Traditions of “Physical Art” in the
Russian Physics Community,
1950s to 1990s.
Yu.V. Gaponov
(RRC “Kurchatov Institute”, Moscow,
Russia)
Report at the Niels Bohr Archive Symposium
“‘Copenhagen’ and beyond: Drama meets
history of science”
The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of the utmost prosperity
in Physics. The atomic revolution having opened for the scientists a new world
of quanta led soon to the nuclear fission discovery and to the first steps in
techniques to dominate the atomic energy. The realization of national atomic
programs which first took place in USA and then in Russia (USSR) and Great
Britain had attracted the whole world’s attention and placed Physics and the
natural sciences in general in a top position. Being concerned with matters of
physics became then exclusive and prestigious and physicists as individuals
attracted the society’s attention. They became heroes of literature, theater,
movies, press. This process was observed in many advanced countries. It was
also typical for the former USSR of those times, although owing to special
social circumstances it had acquired some particular forms. One such form was
the creation of “Physical Art” traditions first of all at Physics Department of
Moscow State University (MSU PhysFac, see i) below) and then widely within the
physics community. Its history is the object of the current report.
The birth of these traditions is commonly associated with the
appearance at MSU PhysFac in 1960 of a Student Humor Festival called “Birthday
of Archimedes” (later “Physics Day”) along with a comic buffoonery opera
“Archimedes” (authors – physicists and poets V. Kaner, V. Milyaev). However,
MSU physicists consider the “Physical Art” traditions to have started earlier.
Here are some remarkable milestones:
In 1932 the well known “Faust” jocular opera and in 1935 the
special issue of the “Jocular Physics” journal were written by some eminent
physicists in connection with the 50th birthday of Niels Bohr. Also
in the 1930s, in the Leningrad Phys.-Tech. Ioffe Institute some jocular
celebrations were performed with participation of young physicists and puppets
produced by I. Kikoin and the professional puppet producer Demini.
In 1949-55 a young physicist, Gertzen Kopylov (1924-76), created a
very timely polemical underground poem, “Eugeny Stromynkin”. In 1947 another
student (now Professor), B. Bolotovsky, wrote the Anthem of MSU Physicists,
‘Dubinushka’ (in Russian the word has a double pun meaning: bludgeot and
blockhead. It is also the title of a famous and popular Russian folk song). In
1955 the first “physical opera” with the same title was written (V. Balashov,
B. Kurjanov, V. Ivanov et al.). Its contents is very simple: it shows the usual
life of a first course student, who passed through a “social conflict” with his
group of friends but then found his right way. It is obvious that this
“conflict” is a jocular one. However, it is imagined by the student as his
private tragedy. This short skit-opera included a lot of jokes, music, song and
dance.
However, there were also additional social causes for its
appearance, connected with the “student revolution” events in MSU PhysFac in
the fall of 1953, just after Stalin’s death. The “revolution” had led to a very
deep transformation of the MSU PhysFac, which changed its leadership cardinally
and created a very open and enthusiastic atmosphere among the students. The
birth of the “Physical Art” traditions became a direct consequence of these
events. (For details of the 1953 events see the report of Yu. Gaponov, S. Kovaleva,
A. Kessenikh in the Proceedings of HISAP’99 International Historical Symposium
on world history of atomic projects – HISAP’99, Laxenburg, Austria).
In accordance with an official “Archimedes” studio legend,
‘Dubinushka’ was staged by graduate physicists on January 3rd, 1955 during the
farewell party immediately following their final State Examination and approved
by academician Lev Landau. The opera was rewritten and for the first time
staged at the MSU Culture House (with young physicist S. Soluyan as director of
scenography) when the International Youth Festival was held in Moscow in 1957.
Thus, the creation of “Dubinushka” became considered as the origin of the
“Physical Art” traditions, which are still alive today. The first physical
opera had a tremendous success within the physics community. It was shown to
physicists of Obninsk (the first Russian atomic power station) and Dubna
(International Joint Institute for Nuclear Research). It was played on the
stage of the Council of Ministers Club (a Moscow theater) and was cited in the
famous theater producer Okhlopkov’s version of Pogodin’s drama, “A Little
Student Girl”, dated 1958.
