Spring is here now, he writes on May 24. Nearly all the snow has melted, shipping has begun, the lake is still covered in dirty ice, with gaping black and green holes appearing. And then on June 1, a massive snowstorm. I didn’t go out, he says, it’s warm in our room, but I feel this cold in my soul. Have you asked for permission to visit me? Akulov would have given it, but now I don’t know anymore. Because Akulov has just been replaced by Andrey Vyshinsky, the future state prosecutor of the “Moscow show trials,” the man who demanded that the defendants, Bukharin and other old Bolsheviks, should be executed: “Shoot these rabid dogs,” “crush the accursed reptiles.” “The graves of these hateful traitors will grow over with weeds and thistles,” he will declaim. We cannot expect anything of such a man, even if he hasn’t yet shown his true colors. My soul seethes with great indignation, writes Alexey Feodosievich. What right do they have to inflict this suffering on an honest servant of the state? I’ve been here for a year, these past twelve months are a year out of my life. Reading the journals, I come across references to the continuation of my work. We have had little opportunity to talk about it together, you are probably unaware of what I’ve done, time will pass and all that filled my work life will be forgotten. I have decided to write a report on what I have accomplished so that you and my daughter will know that I wasn’t a slacker.

  It is just at this point, June 10, 1935, that he mentions the wind and sun registers, as well as wind and solar power that he sees as the reservoirs of the future. He understands that life is going on without him, that his work is continuing without him, that others are picking up his ideas, his work and his dreams, and this is a new torment. He seems to be losing hope of ever returning to that active world where people plan, decide, and accomplish, where there is a future, which people claim can be tamed like a wild horse, where, in constructing socialism, they are constructing themselves. Here, on the islands, no future, nothing can be accomplished. This island is the island of the dead. He wants to leave his wife and daughter a testament, so that they at least will not forget that he has not always been a thing, a number in the registers of the NKVD. In 1934, he writes, I should have finished the first atlas of wind energy distribution in the USSR. It will certainly be published, but without me. The same goes for the sun register. Wind power is inexhaustible and renewable. Soon the vast territories of the USSR will be electrified by wind power, and my name will disappear without trace. Solar energy is even more powerful. The future belongs to solar and wind power.

  I continue to feel this cold in my soul. We have gone from winter to summer, with very hot days, he writes at the end of June. Thousands of wild geese fly overhead, making their way northwards. He complains that his research on the influence of the weather on the human organism is not progressing. He has always been exercised by this question, he says, which can lead to prolonged life expectancy. In 1932, he organized the first conference in the USSR, and perhaps in the world, on the influence of the climate on humans, he boasts, with doctors, architects, engineers, tree growers, and urban planners . . . the purpose was to reflect on the relations between the hydrometeorological regime and health, the design of apartment buildings, town planning. To think about the habitat and cities in relation to the climate was not so common in those days; he is certainly a pioneer. He reads an article in one newspaper about a new flight to the stratosphere (it must be the USSR-1 Bis, in June, which again nearly ended up in a fatal plunge). Once more he sees the fog over Moscow, illuminated by the headlights of Misha the driver, the night spent fine-tuning the instruments, charting the landing site on the map (and he had calculated it precisely!), the agonizing wait for radio messages from the gondola, Prokofyev’s nasal voice sending his Communist greetings from high in the sky where he had seen no more of God than Yuri Gagarin would twenty-eight years later, and then the most important part—collating and analyzing the readings. On January 8, that fateful January 8, 1934, he had prepared the report on the results in order to print it for the Seventeenth Congress. It was in his pocket when he was arrested. All he needed to do was proofread his two articles and send the entire thing to the typesetters. You know what happened afterwards, he writes to Varvara. The report was published, but of course without my articles and under a different name.

