Alexander Esenin-Volpin

Early life

Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin was born on 12 May 1924 in Leningrad, Soviet Union. His father was Sergei Yesenin, a celebrated Russian lyric poet who had a complicated relationship with the Bolsheviks. His mother, Nadezhda Volpina, was a poet and translator from French and English. Yesenin and Volpina were unmarried literary friends, and Alexander was conceived during an affair in the summer of 1923. Volpina ended their relationship when Yesenin tried to convince her to have an abortion. Alexander never met his father, who died under suspicious cicrumstances at the Hotel Angleterre in December 1925. Alexander and his mother moved from Leningrad to Moscow in 1933. He graduated from the prestigious Moscow State University with a Candidate dissertation in mathematics in the spring of 1949. After graduation, Volpin was sent to the city of Chernovtsy in the Ukrainian SSR to teach mathematics at the local state university.

Dissident activity

Esenin-Volpin's legal issues for dissident activity began on 21 July 1949, less than a month after his arrival in Chernovtsy, when he was arrested by the MGB, sent on a plane back to Moscow, and incarcerated in the Lubyanka Building. He was charged with "systematically conducting anti-Soviet agitation, writing anti-Soviet poems, and reading them to acquaintances." Apprehensive about the prospect of prison and labor camps, he faked a suicide attempt in order to initiate a psychiatric evaluation. This resulted in psychiatrists at Moscow's Serbsky Institute declaring him mentally incompetent, and in October 1949 he was transferred to the Leningrad Psychiatric Prison Hospital for an indefinite stay. Imprisonment in a psikhushka (psychiatric hospital) was a common form of punishment for dissidents in the Soviet Union. However, a year later, Esenin-Volpin was abruptly released from the prison hospital, and sentenced to five years exile in Karaganda in the Kazakh SSR as a "socially dangerous element." He found employment as a teacher of evening and correspondence courses in mathematics. He was released from exile in Karaganda in December 1953 as part of an amnesty following the death of Joseph Stalin, and returned to Moscow. Soon he became a known mathematician. In particular, he adhered to the philosophical theories of ultrafinitism and intuitionism and worked on development of these.

In the summer of 1959, Esenin-Volpin was invited to mathematical symposium in the Polish People's Republic (a Soviet satellite state) to be held the following month. He applied for a passport to travel to Poland, but his application was immediately denied and he received a reply stating that mentally ill Soviet citizens were not permitted to travel abroad. Instead, Volpin forwarded the text of his paper to Warsaw, which was read out in his name at the symposium, with the explanation that he had been prevented from attending in person. That year, Esenin-Volpin was arrested for smuggling samizdat (illegal literature) to the West and again placed in a psikhushka. The works were a collection of poems and his Свободный философский трактат (Free Philosophical Tractate), which he had signed with his own name. He was diagnosed with the pseudo-scientific disorder "sluggish schizophrenia", though Yuri Savenko would diagnose him with only cyclothymia. He spent two years in the psychiatric hospital, and continued to smuggle samizdat to the West after his release.

1965 Glasnost demonstration

In 1965, Esenin-Volpin organized a legendary "glasnost meeting" ("митинг гласности"), a demonstration at Pushkinskaya Square in the center of Moscow demanding an open and fair trial for the arrested writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. The leaflets written by Esenin-Volpin and distributed through samizdat asserted that the accusations and their closed-door trial were in violation of the 1936 Soviet Constitution and the more recent RSFSR Criminal Procedural Code. The meeting was attended by about 200 people, many of whom turned out to be KGB operatives. The slogans read: "Требуем гласности суда над Синявским и Даниэлем" (We demand an open trial for Sinyavski and Daniel) and "Уважайте советскую конституцию" (Respect the Soviet constitution). The demonstrators were promptly arrested.

right

[Volpin] would explain to anyone who cared to listen a simple but unfamiliar idea: all laws ought to be understood in exactly the way they are written and not as they are interpreted by the government and the government ought to fulfill those laws to the letter [...]. What would happen if citizens acted on the assumption that they have rights? If one person did it, he would become a martyr; if two people did it, they would be labeled an enemy organization; if thousands of people did it, the state would have to become less oppressive.

In the following years, Esenin-Volpin became an important voice in the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. He was one of the first Soviet dissidents who took on a "legalist" strategy of dissent. He proclaimed that it is possible and necessary to defend human rights by strictly observing the law, and in turn demand that the authorities observe the formally guaranteed rights. Esenin-Volpin was again hospitalized in February 1968 as one of those protesting most strongly against the trial of Alexander Ginzburg and Yury Galanskov (Galanskov-Ginzburg trial).