This success lent wings to young physicists and “Dubinushka” was
soon followed by a new opera, “Gray Stone” – a musical-dramatic composition in
4 acts with a Prologue and an Epilogue, which was staged in 1958 (A. Kessenikh,
Yu. Gaponov, V. Ivanov, S. Soluyan). It represented PhysFac students’ life of
those times, including the following scenes: in a dean’s secretariate, in a
students’ hostel, at laboratory exercises, on a voluntary militia brigade duty.
The characters of the opera were the dean’s lady-officers, students,
professors, laboratory assistants – and even characterized students grades from
5 to 1. The opera reflected a tragedy of a fifth-course student, Boris
Pugovkin, a student trade union leader and social activist, who was prepared to
sacrifice his private life for the sake of an ill-conceived social duty. The
refrain sung by the choir of first-year students in the Prologue and Epilogue
sounds ironically:
“Are we really ever going to become like Him?!…”
The rise of the physicists’ creative activity in the 1950s
coincided with the period of wide-spread discussion of “Physicists-Lyrics” in
Russia. This period also overlapped with the formation of the first Students’
Building Brigades, which is not a mere coincidence. These brigades initiated
the mass student works in 1958–61 on newly reclaimed virgin lands. Even in this
case, the MSU physicists became the founders of this new tradition, which
remained alive several decades later. As we understand now, these initiatives
were really a distant echo of the atomic revolution in Physics and of a student
revolution at MSU PhysFac in 1953 (see our report at HISAP’99 – Laxenburg,
Austria – historical Symposium on world history of atomic projects).
The peak of the Khrushchev era was the heroic period of the
so-called “men-of-the-sixties”. At the height of the creative inspirations,
both traditions –the opera and the brigades – helped each other and gave birth
to the heroic physical skit-opera “Archimedes” and to a festival as a tribute
to him. The Festival of Humor at the MSU PhysFac was instituted by a special
non-standard decree of the 1959 Komsomol, see ii), annual conference: “To
institute an annual Physicists’ Festival of Humor – ‘Physics Day’”. The
birthday of Archimedes is now considered as the “Birthday of Physics”.
Archimedes was born 7th of May, 287 BC”.
The idea to place Archimedes as a chief of a pantheon of Physics
Heroes and Gods saw the light in May 1959 in Room B-835 of the MSU students’
hostel (M. Artemenko, N. Kabaeva, N. Nikonova, Yu. Gaponov). The steps of a
wide PhysFac entrance stairway were chosen as a scene of the activities and it
was really an ideal stage for a classical Greek drama! The physical creative
activity reaches its culmination: a multi-mass festival with thousands of
participants and with the third physical opera “Archimedes” is born.
The opera “Archimedes” is the apex of the physicists’ creative
musical activity of those times. In a heroic form it conceives and expresses
all that the students of the 1960s had lived with. It includes a glorious
history and reality, students building brigades, ancient gods as destroyers and
physics heroes as creative constructors, the flight of the spirit and an
anticipation of forthcoming tragedy. This self-made amateur opera was
incredibly popular and unsurpassed. Within a period of 40 years it was staged
more than 250 times in various physics universities and R&D Russian
institutes. The tours of “Archimedes” extended from Krakov, Prague and Riga to
the Sakhalin Island and from Novosibirsk to Simpheropol (Krimia) and Kiev. As
it is said in the author’s introductory speech, which is usually read from the
stage before the spectators: “Having rejected any false modesty, which is alien
to us, we proclaim that the numerous performances and the tremendous success of
this opera in all the strata of the national and foreign intellectual physics
communities have proved that the humor, the incessant good temper and simply
the charm of the opera could never be destroyed by any performance. And we are
sure that today’s staging will confirm this point once again.”
However, there was yet another hypostasis that Archimedes turned
in at MSU PhysDep. It was the annual festival, “Birthday of Archimedes”,
celebrated in May which during the peak years (1963-64) lasted for several
days. It normally began at 1 p.m. with a call by trumpeters to general assembly
and went on in a form of a comic student play on the steps in front of the
entrance of the PhysFac In this play student representatives of each course,
dressed in fantastic costumes, presented annual reports on principal events in
their life of the year before. Their reports were accepted by the eighteenth
century Russian physicist Mikhail Lomonosov, and the following arrival of
Archimedes was normally accompanied by various pyrotechnic fires. The funny
addresses were alternated with verses, songs, dances and ever-green student scenes
depicting exams, thunderstorm professors and cunning students. Many real heroes
of those times were among the honored guests welcomed by the festival
organizers: Academician Lev Landau (1960-61), the great Niels Bohr (1961),
cosmonaut German Titov (1963 – the era of space flights was beginning). The
creation of this festival constituted the beginning of the MSU liberal
traditions which, in the 1960s, instantly spread out to other universities in
the USSR. The “Physics Days” appeared soon in Leningrad (St. Petersburg),
Tbilisi, Baku, Kiev, Riga, Novosibirsk, Simpheropol, Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg),
Dnepropetrovsk and many other university towns.