  Recently, he writes in July, I’ve been lagging a bit behind in my own work because in addition to my regular work in the library I’ve had to clean the place, the reading room and the toilets. It’s a big area and that has taken up all my free time. So I haven’t had a moment to draw a riddle for my little girl. I’m sending her the drawing of a berry that’s found here, I’m planning to make a collection of flowers and berries for her. As the months go by, he draws apricots, cranberries, a bunch of grapes, cherries, a wild strawberry, gooseberries, raspberries, greengage plums, blueberries, black currants and red currants, plums, a whole fruit salad, and another two that I am not able to identify. He draws a whole series of mushrooms. The riddles are in doggerel, for which I shan’t attempt to find an equivalent: “With no door and no windows / A house full of people” (a bean pod), “Two brothers live beside a path / but never see one another” (the eyes), with a variant, “Two brothers see one another without ever meeting / One is trampled on, the other is smoked” (floor and ceiling), or these two, which I quite like: “Steel nose / cotton tail” (a needle), and “Seventy coats / but no buttons and no buckles” (a cabbage).

  We knew nothing of the north, he writes, even though the polar air masses govern our climate. There was no weather station network in the north, I built it, despite extreme difficulties, including in the vast Siberian wastes. Of course they’ll keep quiet about the debt owed to me, all the glory will go to Otto Yulyevich and others, but History will remember. All thanks to my leadership. The results are visible, from Spitzbergen to Uelen in Chukotka. Condemned, forgotten, betrayed, humiliated, he is prone to outbursts of pride, taking credit for everything. When the pilot Sigismund Levanevsky, a handsome fellow known as “the Russian Lindbergh,” is planning a transpolar flight, he writes that if he hadn’t battled for three years to set up a network of polar stations, the flight wouldn’t be possible (incidentally it was a failure and it was Valery Chkalov who, two years later, flew nonstop from Moscow to Vancouver via the North Pole). The readings of the magnetic fields across the entire territory of the USSR, again, that was him. And at present, instead of checking the instruments returning from the stratosphere, guiding planes over the frozen wastes where compasses go awry, or mapping the earth’s magnetic fields, instead of dreaming of light being generated from the winds, what is he reduced to? Picking mushrooms and collecting plants. Today’s a day off, he writes, I went out with a friend. We picked mushrooms, samples of plants, and we ate blackberries from the peat bogs . . . Bitter mockery. His friend, his student, Nikolay Zubov is sailing on the Kara Sea on the icebreaker Sadko (from the name of the Russian Sinbad, the subject of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, which he planned to see with Varvara on the evening of January 8, 1934—a year and a half ago—a different era, a different world); he is going to set up a station on Solitude Island. I’m happy for him, writes Alexey Feodosievich. Like Schmidt, I expect he will try to forget me, but in his heart he must remember what I have done for him. We surrounded the entire Arctic with a network of expeditions. Like Zubov, I too dreamed of being part of one of them . . . Solitude Island in fact, that’s where he is.

  Back in 1925, he writes, I recommended bringing the weather forecasting services together in one big unified department, and in 1929 I succeeded. And one day my project of combining the weather forecasting services of the entire world will come about, of that I have no doubt. Here I’ve given two lectures on the topic of “Science at the service of everyday life.” I talked about molecular sequencing and concluded with the right way and the wrong way to sweep a floor. The audience was fascinated. My life is very dispiriting because I have no one to talk to, it is a total solitude, everything I experience, I experience alone. Alexey Feodosievich does not have the same point of view at all as Yury Chirkov, who is enthralled by the intellectual brilliance of the little group that gravitates towards the library. But Chirkov is a young man full of optimism, and Wangenheim a neurasthenic who feels his life ebbing, now useless. I’m continuing to study foreign languages in fits and starts, he writes. Talking of solitude, I forgot to mention an animal: my little cat. We have grown very attached to one another. He has just jumped off my shoulder where he’d been quietly snoozing. He is well-behaved, affectionate, and crafty, he knows when I’m about to eat, he comes up to me and starts to claw at my puttees. Once he went out of the open door, I looked for him for ages but he came back of his own accord. It may seem strange, but this playful little grey creature comforts me even though he messes up my papers or makes my table dirty with his mucky paws.

