Reading the diaries of D.I.Blokhintsev

The publication of the diaries of D.I.Blokhintsev, one of the founders of the Joint Institute and its first Director, is an extraordinary event for Dubna. And not only for Dubna. Many memoirs written by scientists have been published, but here is a diary ... - here offhand, only the diaries of V.I.Vernadsky are recalled.

Dmitry Ivanovich kept diaries from his youth and perhaps from childhood. At the disposal of his heirs there were notebooks of the last 20 years. The diary is a special genre. It has no place for hypocrisy. The diary may be different. It can be a confession, it can be sketches from nature, capturing moments of life between the past and the future, it can be summing up and making plans for the future. All this can be found in the diaries of Dmitry Ivanovich. But the main thing for him in the diaries was self-knowledge, since reflection, including philosophical, was an integral feature of his personality. At times, he had a desire to be alone, he dreamed of the "lamp of the sage". These minutes (and hours) are captured in diary entries. The sculptor depicted him in a bas-relief in front of the branch of the SINP MSU as some kind of a schemamonk, a hermit, a monk - well, there really was something like that in him.

Energetic and delicate, sensitive, a man with thin skin and a vivid imagination, Dmitry Ivanovich never complained publicly and those who seemed to know him well will discover him in a new way by reading these diaries. His diaries were never dry and only when summing up and making plans for the future, he switched to a strict protocol style.

He summed up, made plans, gave characteristics to contemporaries and predecessors, sketched strokes for portraits, made sketches of nature and mood, tried to understand himself, to understand what was happening with the country and where the world was heading, thought about science and art, about limitations of human possibilities and finiteness of being. Did he not think that he was writing for History? Perhaps, but he felt the look of descendants behind the right shoulder when writing.

He glanced at the timer and checked to see if he was still strong enough. In January 1959, he wrote in his diary: "Our company turns 100 years old: I am 51, Shi is 49 ... I have lived about half a million hours and do not feel like an old man. Is that an additional 10 kg - I should lose them ..."

He remembered the times that he compared with spring. Crimea, in 1930, where he and Shi spent the summer vacation after graduating from the university, Tamm's postgraduate studies, the first publications, a conference on nuclear physics in Kharkov in 1934, to which Bohr and Dirac came...

And, of course, Obninsk. That's where he really felt well. Nuclear energy was born here... Coming to Dubna, it was as if he cut off the umbilical cord. Obninsk called him for a long time. He was loved there, people were busy there, there was no time for intrigues...

And he warmly recalled the house of his childhood, where everything was filled with kindness and as a symbol of this kindness, a family heirloom - a cup that was kept by the grandmother, who had received it as a gift from Dr.Haas. In the second place after kindness, Dmitry Ivanovich appreciated wisdom in people. In 1961, when Bor visited Dubna, he wrote in his diary: "I haven't seen him since 1955… he is even more overgrown, mossy and has gone to the world of the distant past; very flabby, but the eyes are kind..."

He was looking for the harmony of the world and suffered from the imperfection of the world. He was sickened by the vanity of "brilliant" physicists who sprinkled aphorisms like gold pieces from chocolates, he denied genius to those who skillfully bypassed singularities, entering the complex plane, but were not able to give birth to a real physical idea. He said to himself: "May I not be a genius, but geniuses do not grow up out of nowhere, they only sum up the work of their predecessors."

Over the years, he was increasingly visited by a premonition of man-made and natural disasters. In 1967, when the country was celebrating the 50th anniversary of Soviet power, he said: "MAYBE THE MOST TRAGIC IS THAT OUR PROBLEMS ARE GENERAL AND PLANETARY AND THE WAY OF THINKING OF MOST LEADING GROUPS REMAINS AT THE LEVEL OF THINKING OF LEADERS OF NOMAD PEOPLE."

He often had dreams, sometimes nightmares. He could make entries about them in his diary and then shot films based on them, as Bu?uel had done. After a book about the Yeti, he had a dream about Bigfoot: "He said to me: "I am not a man, I am a monkey. One finds me in the Gimalai mountains, because I am the member of the Gimalai Climbing Club!" What is there "Modest Charm of the Bourgeoisie"!