The festivals of the early 1960s were really large scale with
regard to the variety of activities and the number of actors (304 persons in
1964!). They attracted thousands of spectators, became topics for TV and movies
(e.g., “Sweethearts need carnations”, a film by Nitochkin). Guests from many
universities (Tbilisi, Leningrad, Baku, Gorki etc.) attended the festivals. The
performance on the steps was followed by carnivals, sports competitions between
teams of students and professors, and, of course, by the evening concerts in
the MSU Culture House with opera performances, PhysFac’s bard songs or guests’
presentations. A student bard song competition took place for the first time at
the 1961 Physics Day. The traditions of physicists were described by L.
Arkhipova in her book “In search for thyself”. The festivals were organized by
a special Headquarters just like the virgin land building brigades. The first
staffs were headed by A. Schirokov (1960), Yu. Gaponov (1961), Yu. Pirogov
(1962), R. Gainullin (1963), L. Pogorelova (1964). However, in 1965, for the
first time, PhysFac party leaders and administration attempted to stop the
Festival of Archimedes.
The era of Khrushchev’s thaw was about to end and new political
times were coming. However, PhysFac students did manage to resume the festival
in 1966 after a thunderstorm at the current komsomol conference just after the
appearance in the popular “Komsomolskaya Pravda” newspaper of an article by
journalist E. Losoto, “Birthday of Archimedes”. Subsequently, the festival was
still alive for three years, whereupon it was finally cancelled by the leaders
of the MSU PhysDep. But its glory remained and the traditions of student humor
festivals had already begun to migrate between the universities and institutes
of the USSR. In MSU there appeared traditional “Chemist Day” and “Mathematician
Day” (the former is alive, the latter did not live long). The Physics Day
re-appeared at MSU PhysFac as “The Day of Absolute Zero” in 1978-79, when on
the entrance steps a nice funny fairy tale, “On Yemelya and how he discovered a
non-purely-physical forces”, written by a group of authors, was staged by Yu.
Nechipurenko. This Day had survived for several years, gradually fading.
Finally it was revived as the traditional “Physics Day” in the early 1990s.
But traditions of physical humor always continued to live. They
created and dominated new genres of ‘Phys. Art’, being familiar with frameworks
of little forms. In 1961, in the Lipetsk building brigade, the so-called
“Agitbrigade” (primitive theater brigade, see iii) was created with O. Zubkova
as its first director. In 1963 there was instituted a permanent theater-studio,
“Archimedes” (instead of temporary opera groups), which still exists today. The
PhysFac soon established its own poetic school, which organized an annual
autumn poetic competition, “The rooks have flown away”, see iv), which later
gradually grew into the first MSU student song competition in 1965 (it exists
now as bard song competitions in many regions of Russia). The most well-known
physical poets of this school were as follows: A. Kesennikh, S. Krylov, V.
Milyaev, V. Kaner, G. Ivanov, S. Semenov, V. Gertzik, S. Smirnov, A. Debabov.
Many of them started out in the Physics Department agitbrigades and travelled a
lot across the USSR: Kazakhstan, Altai, Kol’sky Peninsula, Naryan-Mar, Northern
Urals, Salekhard etc. It is this PhysFac agitbrigade that Sergei Nikitin,
physicist and now famous Russian bard singer and composer, came from. The
physical humor already began to move across the whole country: in the mid-1960s
a very popular book under the title “Physicists’ Joke” was published in
Obninsk.
The opera traditions were also in progress. A ballet troupe
appeared in the studio. Following the intentions of “Dubinushka”, a new ballet
under the same title was staged where comic dances performed by soloists S.
Kovaleva and A. Prokhorov were interchanged with the jocular authors’ comments.
