are private icons in her life of devotion.
Alexei Balandin once described chemistry as the ‘contemplation of the world of matter’. At a turning moment in his creative life, Chekhov remarked that ‘the writer must be as objective as the chemist’, and that ‘for chemists there is nothing unclean on the earth’.
FIVE
Mozzhinka
‘… we should not minimise our sacred endeavours in this world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of unconsciousness into material existence.’
ANDREI SAKHAROV, Nobel lecture
The sun had set hours ago, but the moon still lit the river and the fields beyond. In the forest, occasional squares of electric yellow beckoned from dacha windows among the firs. Banks of shovelled ice sparkled in orange-pink pools under the lamps lining the straight road through the colony. We skied past the Academy of Sciences clubhouse on the creaking snow. A soft glow shone from inside.
A caretaker still lived in a corner of the palace built for Stalin’s scientists, keeping the unused building fully heated through the winter. The white plaster on its neoclassical façade had crumbled and the wide steps were cracked and dislodged by underground plant life and frost, but red carpets ran the length of its parquet halls, and the spider plants in urns at the foot of the grand staircase were still green and moist. In the auditorium, the stage was set with a podium and hung with curtains of heavy brocade. On the upper floor, the banqueting hall and kitchen waited for some evening of pomp and glass-raising that would never come: ranges scrubbed, pots stacked, knives sharpened.
Earlier in the day, when the caretaker had allowed us to explore the clubhouse, I had studied the portrait on the wall of Sergei Vavilov, looking at his eyes. By the end of his life, other scientists recalled, those eyes were tired and empty. On one occasion, in 1943, the renowned physicist had been seen coming out of the office of the president of the Academy of Sciences in tears, after petitioning on behalf of his brother the biologist Nikolai Vavilov, a greater scientist, who was starving in a ‘death cell’ in a prison in Saratov. Vyshinsky had ignored all petitions; Molotov had said, with irritation, that he had no time for the matter, and Andrei Andreev told a petitioner that there were ‘facts of which you are not aware’. Two years later, Sergei Vavilov sat up all night, as Andrei Sakharov writes in his memoirs, smoking through several packets of cigarettes, asking himself whether to accept the post of president of the Academy, or to allow the appointment of Stalin’s favourite Trofim Lysenko and the further devastation of Soviet science and agriculture. Vavilov died in 1951 at the age of sixty, before the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that he was editing reached ‘Molotov’, the name of the man who had personally sanctioned the arrest of his brother Nikolai. Under the entry for Nikolai Vavilov, the encyclopedia informed that ‘the scientific work of Vavilov was stopped in 1940’, which was code for the fact that he was arrested and never returned.
I imagined Sergei Vavilov as I passed, in his honoured place in the almost-dark clubhouse, his faded eyes staring out from the wall. Vavilov had insisted that this dacha colony be built here, at Mozzhinka, just outside Zvenigorod on the Moscow side of the ancient town. It was a place he loved. During the war, he had worked on night-vision technology for the military. In discussions about where to establish a dacha colony for academicians who had contributed to the Soviet victory, he favoured Mozzhinka, with its dense firs and moist clay soil, over the sandy massif above the bend in the river at nearby Lutsino. A native Muscovite, descended from local peasants, he knew the area from summer walks and mushroom-hunting expeditions.
As a young man, struggling to free himself for physics from his preoccupation with art and beauty, Sergei Vavilov had written in his diary that all he asked from nature was its quiet. Yet Mozzhinka holds more than quiet. It is the landscape of the folk tales of magic and terror that he had loved as a child, of the imaginative worlds of Hoffmann, Afanasiev and Gogol, which first summoned him towards a vocation in the science of sight and light. Wood demons might hide in the shadows of the firs, Baba Yaga’s house on chicken legs might appear in some clearing in the forest, or, in some deserted church on the river’s edge, the goblin Viy.
Rest for a scientist, Vavilov said, should be regarded as another way of furthering creative work. Mozzhinka dachniki remember him sitting in the garden of his dacha, always with some antique volume in his hand. Bibliomania was an aspect of his youthful aestheticism which he had tried in vain to overcome. As a schoolboy he had browsed in the antique booksellers of Mokhovaya and the basements of old Sukharevka, finding gems in the dust, such as a seventeenth-century edition of Otto von Guericke’s Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) De Vacuo Spatio, a treatise on the physics of vacuums. ‘The book is the “highest” thing in the world, because it is almost a person,’ he wrote in his diary in 1913; ‘sometimes it is even higher than a person (like Gauss, like Pushkin)’. Yet he longed for his passion to cool. He was not a ‘novice’ in the matter of books, he reflected; he understood their value, the difference between a book that was ‘just for himself’, like a first edition of Goethe’s Faust, and one that merely had ‘rarity’ value. Yet he could not stop himself acquiring all kinds of trash and ‘bricks’.