  It is a total solitude. We dried the mushrooms, he writes. When you send me a parcel, put in a fine-tooth comb. We have to have our heads shorn here, but between shavings, I’d like to comb my hair, and the teeth in the comb I made are too far apart. It’s such a shame to have to think about such things rather than important matters . . . I’m struggling to remain strong. I’m wearing new shoes. I was afraid I’d have to keep the old ones—which are very worn, but I’ve been given new ones, which are one and a half sizes too big, but with socks and puttees they are all right. So I’m all kitted out, if they aren’t stolen, which is what usually happens. We’re preparing for the anniversary of the October Revolution, it’s the second one I’ll be celebrating without you and Eleonora, with an overwhelming sense of utter absurdity. I am very tired. I had a huge boil on my back, today’s the first day I’m able to sit at my table to write. My right hand is a lot better, but now it’s the left that is beginning to hurt. Tomorrow it will be one month since I sent my seventh letter to Stalin. Either my letters aren’t reaching him, or they are not being read. Deep down I fear that no one cares about the truth.

  There are no attempts at escape, or very few. The sixty kilometers that separate the principal island from the mainland form an almost insuperable barrier, whether the sea is thawed, from May to November, or frozen. And the men of the NKVD patrol the shores around Kem, opposite. However, in September of this year of 1935, there is one. Chirkov, newly disembarked from the Udarnik, describes it. The power station siren goes off, the dogs lead the pursuers down to the shore, the camp’s small seaplane takes to the sky. If the fugitive tries to cross the inlet, he has almost no chance of avoiding detection. A storm blows up, forcing the sea search to be called off. After a week, the fugitive’s body is found crushed amid a heap of tree trunks washed ashore by the storm. His name is Pavel Boreysha, he was a member of the Komsomol who had been appalled by the sight of those who had starved to death in Ukraine and had had the courage to write about it. He had been deported as a result. He too had sent a petition to Stalin, which had been read, because it earned him a transfer to a cruel penalty isolator.

  I am utterly alone here, writes Alexey Feodosievich at the beginning of December 1935. I get on well with several of the men, but I am not close to anyone. I’m a misfit, a white crow. I sent my petition to Vyshinsky, I don’t know what will come of it. It’s the first time I have asked the prosecutor to review my case. Given that two years have gone by, I have high hopes. I’m convinced that if I remain alive, the Party will eventually clarify everything. It is just a matter of time. My faith in the Party remains unshaken, he writes on December 24. Then, on January 18: my petition has been filed under number 1726. There’s a terrible storm blowing, the snow stings your eyes. I gave a lecture on the conquest of the stratosphere, there were people of all ages in the audience, from nine years old to the elderly, and they all listened attentively.

  He is a white crow here. I am utterly alone here. You tell me you haven’t received any letters for a long time, he says, but I write regularly. Why would anyone delay the post? During my walks, he writes, I talk to the moon and I ask it to give my greetings to my darlings. It shines on you at the same time as on me. Yesterday I saw a magnificent green aurora borealis. At first it was like a curtain rippling across the sky, then rays and rainbows. When you think about the altitude at which it is happening, probably over two hundred kilometers from Earth, and at what astonishing speed the rays are moving, you’re struck by what a powerful phenomenon it is. I’m reading Fridtjof Nansen, he writes, Farthest North. He was also cut off from the world, but what wouldn’t I give to swap places with him. After being forced to turn back on his walk to the North Pole, the Norwegian Nansen had spent an entire winter in a makeshift shelter on the Franz Josef archipelago in northern Siberia. Wherever I look, writes Alexey Feodosievich, whatever I think about, everything seems gloomy, agonizing, often desperate, the only glimmer in the darkness is you, my darlings. That star lights the way, and I won’t give up, despite the overwhelming facts, despite the grim reality. I continue to hope that the darkness will be dispelled, that the Party will acknowledge the truth. And yet, my fifteen petitions addressed to the leaders remain unanswered . . . Perhaps the petition I sent to Vyshinsky met the same fate. I bought some seal blubber, he adds.

