Alexander Esenin-Volpin | |
|---|---|
| Александр Есенин-Вольпин | |
 | |
| Born | Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin (1924-05-12)May 12, 1924 |
| Died | March 16, 2016(2016-03-16) (aged 91) Boston,Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Citizenship | Soviet Union, United States |
| Alma mater | Moscow State University |
| Occupation(s) | Soviet mathematician, human rights activist, dissident, poet |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Boston University |
Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin (also written Ésénine-Volpine and Yessenin-Volpin in his French and English publications; Russian:Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Есе́нин-Во́льпин,IPA:[ɐlʲɪˈksandrsʲɪrˈɡʲejɪvʲɪtɕjɪˈsʲenʲɪnˈvolʲpʲɪn]ⓘ; May 12, 1924 – March 16, 2016) was a Russian-Americanpoet andmathematician.
Adissident,political prisoner and a leader of the Soviethuman rights movement, he spent a total of six years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities inpsikhushkas and exile.[1][2] In mathematics, he is known for his foundational role inultrafinitism.
Alexander Volpin was born on May 12, 1924, in theSoviet Union. His mother, Nadezhda Volpin, was a poet and translator from French and English. His father wasSergei Yesenin,[3]: 221 a celebrated Russian poet, who never knew his son. Alexander and his mother moved from Leningrad to Moscow in 1933.
His firstpsychiatric imprisonments took place in 1949[4]: 20 for "anti-Soviet poetry", in 1959 for smuggling abroadsamizdat, including hisСвободный философский трактат (Free Philosophical Tractate), and again in 1968.
Esenin-Volpin graduated fromMoscow State University with a"candidate" dissertation in mathematics in the spring of 1949. After graduation, Volpin was sent to the Ukrainian city ofChernovtsy to teach mathematics at the local state university. Less than a month after his arrival in Chernovtsy he was arrested by theMGB, sent on a plane back to Moscow, and incarcerated in theLubyanka prison. He was charged with "systematically conducting anti-Soviet agitation, writing anti-Soviet poems, and reading them to acquaintances."[5]: 639
Apprehensive about the prospect of prison andlabuor camp, Volpin faked a suicide attempt in order to initiate a psychiatric evaluation.[6]: 119–21 Psychiatrists at Moscow'sSerbsky Institute declared Volpin mentally incompetent, and in October 1949 he was transferred to the Leningrad Psychiatric Prison Hospital for an indefinite stay. A year later he was abruptly released from the prison hospital, and sentenced to five years exile in the Kazakh town ofKaraganda as a "socially dangerous element." In Karaganda, he found employment as a teacher of evening and correspondence courses in mathematics.
In 1953, after the death ofJoseph Stalin, Volpin was released due to a general amnesty. Soon he became a known mathematician. In particular, he adhered to the philosophical theories ofultrafinitism andintuitionism and worked on development of these.
In 1965, Esenin-Volpin organized a legendary "glasnost meeting" ("митинг гласности"), a demonstration atPushkinskaya Square in the center ofMoscow demanding an open and fair trial for the arrested writersAndrei Sinyavsky andYuli Daniel. The leaflets written by Volpin and distributed throughsamizdat asserted that the accusations and their closed-door trial were in violation of the1936 Soviet Constitution and the more recent RSFSR Criminal Procedural Code.
The meeting was attended by about 200 people, many of whom turned out to beKGB operatives. The slogans read: "Требуем гласности суда над Синявским и Даниэлем" (We demand anopen trial for Sinyavski and Daniel) and "Уважайте советскую конституцию" (Respect the Soviet constitution).[7] The demonstrators were promptly arrested.
[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 thehuman rights movement in the Soviet Union. He was one of the firstSoviet 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 wasagain hospitalized in February 1968 as one of those protesting most strongly against the trial ofAlexander Ginzburg andYury Galanskov (Galanskov-Ginzburg trial).[9]
After his 1968psychiatric confinement,Letter of the Ninety-Nine was sent to the Soviet authorities asking for his release.[10] This fact became public and theVoice of America conducted a broadcast on the topic; Esenin-Volpin was released almost immediately thereafter.[3]: 221 Vladimir Bukovsky was quoted as saying that Volpin's diagnosis was "pathological honesty".[11]
In 1968, Esenin-Volpin circulated his famous "Памятка для тех, кому предстоят допросы" (Memo for those who expect to be interrogated) widely used by fellow dissidents.[12]
In 1969, he signed the firstAppeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights, drafted by theInitiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR.[13] In 1970, Volpin joined theCommittee on Human Rights in the USSR and worked withYuri Orlov,Andrei Sakharov and other activists.
In May 1972, he emigrated to theUnited States, but hisSoviet citizenship was not revoked as was customary at the time. He worked atBoston University. In 1973 he was one of the signers of theHumanist Manifesto.[14]
Abroad he again alarmed the Soviet authorities in 1977 by threatening to sue them for spreading rumours that he was mentally ill.[15]
In 2005, Esenin-Volpin participated in "They Chose Freedom", a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement.
He died on March 16, 2016, aged 91.[16][17]
His early work was in general topology, where he introducedEsenin-Volpin's theorem. Most of his later work was on the foundations of mathematics, where he introducedultrafinitism, 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 ofZermelo–Fraenkel set theory using ultrafinitistic techniques in (Ésénine-Volpine 1961), (Yessenin-Volpin 1970) and (Yessenin-Volpin 1981).
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.
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