Some outstanding vocalists are also found among the physicists. Ljubov’
Bogdanova has later graduated from the Gnesinski Institute, see v), and has
sung in the famous Bolshoi Theater. In the 1990s she sang in Germany, Italy and
Poland. Victor Dubinchuk, who has an extraordinary sweet tenor, also took part
in our operas. He too was invited to the Bolshoi studio, but nevertheless
preferred to remain a physicist. The opera choir was under the direction of top
professionals from the Gnesinsky Institute (O. Khristich, O. Lebedikhina, G.
Kol’tsova). The opera team had a stable cast of 50–70 persons in spite of the
natural fluidity of the student contingent. Finally, in the mid-1960s we were
inspired to create the next physical opera as a farewell with MSU PhysFac. Its
first title was “Quo vadis?”; the official title is “Fly, pigeons, fly ...” (1967-68, G. Ivanov,
S. Semenov, Yu. Gaponov, A.
Kesennikh), see vi).
The end of the 1960s was marked by dramatic changes. The political
situation in the USSR was changing. The PhysFac’s party leaders began to feel
the burden of students’ free-thinking. The traditions of the Physics Day were
fading and the studio’s headquarters had already begun to feel the cold winds blowing
from the administration and local party committee. We began to think about
leaving MSU for good, the last opera being a summary of student days as
consisting of graduation and the state distributing students for work, see
vii). In 1968 the new opera was staged at the PhysFac for the first and last
time. The same summer the opera building brigade was off for a concert tour to
the Sakhalin Island. In 1969 A. Kharlamov, the commander of the studio’s HQ,
was summoned to the party committee of the Faculty and was ordered to close the
studio “Archimedes”. The studio moved to the Kurchatov Institute. A year before
– on the request of the famous physicist, acad. I.K. Kikoin – it had staged
there a comic performance dedicated to Kurchatov Institute’s 25th Anniversary.
It was presented in a form of “Anti-scientific meeting of the Institute
Scientific Council”, where the speeches of “medieval” scientists as an
alternative to real Academicians and Leaders of the Institute was performed by
the young physicists–studio actors. The last days at PhysFac were described
later by A. Kharlamov, A. Prokhorov and S. Semenov in the farewell physical
opera “Schizel” (1972). That was the opera about ourselves: how the Opera
lived, what were Its spiritual values and how It became alien to the native
PhysFac which gave birth to It.
So, in 1969 the “Archimedes” studio settled at the Culture House
of the Kurchatov IAE, see viii), (KI). A new alloy of two traditions – student
and scientific – which earlier stood far from each other, gave a powerful
impulse to a new rise of physical creative activity. The traditions of
scientific physical humor were known long before. Thus, there were the funny
books “Jocular Physics” published in Denmark at N. Bohr’s birthdays (1925, 35,
45), comic performances at A. Ioffe’s Leningrad Institute of Technical Physics
(1930s), legendary jokes by I. Kurchatov and A. Migdal. In the USA the jokes of
R. Feynman were very popular (“Surely, You’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” book). A
sense of humor is immanent for a real, deep scientist. According to N. Bohr’s
principles it is complementary to the intensity of his scientific creative
activity. It particularly flourished in the USSR in the 1960s, when physicists
were almost epical, just like national heroes. Before “Archimedes” the two
physical skit-operas, as an obvious influence of PhysFac graduates, had already
been written in KI (“OPIada”, 1958, B. Trubnikov, V. Shafranov; “OPTKiada”, in
the early 1960s, E. Buryak and Co.). The title of the former is taken from the
abbreviation for the KI Department of Plasma Research. It is a heroic poem
about the first assault on the peaceful thermonuclear problems. The latter was
a private domestic drama of a young physicist of acad. I. Kikoin’s Department.
When in 1968 a comic performance dedicated to the Institute’s 25th Anniversary
was staged, its second act was a puppet show with puppets of academicians A.
Alexandrov, I. Kikoin, A. Migdal and others (under the direction of the same
professional producer Demeni who had directed the Leningrad puppet theater in
1930s). The most vigorous supporter of the “Physical Art” traditions in KI and
its principal advocate became the academician I.K. Kikoin himself.