  Yesterday I saw a magnificent green aurora borealis. The days follow on from one another monotonously, each one is a desperate loss, drawing me closer to the end of my life, he says. My petition has been filed under number 1726 . . . I am quietly continuing my Arctic research. When I immerse myself in my studies, I forget a little. Never in my life have I devoted so much time to trivial domestic details—that must be the meaning of “rehabilitation through work” . . . It’s obvious that stupid jobs, cleaning toilets etc., are more useful to the Construction of the Soviet Union than finding answers to important scientific questions . . . Furthermore, he writes, we should not try to analyze things that are beyond our understanding. This little grey creature, my cat, with his dirty paws, comforts me in my sadness. I had a reply to one of my inquiries about my eighth petition to Comrade Stalin: it was sent to the Central Committee secretariat on November 15, 1935. No result. I don’t think there will be one, and I wrote to Dimitrov to no avail. You know, if someone had talked to me before January 8 about what I am forced to conclude now, I would have spat in his face and called him a liar and a slanderer.

  In March, he writes, I gave ten lectures on the aurora borealis. I have seen several, mostly they are in the form of an arc, but once I saw curtains of green rays shimmering in the sky and undulating as if in the wind. I teach others things, but I myself am learning nothing, for lack of books on the subject. On the other hand, I read new books on the physics of the atomic nucleus with interest. I try to be outdoors as often as possible. On the 20th, I was able to measure the depth of the snow around the “Kremlin.” Thanks to the boots you sent me I leaped around in the snow like a hare, and in some places it came right up to my waist. The average depth of the snow is seventy centimeters. This little note gives an insight both into the way Wangenheim’s mind worked, focused on numbers and precise measurements rather than the imagination (admittedly circumstances did not lend themselves to fantasy), and into his despair at his enforced idleness. I’ve started to write a lecture on the eclipse of the sun that will take place on June 19, he writes. I’m building a huge planetarium. I remember 1914, when the Academy of Sciences planned to send me to Feodosia to observe the full eclipse of the sun. I bought a suitcase and a whole lot of equipment, but four days before my departure I was called up, and instead of Feodosia, I found myself at the front.

  I’m preparing for the eclipse of the sun that will take place on June 19, he writes, I’m finishing the big planetarium, I’m doing technical drawings, and there’s one question I can’t get out of my mind: why can’t I do this for my little Elia and for your students? In some places, especially where there are large numbers of regular prisoners, people listen attentively, avidly even, to my talks. For me it’s a good exercise in making science understandable, I’m training myself to explain sometimes very complicated things in a way that is simple. I’m sending you two drawings of the aurora borealis for your students, he writes. I listened to the broadcast of the May Day parade on Red Square on the radio, and it made me feel so miserable that I went outside to stop myself from weeping. At the moment I’m studying Einstein’s theory of relativity, he writes a month later, at the very beginning of June, and I feel capable of tackling these difficult questions. Soon Einstein’s theory will be considered a “Talmudist abstraction,” and physicists referring to it as agents of a foreign conspiracy. Life and Fate, the great novel by Vasily Grossman, talks about it, among other things that are essential to understanding the twentieth century. Amid the debris of all his convictions, Alexey Feodosievich clings to that which does not founder—his love for his family and his mental stamina: he is capable, he is still capable of studying the theory of relativity. Long imprisoned by the ice, the spring bursts into life, the cuckoos start to sing, the frogs to croak in the hundreds of lakes and marshes dotted around the island, the seagulls are back and their screeching keeps him awake, the vegetation shoots up, cranberries, blueberries sprinkling the undergrowth with millions of colored beads. But what is the use of spring? There is no night, the sun goes down, blots out the horizon to the north and rises again, making the clouds explode with all the colors of the spectrum. Wangenheim cannot be relied on to give colorful descriptions of the glories of nature, it is even curious that his love of drawing does not seem to go hand in hand with an acute sense of observation. The letters of Pavel Florensky written at the same time give us a much better idea of the celestial gems of the white nights: “Last night, on returning from the ‘Kremlin,’ I was unable to tear myself away from the prodigious richness of the colors of the sky: purple, violet, lilac, pink, orange, gold, grey, scarlet, pale blue, blue-green, and white: the interplay of all the colors in the sky streaked with long, thin layers of purple clouds.” “The splendor of Claude Lorrain,” he adds, “with much more richness and diversity of hues.” Rays fan out from the rims of the clouds and strike the surface of the sea, reminding him this time of Raphael’s Vision of Ezekiel.

 

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