Sometimes the dreams were repeated and in one of them exactly what he had already dreamed of in the anxious 1937 was repeated. What exactly? There is no answer to this question in the diary, but there were plenty of events that year ... For example, a meeting of the LPI activists, at which I.E.Tamm was discussed: his younger brother Leonid was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet activity and the issue of how Igor Evgenievich could overlook the enemy of Soviet power next to him was discussed. Blokhintsev was one of the few who dared to defend him: "I have known Igor Evgenievich for a long time, we have talked a lot with him on a variety of topics and I have never heard anything anti-Soviet from him ..." Like someone said that in times like these, being just a decent person was in itself a deed.

It is all more surprising that their paths diverged. Why two of them, the teacher and the student, had a nasty falling out? Most likely, the answer should be sought on the battlefields fought between the LIP and the Physics Department of Moscow State University in the middle of the last century (for more details, see the book by A.V.Andreev "Physicists do not joke" - A.R.). Blokhintsev, who worked in both places, found himself under crossfire. Most of all he got from the LIP colleagues, the "Boeotians".

The first blow came in 1938. If I.M.Frank, his former classmate, in that year gave an explanation for the blue glow discovered by Cherenkov and 20 years later shared the Nobel Prize with him (and with I.E.Tamm), then Blokhintsev predicted in the same year a new phenomenon and received nothing but criticism from colleagues who smashed his work at the seminar. He took the article to the magazine, but the same people were sitting there and the work went to the table. And 9 years later, the predicted "Lamb shift" was discovered experimentally and was awarded the Nobel Prize... The second blow followed after the war: the LIP colleagues failed him in the elections to the Academy. Academician M.A.Leontovich, the most direct of them (he was called "the conscience of the Academy"), said just that: "Your line is not our line, so get it!" Among those who voted against Blokhintsev was I.E.Tamm, "a teacher and an enemy" ...

In 1971, he dreamed of Tamm; the farewell scene was imprinted so vividly, as if everything was happening in reality, although Igor Evgenievich was already standing on the other side of being: "I dreamed of him clearly, as if alive ..."

"I.E., after all, you are dear to me, after all, then it was spring!"

"Yes, yes, I understand..."

"But you and Dau drowned my work..."

"I know, I know, I'm sorry I didn't understand…"

"It doesn't matter, I.E., it's gone…"

Finished script!

"And then ... I left the "lordly gardening of poetry - a capricious woman," wrote D.I., looking back, "but they didn't understand then that I didn't run, but threw all the rubbish of academic tinsel in their faces..." And five months later he added: "It seems that they should congratulate the Academy - I was elected a Corresponding Member. "They" themselves think that this is so important that it also begins to seem to me that it is important. Kurchatov signed his congratulations: a soldier of the Atomic Project. And he should have asked as a general, D.I. noted: sometimes he was annoyed at the CPI ..."

I.N.Golovin's book about Kurchatov that came out ten years later also touched him. It was written about the first nuclear power plant in it as if Kurchatov had done everything and Blokhintsev was just the head of construction. And when they began to prepare in Obninsk for the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Obninsk NPP, its new creators suddenly appeared: "Yesterday, M.E.Minashin told me that Savely Feinberg is rushing into History and ascribes the NPP to himself. This is after he tried to close it at the very beginning of construction! Good swan geese!" The story is as old as the world: the architect Sostratus carved his name on the marble wall of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, under the plaster, and the name of the next Ptolemy flaunted on the surface, but over time the plaster fell off, and the name of the creator of the seventh wonder of the world became the property of history. Dmitry Ivanovich did not wait for the plaster to crumble. He sat down and wrote "The Birth of the Peaceful Atom", where he seated everyone in their places.

Of course, Dmitry Ivanovich was not always consistent in everything. At times he even contradicted himself. At a meeting of the JINR Scientific Council, he threw the slogan "Ideas, not accelerators!", and at another - "Come on, IBR-2!" In his diaries there are opposite judgments and assessments that he endured, succumbing to momentary annoyance. Well, people are people...

In 1965, Dmitry Ivanovich headed the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics. Having got rid of administrative troubles, he plunged headlong into science. He dreamed of constructing a theory of elementary particles in a finished form, devoid of contradictions. He was looking for a way out in non-locality, in the discreteness of space and time. Most theorists by that time had already given up thinking in images and switched to formulas and he impressed his students with the ability to represent what was happening in the microcosm in space-time. But ... physics went the other way - mathematics won. Particles have remained pointlike, infinities are still being swept under the carpet and nonlocal theories have been archived. However, the monograph "Space and Time in the Microcosm", published half a century ago, was republished once again in 2015 that means, the ideas and images of D.I.Blokhintsev still inspire physicists of the 21st century.

Alexander RASTORGUEV