In 1968, Esenin-Volpin was again imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital, prompting the Letter of the Ninety-Nine to be sent to the Soviet authorities asking for his release. This fact became public and the Voice of America conducted a broadcast on the topic; he was released almost immediately thereafter. Vladimir Bukovsky was quoted as saying that Esenin-Volpin's diagnosis was "pathological honesty". That year, he circulated his famous "Памятка для тех, кому предстоят допросы" (Memo for those who expect to be interrogated) widely used by fellow dissidents in the Soviet Union.

In 1969, Esenin-Volpin signed the first Appeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights, drafted by the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR. In 1970, he joined the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR and worked with Yuri Orlov, Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet human rights activists.

Emigration

In May 1972, Esenin-Volpin emigrated to the United States at the insistence of the Soviet government, but his Soviet citizenship was not revoked as was customary at the time for exiled people. He worked at the University of Buffalo and Boston University, first as a professor then as a librarian. In 1973, he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.

In 1977, Esenin-Volpin again alarmed the Soviet authorities by threatening to sue them for spreading rumours that he was mentally ill.

In 2005, Esenin-Volpin participated in "They Chose Freedom", a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement.

Esenin-Volpin died on March 16, 2016 in Boston at the age of 91.

Mathematics

His early work was in general topology, where he introduced Esenin-Volpin's theorem. Most of his later work was on the foundations of mathematics, where he introduced ultrafinitism, an extreme form of constructive mathematics that casts doubt on the existence of not only infinite sets, but even of large integers such as 1012. He sketched a program for proving the consistency of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory using ultrafinitistic techniques in , and .

|I have seen some ultrafinitists go so far as to challenge the existence of 2100 as a natural number, in the sense of there being a series of "points" of that length. There is the obvious "draw the line" objection, asking where in 21, 22, 23, … , 2100 do we stop having "Platonistic reality"? Here this … is totally innocent, in that it can be easily be replaced by 100 items (names) separated by commas. I raised just this objection with the (extreme) ultrafinitist Yessenin-Volpin during a lecture of his. He asked me to be more specific. I then proceeded to start with 21 and asked him whether this is "real" or something to that effect. He virtually immediately said yes. Then I asked about 22, and he again said yes, but with a perceptible delay. Then 23, and yes, but with more delay. This continued for a couple of more times, till it was obvious how he was handling this objection. Sure, he was prepared to always answer yes, but he was going to take 2100 times as long to answer yes to 2100 then he would to answering 21. There is no way that I could get very far with this.

Mathematical publications

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References

Audio-visual material

References

1. [http://old.memo.ru/history/diss/ig/docs/igdocs.html Документы Инициативной группы по защите прав человека в СССР]
2. [http://facecollection.ru/people/aleksandr-esenin-volpin Александр Есенин-Вольпин - биография и семья]
3. (1993). "Golden years of Moscow mathematics". AMS Bookstore.
4. Nathans, Benjamin. (2007). "The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol'pin and the Idea of Human Rights under Developed Socialism". Slavic Review.
5. Irina Kirk, ''Profiles in Russian Resistance'' (New York, 1975)
6. [http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/books/ALEXEEWA/Chapter16a.htm {{in lang. ru Text] {{webarchive. link. (2005-10-27)
7. Alexeyeva, Lyudmila. (1987). "Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights". Wesleyan University Press.
8. {{usurped
9. Gilligan, Emma. (2004). "Defending human rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalyov, dissident and human rights commissioner, 1969–2003". RoutledgeCurzon.
10. {{in lang. ru [http://www.math.ru/history/p99/index.htm Text of the letter] {{webarchive. link. (2014-02-26 . math.ru. Retrieved 21 February 2014.)
11. "NRS | Kayak Gear, Raft Supplies, SUPs & Boating Equipment".
12. [http://www.warning.dp.ua/bezop78.htm {{in lang. ru Text] {{webarchive. link. (2010-05-26)
13. (21 August 1969). "An Appeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights". [[The New York Review of Books]].
14. "Humanist Manifesto II". American Humanist Association.
15. [https://bukovskyarchive.wordpress.com/2016/07/03/26-january-1977-st-4218/ The Bukovsky Archives, 26 January 1977 (St 42/18).] {{webarchive. link. (13 October 2016)
16. (2016-03-16). "Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin, Prominent Soviet-Era Dissident, Dies Aged 91". RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty.
17. (16 March 2016). "Early Soviet dissident Alexander Esenin-Volpin dies at 91". [[Agence France-Presse]].