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Chapter One The Academy of Poetry and Russian Society 3 THE FATE of Aleksandr Leonidovich Chizhevskii is conspicuously unusual and, at the same time, amazingly familiar. Graduating in 1917 from the Moscow Archeological Institute with the title of Archeologist, he defended his dissertation, “Russian Lyrics of the 18th Century,” the following year. He was then actively researching in the area of the natural sciences , particularly focused on the activity of the sun. He was simultaneously a student in the Natural Sciences and Medicine faculties of Moscow University and attended lectures on mathematics, physics, and chemistry at Moscow Commercial University and the A. L. Shaniavskii People’s University. Chizhevskii has been called the founder of major trends in biophysics, the creator of aeroioniWcation—the theory and practice of the artiWcial ionization of air. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, he had become an honorary professor and academician in many universities and academies worldwide. His books were published in France, the United States, Belgium, Switzerland , Italy, Turkey, England, and Brazil. Then came the Northern Urals and Karaganda. Then—“rehabilitation.” Then—new books about the cosmos and the sun and . . . books of poetry. Chizhevskii’s poems are a curious exemplar of the “lyricism” of a physicist . Their main characters are The Universe, The Sun, and The Cosmos.1 Chizhevskii was never a “professional poet.” His scholarly works have been called ahead of their time. Chizhevskii was a great dreamer, and it is not by chance that he was connected to Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, founder of the science of space travel, by a longstanding close friendship. Indeed, the city of Kaluga, “fatherland of space travel,” became his second home (he went there with his family in 1913, at the age of 17, and left in 1929 as an already world-famous scientist). It was also there that Chizhevskii published a brochure, under the auspices of the Cultural-Educational Commission of the Kaluga Infantry OfWcers’ Training Courses, in 1918. The brochure’s coarse gray paper bore the title “An Academy of Poetry (A Project)” (“Akademiia Poezii [Proekt]”). No, this was no longer cosmic sonnets: one can sense a kind of truly monumental sweep in this work. But for now, let us leave the ecstatic condition of the 19-year-old youth in 1918 aside. Chizhevskii’s “Project” has brought much more than his verses to us from that era of grandiose utopias. Educated on Russian classical poetry, the author talks about the contemporary state of poetic creativity with simultaneous hope and sorrow: although musical and artistic schools and colleges existed, as well as conservatories and an Academy of Arts, there were no poetry schools, nor any “academy of poetry”: “Artists, musicians, and architects can all get an education in accordance with their calling, and only poets are doomed to be selftaught , regardless of the fact that, Wrst, of all the arts poetry is closer and more familiar to man, and second, the most difWcult and least developed art of all is poetry.”2 Chizhevskii was not suggesting, however, turning the “self-taught” into poets (we have yet to address this subject). His challenge was far more traditional : “So that our poets should not get dirtied by the slime of petty existence in their work, but rather in moving together with progress could give mankind examples of truly high art that would serve the greatest aims of civilization , education, and nurturing of our hearts, we should ourselves be concerned about this, and therefore I call upon our Russian society and upon all to whom poetry is dear to step up to the task of building an Academy of Poetry—a center of the poetic, artistic, and cultural life of Russia.”3 The noble zeal of addressing “our Russian society” (in 1918!) unexpectedly alternates with quite sober calculations, which only makes even more evident the total fantasy of what is described in the scheme: the “Project,” rather than beginning with a deWnition of the proposed Academy’s status or with the goal of creating it, begins with a description of—its building . Thus, it is explained, the Academy should of course be located in Moscow, since Moscow is “both the center of Russia and the heart of the Russian people, and the center of poetic activity.”4 It would of course be a “majestic building[,] . . . the largest construction not only in Russia but in all of Europe. . . . [A]bsolutely all of what is truly poetic in the country should be collected in the Academy of Poetry. The...

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