Having settled in the Kurchatov Club, the studio “Archimedes”
(which was soon proudly and jokingly named the “Bolshoi Physical Theater for
Opera and Ballet”, see ix)) first of all restored the Physics Day tradition. In
1972, in the Palace of Grand Duke Konstantin (just nearby the Winter Palace in
St. Petersburg), we, together with Leningraders (Yu. Magarshak and his team),
organized the first ‘All-Leningrad Physics Day’. In the same year “Archimedes”
orginized the first KI Physics Day. It started on May 13th, 1972, at
the entrance of the KI Culture House, with a ceremonial laying of a memorial
stele devoted to the future “Kurchatov Institute Physics Day” (“KI Physics
Day”). A warm May rain showered the leading USSR physicists who stood grasping
their umbrellas, listening to funny addresses to the Institute of Atomic
Energy. I. Kikoin was among those. Then, in the KI Culture House, when acad. E.
Velikhov – surrounded by three beautiful Misses Physics (who won these titles
in the Leningrad Day) – accepted congratulations from physicists and guests,
Kikoin appeared on the stage with a baby in his hands and sang him a lullaby.
So the tradition of physical humor had revived and acquired some new features
at the Kurchatov Institute.
Beginning in 1973, the KI Physics Day received its final shape.
Traditionally, it began with brass-band music and the run-out of an equipage
with the KI Directorate as passengers; the whole presidium was placed in a cart
towed by an old horse named “Atomokhod”. Then on the square in front of the
Culture House a parade of KI Department Directors took place. It was a carnival
where every physics department headed by its real Director, by using an
electric trolley exposed its fantasy and humor as well as its exotic costumes,
slogans and comments. Having made the round of honor they reported to the
Presidium on their achievements the previous year. The parade was followed by a
series of scientific-sports Alexandrov’s Games with the objective of winning a
prize of KI Director acad. A.P. Alexandrov (who shortly afterwards became the
President of the USSR Academy of Sciences). When the parade and sport
scientific Games ended, the “Anti-Scientific Meeting of the KI Scientific
Council” began. It included the real Directorate and leading scientists whose
real hobby was fun and a good joke. One of the very first Physics Days became
famous from the verses of A.P. Alexandrov containing rather coarse
improvisations addressed to all the Department Directors. The Department of
Plasma Research was permanently led by Acad. B. Kadomtzev and once represented
by a funny joke of B. Trubnikov who suggested at once a verse to remember the
“pi” number with a precision to one hundred decimal places. Kikoin’s Department
presented anti-scientific reports with the demonstration of experiments and
participation of genuine sheep or donkeys borrowed from the well-known Moscow
Durov’s Zoo Corner, see x). The KI branch in Troitsk once demonstrated a huge
fire-breathing dragon spitting plasma and suffering from problems associated
with spring love. One of the anti-scientific Councils was dedicated to an
ever-green topic about extraterrestrials, and a cycle of funny songs about UFOs
was performed as a scientific report. In 1978 the KI elected Misses Physics for
each of the Departments: Miss of Plasma, Solid State Miss, Biomiss, Miss
Reactor etc. It is necessary to underline that the jokes of reporters and the
Council were always timely and very critical. The TV shooting the movies about
the Physics Day in 1979 did not dare to transmit it to its audience. If they
had, it would have been too unusual in the former USSR where the situation was
getting gloomy. But physicists kept on joking!
Judging retrospectively, we can say that the Kurchatov Institute
festivals of 1977-84 were the culmination of the “Physics Day” tradition. It
had grown up and become more serious and deep. In comparison with students’
jokes spinning about exams, students and professors, the scientific humor was
more profound, more informative, more ingenuous. Physicists in their fun and
humor expressed their attitude to the external social world.
The theater-studio “Archimedes” continued its life together with
the Physics Day. Some new forms were being developed. In 1973 a new variety
performance show with dances, music, lights and 8 soloists was staged. This was
“Physical Review, Volume I” (A. Prokhorov, Yu. Gaponov; ballet-master: G.
Abramov) which survived a dozen performances. A bit later there appeared
“Monologues about Physics” (1974; A. Prokhorov, S. Semenov) which is still on
the stage. These are monologues about science spoken by people from the arts
who themselves are very far from science but somehow still concerned with it.
