Alexander Esenin-Volpin
Encyclopedia
Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin
is a prominent Russian-American poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

.

Born on May 12, 1924 in the former Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

, he was a notable dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....

, political prisoner
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....

, poet, and mathematician. Volpin was a leader of the human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 movement and he spent total of fourteen years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in prisons, psikhushka
Psikhushka
In the Soviet Union, systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place. Soviet psychiatric hospitals were used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate hundreds or thousands of political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally...

s and exile.

His mother, Nadezhda Volpin, was a poet and translator from French and English. His father was Sergei Yesenin
Sergei Yesenin
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was a Russian lyrical poet. He was one of the most popular and well-known Russian poets of the 20th century but committed suicide at the age of 30...

, a Russian poet, who never knew his son. He and his mother moved from Leningrad to Moscow in 1933. In 1946 Esenin-Volpin graduated from Moscow State University
Moscow State University
Lomonosov Moscow State University , previously known as Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be one of the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy...

. He wrote and often publicly read his poetry.

Esenin-Volpin was free from conscription due to "psychiatric" reasons. His psychiatric imprisonments took place in 1949 for "anti-Soviet poetry", in 1959 for smuggling abroad samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...

, including his Свободный философский трактат (Free Philosophical Tractate), and again in 1968. After Esenin-Volpin's 1968 psychiatric confinement, 99 Soviet mathematicians sent a letter to the Soviet authorities asking for his release. This fact became public and the Voice of America
Voice of America
Voice of America is the official external broadcast institution of the United States federal government. It is one of five civilian U.S. international broadcasters working under the umbrella of the Broadcasting Board of Governors . VOA provides a wide range of programming for broadcast on radio...

 conducted a broadcast on the topic; Esenin-Volpin was released almost immediately thereafter.

Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky is a leading member of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s, writer, neurophysiologist, and political activist....

 was quoted as saying that Volpin's diagnosis was "pathological honesty". http://www.nrs.com/print/191104_222319_50567.html

In September 1950, Volpin was exiled for five years to Karaganda
Karaganda
Karagandy , more commonly known by its Russian name Karaganda, , is the capital of Karagandy Province in Kazakhstan. It is the fourth most populous city in Kazakhstan, behind Almaty , Astana and Shymkent, with a population of 471,800 . In the 1940s up to 70% of the city's inhabitants were ethnic...

 as a "socially dangerous element". In 1953, after the death of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

, he was amnestied
Amnesty
Amnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent people, without changing the laws defining the offense. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the...

. Soon he became a known mathematician specializing in the fields of ultrafinitism
Ultrafinitism
In the philosophy of mathematics, ultrafinitism, also known as ultraintuitionism, strict-finitism, actualism, and strong-finitism is a form of finitism. There are various philosophies of mathematics which are called ultrafinitism...

 and intuitionism
Intuitionism
In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism , is an approach to mathematics as the constructive mental activity of humans. That is, mathematics does not consist of analytic activities wherein deep properties of existence are revealed and applied...

.

Volpin was the first dissident in the history of the Soviet Union
History of the Soviet Union
The history of the Soviet Union has roots in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, emerged as the main political force in the capital of the former Russian Empire, though they had to fight a long and brutal civil war against the Mensheviks, or Whites...

 who proclaimed that it is possible and necessary to defend human rights by strictly observing the law.

On December 5, 1965, the Soviet Constitution Day, he organized a legendary "митинг гласности" (the glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...

 meeting), a demonstration at the Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

. Western journalists were invited to provide press coverage.
The leaflets written by Volpin and distributed by samizdat method, asserted that recent arrest of writers Andrei Sinyavsky
Andrei Sinyavsky
Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was a Russian writer, dissident, political prisoner, emigrant, Professor of Sorbonne University, magazine founder and publisher...

 and Yuli Daniel
Yuli Daniel
Yuli Markovich Daniel was a Soviet dissident writer, poet, translator and political prisoner.He frequently wrote under the pseudonyms Nikolay Arzhak and Yu. Petrov .-Early life and World War II:...

 violates Article 3 of the Soviet constitution and Article 18 of RSFSR Criminal Code. The meeting was attended by about 200 people, many of whom turned out to be KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...

 operatives.
The slogans read: "Требуем гласности суда над Синявским и Даниэлем" (We demand an open trial
Open trial
Open trial may refer to:*Public trial*Open-label trial, a type of clinical trial that is not blinded...

 for Sinyavski and Daniel) and "Уважайте советскую конституцию" (Respect the Soviet constitution).http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/books/ALEXEEWA/Chapter16a.htm The demonstrators were promptly arrested.

In 1968 he circulated his famous "Памятка для тех, кому предстоят допросы" (Memo for those who expect to be interrogated) Text (in Russian) widely used by fellow dissidents. In 1970, Volpin joined the Human Rights Committee of the USSR and worked with Yuri Orlov, Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...

 and other activists.

In May 1972, he emigrated to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, but his Soviet citizenship was not revoked as was customary at the time. He worked at Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...

. In 2005, Esenin-Volpin participated in "They Chose Freedom
They Chose Freedom
They Chose Freedom is a four-part TV documentary on the history of political dissent in the USSR from the 1950s to the 1990s. It was produced in 2005 by Vladimir V...

", a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement.

External links


Russian language links
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