People of the world: Russian scientific abroad

On the 10th anniversary of the Enlightener Award, the book “People of the World: Russian Scientific Abroad” is published by Alpina Non-Fix. The chapter from this book (in an abbreviated form), written by Olga Orlova about Sergey Shandarin, is represented by the editor-compiler Dmitry Bayuk .

Sergey Fedorovich Shandarin was not in Russia for 17 years, probably, this is a lot. During the time that he works as a theoretic physicist, he had to make distant travels and stay away from his homeland for a long time. The fate of far from all famous physicists was associated with such distant and long travels. Isaac Newton has never been a longer journey than from Cambridge to London. Galileo Galileo did not cross the boundaries of modern Italy.

But the life of a modern scientist is different: it involves frequent and distant trips, and in most countries the academic rules themselves exclude the opportunity for a scientist to spend their whole life in one place. Social mobility is included in the conditions of the profession. But, even accepting these conditions as a given, there is something wrong in this story, which will force the attentive reader to swarm, although to say what exactly the reasons for this sadness will turn out to be not easy.

The flight of the Russian intellectual elite, at the end of the nineteenth, in the first third of the twentieth or at the end of the same twentieth century, reflected not only and not so much the general cosmopolitan tendency of science for mobility, but also the infinity or sometimes the hostility of the Russian atmosphere for those who, under other circumstances, could have a beneficial effect on it. Sergei Shandarin is only one of the characters in the book that should see the light at the end of this year, but his fate completely reflects the general tendency to cross our borders in only one direction. Once this was not a trend, but a rule. Now the situation has improved, but it has not been corrected.

In order to deal with this trend, we undertook a special study. I won’t hide it - they told us the idea: Dmitry Borisovich Zimin suggested that the book on such a topic was very appropriate in the year, when a decade of the Enlightener Prize was celebrated. I will not hide the fact that the study for the most part was journalistic: over the 25 years of the program of scientific study of Russian emigration, only in Russia a large number of biographical and theoretical results were obtained.

Sergey Shandarin is only one of the large number of heroes of the book - mathematicians, physicists, chemists and scientists of other areas. But even from the story about him, the attentive reader will learn a lot about other domestic scientists - both working or working in other countries and never left their native limits. Some of them are mentioned in other chapters of the book, with others the reader will meet only here.

In total, there were several hundred heroes in our book. Compared to millions of people who emigrated from Russia at different periods of its dramatic history, this, of course, is a drop in the sea. And even if you limit yourself to representatives of the scientific intelligentsia, we should talk about thousands, if not about tens of thousands of people. Therefore, we hope that this publication is only the beginning of the annals of Russian science abroad.

Emigration is an ancient and versatile phenomenon. It cannot be considered exclusively Russian or Soviet phenomenon. Scientific research and journalistic work of various authors from various countries and cultural areas are devoted to her. Emigrations from the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation are not only devoted to the work of not only Russian authors. But in work on the book, we did not want to limit ourselves to emigrants, no matter what a wide definition was given to them.

Sergey Fedorovich Shandarin is a professor at the University of Kansas, but this does not yet turn him into an emigrant: he remains a Russian citizen not only formally, according to his passport, but also by the nature of his scientific connections and the subject of his work. Such a plot turn in Soviet times seemed impossible. But it is precisely such a work -to -order activity that turns the majority of our heroes, in full accordance with the name of the whole book, into people of the world.

Dmitry Bayuk