In 1975 the studio was getting involved in a classical drama by taking part in
a staging of “Life of Galileo” (B. Brecht; with A. Chapleevsky, the professional
producer of scenography, then Art Director of KI Culture House). The role of
Galileo was played by V. Klimenko, who was a physicist-theoretician of
supernatural temperament and a talented self-made actor. In 1973 a new genre of
physical humor was born. A. Kharlamov, the commander of the opera’s HQ, when
leaving the PhysFac issued Volume I of the “General History of Archimedes” – a
type-writer collection of physical humor – and offered it to the studio before
his departure to Sakhalin for permanent work as a geophysicist. Towards the end
of the 1970s six such volumes had already been issued: more than 1500 pages
total, typed then, of course, with a typewriter. We began to understand the
wide scale and universality of physical humor and, more than that, of the
“Physical Art”. The links of “Archimedes” with the world of physicists and the
whole physics community were getting broader and tighter: we gathered those who
were close to us in spirit. Thus the Studio began to convert into the Physical
Club.
First of all, there were the PhysFac graduates. The KI Culture
House hosted the meeting of three poets-physicists (A. Kesennikh, V. Kaner, V.
Milyaev) with Acad. Rem Khokhlov, who was MSU rector then. We commemorated G.
Kopylov, the precursor of “Physical Art” who died in 1976, and typed his
“Eugeny Stromynkin” for the first time in an “academic” version (1978, A.
Prokhorov) that was a “canonical” text with different underground versions and
notes. We invited to the Physics Days the humor teams from the Moscow MEPhI,
PhysTech, see xi), humanitarian universities, and organized a “Week of Physical
Art” celebration at PhysTech in 1982; staged our operas in some cities with
students and scholars as artists. At the beginning of 1980 more than 500
“graduates” of all years of the studio “Archimedes” gathered at KI Culture
House (already not only physicists!) to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of
Physical Art. The “Archimedes” Studio HQ presented its review report of the
last 25 years of activity, and the report was assessed as satisfactory by
voting. Physical Art was gaining universal recognition and began to occupy its
honorable place in the Russian scientific community.
The following two events of the early 1980s had a particular
significance for us: The KI Humor Festival dedicated to the 80th birthday of KI
Director acad. A.P. Alexandrov (1983) (AP) and the Centenary of Niels Bohr
(1985). The AP anniversary was celebrated by the whole Institute in an
extremely warm atmosphere. All the KI Departments did their best to demonstrate
on the stage their inventiveness and wittiness. The best tricks of the old
Physics Days had been recollected and re-staged. There was a lot of games and
side-shows for guests. They were followed by the stage performance, “Sagas,
legends and jokes about AP”. The biophysicists were first with their “Fairy
Tales on His Birth”, which was followed by legends and songs: on AP’s
scientific works (with reviews of the articles from the 1930s), on war-ship
demagnetization, the legend of TOCAMAC etc. The studio had a distinguished
place in the performance: we built up the whole scenario and participated
ourselves – our Bolshoi Theater soloist L. Bogdanova sang with her incredible
voice with great success. AP was touched, and the studio’s principal director
was invited to attend his home party where we offered AP the first written
history of Physical Art as a gift. That was our humorous report of 25 years of
activity.
When organizing the Centenary of N. Bohr in Russia we encountered
for the first time real practitioners of history. It happened when the
Institute for History of Natural Science and Technology (now IHST RAN) was the
base for organizing the N. Bohr Centenary Session in Puschino near Moscow. Then
our studio recalled N. Bohr’s visit to the USSR in May 1961 when he blessed the
“Archimedes’ Birthday” and our opera with a long life. We kept on seeing dozens
of people who remembered those days and collected one by one a lot of family
and official snapshots. Finally we prepared an unusual scientific report, “Niels
Bohr’s visit of 1961 to the USSR in photos”, in which the events of his
unforgettable visit had been reconstructed along with the cordial atmosphere
around the legendary Bohr who passed away forever the following year. The day
when this report had been presented became also the day when the studio
performed the “Archimedes” opera to historians of physics to commemorate this
great person and the times when the physicists had the full right to be proud
that by having created the bomb they preserved peace. This conference in
Puschino was the first planned half of the Russian part of N. Bohr’s centenary.
The second part, with participation of A. Bohr and some western scientists, was
planned for December 1985. We were occupied with making our reports and an album
of photos for the Niels Bohr Archive. Bohr’s family knew about us and planned
to meet with the studio “Archimedes”. When I made a scientific visit to the
Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in 1981, I was invited to visit Margrethe
Bohr. With great sympathy she recalled the meeting of Niels with MSU students
as well as our festival on the PhysFac’s steps and the opera performance in
MSU. She was 92 then, but she still remembered details of our performance – L.
