Though in books that appeared under his name in the 1940s Sergei Vavilov set an adamant face against the paradoxes of quantum physics that threatened to undermine the determinism of Marxist–Leninist dialectics, his private memoir is guided by the principle of uncertainty. Images of revolution in the streets collide with images of the interior world of home. Everything is disconnected. Again and again, he says, ‘I did not understand’, ‘it was all unclear’, ‘I had no understanding’, ‘it was a blur’. There is no sign in his arrangement of fragments of memory of the Stalinist who claimed that all the laws of history had been understood. The narrative ends at the threshold of his vision, and Nikolai, erased from his public works, stands clear in the foreground. Vavilov remembers the shock of the destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese at Tsushima as an awakening to history. ‘The ghost of Tsushima’s hell’, as Akhmatova called it, was a portent for their generation. Vavilov sensed great waves of history breaking over the country, but understood nothing. He remembers marching in street demonstrations with his cousins after Nicholas II’s October Manifesto of 1905, not understanding their cause. A man in worker’s dress stood on Theatre Square in front of the Bolshoi, shouting, waving a knife. Cossacks rode past the Manège, whips in hand. Crowds gathered outside the governor’s house on Tverskaya. At home, over tea, the family discussed politics. His father, a self-made textile millionaire and Moscow city councillor, was convinced by the promises of civil liberties in the Manifesto; Sergei took the socialist part, following Nikolai. There were speeches and pamphlets: Marx, Engels, Bebel. He listened and understood nothing. He remembers in precise detail the furnishings of home, the feel of domestic interiors, their shadows and light. From the dark sitting room, with its red and gold divans, he heard Nikolai and his friends at their discussion group, and dreamed of leading an intellectual circle of his own. A red kerosene lamp illuminated coloured reproductions from the popular journal The Meadow, mounted in gilt frames on the walls. In the grand wooden house on Presnya to which they moved from their apartment on Nikolskaya Street near Red Square, there were indoor columns and murals, mahogany furnishings, a seventy-five-volume leather-bound edition of Voltaire, and ‘various other junk’. On Nikolai’s name day in 1905, they played charades at home, while outside, barricades went up, factories burned and workers fought street battles with Cossacks and gendarmes. Classes were cancelled. Schoolboys joined demonstrations. Nikolai printed a school journal on a hectograph, filled with political proclamations; their parents did not intervene. 1905 frightened the fourteen-year-old Sergei. He buried himself in science, philosophy and art. He imitated Nikolai, building barricades, tearing up portraits of the Tsar, but it was no more than a child’s game. Unlike Nikolai, he could not make the transition from thought into action. He was ‘spineless’, he says; no man of steel. Political lines blurred in his mind. It came naturally in his family to be ‘of the left’, ‘for the people’, a ‘democrat’. Yet he could not translate these vague sensibilities into the hardness of real politics, or, he adds, its necessary cruelty.
For all his efforts to follow Nikolai into the flood of revolution, Sergei was closer in his tastes to the aesthetes of Sergei Diagilev’s World of Art movement than to the Bolsheviks. While Nikolai studied the slugs and snails that attacked the fields and vegetable gardens of the Moscow region, Sergei toured Italy in search of illumination. Alexander Blok’s Italian Verses, a cycle of poems about Italian towns infused with the writings of John Ruskin, had appeared in 1909. Pavel Muratov had recently published a translation of Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and a two-volume study, Images of Italy. Akhmatova and her husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, spent their honeymoon in Italy in 1912. Sergei Vavilov was not part of this creative elite, but he had aspirations. In 1914 he published a pair of essays on Verona and Arezzo in a journal for teachers of graphic art. However, his diary of 1913 records a painfully deliberated turn away from aestheticism. ‘Diary of my last aesthetic wanderings,’ he inscribed on its title page, ‘or the Tragicomic memoria of a physicist, bound by the will of fate to the aesthetic yoke’. After visiting Santa Croce in Florence, he convinced himself that Italy’s true greatness was not to be found in Giotto, Dante or Michelangelo, but in Galileo. ‘Science, science is my business,’ he told himself. ‘Drop everything and concentrate on physics alone.’ On his visit in the previous year, the beauty of Venice had provided him with a logical foundation for pure aestheticism; now, even as he turned away, the ‘strange and wonderful city-paradox’ beckoned him again: ‘the grace and ease of Venezia stretch out to me. Even in the rain the Piazza is a fairy tale, an enchanted place. Luxurious, sweet, brazen, beautiful Venezia …’ His diary ends on the train: ‘So, home in two hours. I hope to God I will set out on a new road. – Finis’.
The tragicomedy of Sergei Vavilov’s wanderings between art and science did not end. In the 1920s, he played his part in the great cultural project, led by Emilian Yaroslavsky, who called himself ‘Yaroslavsky the godless’, of replacing religion with science for a people who still venerated icons and relics. Now the people could read books on physics in cheap editions published by ‘New Moscow’ and ‘Red Virgin Soil’. In the Lenin Library, wanting to understand the life of the man who had made the dacha colony appear in the forest, I read Sergei Vavilov’s popular classics – The Action of Sunlight, Sunlight and Life on Earth, and The Eye and the Sun. Printed on coarse paper, the books are disintegrating, their ochred pages corroded at the edges; but their words are still lucid, beautiful to read. Suffused with culture, Vavilov’s writing beckoned me back to the magical light of Mozzhinka. The Eye and the Sun has Amenophis IV, founder of the cult of the sun, on its cover. Its epigraph is from Goethe: ‘If the eye were not suited to the sun, how would we see the light?’ The world, says Vavilov, is above all an object of sight, a picture. He illuminates his explanations with lines from the poems of Pushkin, Tyutchev, Fet and Esenin, from Plato’s Timaeus and the hymns of the ancient Egyptians. What does the sun mean to the earth, Vavilov asks, illustrating Copernicus with lines from Lermontov. He describes Newton’s experiments in his rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, his colour wheel. How did the earth fall into such a perfect position in relation to the sun? Why are plants green? How is it that the curve of daytime sight coincides almost exactly with the average curve of sunlight dispersed by plants? What would the world be like if plants were black? Why do deep-water fish have eyes? Why do the sun and moon look bigger as they approach the horizon? We believe in what we can see, Vavilov explains, but our sight will only tolerate the weak light distributed by the matter that surrounds us.