Landau with Niels Bohr on the steps and the “Greek” choir from “Archimedes”
with singers wrapped into white bed-sheets instead of ancient tunics. But,
owing to some unknown reasons (still unknown to us!) the international meeting
had been cancelled. Thus Bohr’s family was not to get a chance to see us
either.
In 1986 Chernobyl burst into our life. From heroes the physicists
began to turn into social outcasts. The time of social shifts had come. The new
epoch has broken a lot of illusions, beloved physics is now far from the top
positions that they occupied before. However, even under these new and very
hard conditions the “Physical Art” tradition is still going on, coming out from
the underground and, miraculously, beginning to be published. Kronid Lyubarsky,
a dissident, published in Germany in Russian Gertsen Kopylov’s collection,
“Four-dimensional poem and other non one-dimensional works” (1990), where
“Eugeny Stromynkin” was first published in its “Archimedes”-like type-written
version, with the publisher changing our comments. In 1993, under the aegis of
the Russian Physics Society, we published “Physicists’ Joke”, second edition,
with some inserted new jokes of physicists from the 1950s. In 1994 Lyudmila
Ivanova (actress of the famous O. Efremov’s “Sovremennik” – “Contemporary” –
theater) published a collection of verses of some poets-physicists, “The time
is coming...”. V. Kaner (1940-1999), one of the “Archimedes” authors, published
his books “Schiziki phutyat” (1994) (book title of “Physicists jokes” is
transformed to humor and mad sense, see xii)) and “100 verses” (1995). Finally,
the Journal of the Institute of History of Natural Science and Technology
(VIET, No.2, 1998) published for the first time (with many comments) the
Russian version of “Eugeny Stromynkin”, and simultaneously G. Kopylov’s
previously unknown “Four-Dimensional Poem” appeared (1999). In the last years
some books of physicists-poets, namely G. Ivanov (1940-2000), A. Kessenikh, V.
Gertzeg, have been also published.
Thus, after many years of an underground, folk existence, the
“Physical Art” tradition of the Russian physicists have become a reality and
have come out as a social phenomenon to be investigated by historians of
science. Here I would like to remember Niels Bohr’s words from his speech just
after performance of the opera “Archimedes”:
“If you, young physicists, can joke about
our scientific subjects
with such humor and enthusiasm,
I am now absolutely confident in the
future
of Physics...”
I would like to thank V. Zakharov – physicist and permanent piano
accompanist of the “Archimedes” studio – for help in translating the text into
English.
Main producer of the Physical “Archimedes”
Theater and Club,
Professor, Doctor of phys.-math. sciences,
Yu.V.Gaponov.
i)
PhysFac –
literally: Physics Faculty (abbr.).
ii)
Komsomol –
Union of Communist Youth – the mass youth organization in the Soviet Union.
iii)
Agitbrigada = agitational brigade. The term goes back to early twenties when
artistic non-professional groups were created in many Soviet government
institutions to propagate in artistic forms the ideas and achievements of the
new Soviet era.
iv)
The title
implies a comic ostensible contradiction with a famous picture “The rooks have
flown in” by A. Savrasov.
v)
Prestigious
Moscow Institute for musical and vocal education
vi)
Same as the
title of a pretentious Soviet song about the international peaceful aspirations
of the USSR. The song had often been put on radio and TV but never taken
seriously by listeners.
vii)
Distribution
(rus: raspredelenie). In the Soviet era working vacancies at any institution
were reserved for young graduates. Thus, each of them was assigned to a working
place where he was obliged to work at least for two years before he could
change to another place. Sometimes the choice and proposed wages were not very
attractive (particularly for non-Moscovites who had no right to settle in
Moscow without getting married to a Moscovite).
viii)
Then IAE –
Institute for Atomic Energy
ix)
Bolshoi (rus.) = Grand. Compare with the famous Bolshoi theater for opera and
ballet in Moscow
x)
Animals
theater in Moscow
xi)
MEPhI –
Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute; PhysTech – Moscow Institute of
Physics and Technology
xii)
The title
comes from an exchange of initial letters of the title “Fiziki
shutyat”(“Physicists’ Joke”). However, the meaning of the title becomes
something like “Schizophrenics are playing the fool”.