Their names are in the history of science

Dmitry Ivanovich with all his personality

To the publication of D.I.Blokhintsev's "Diaries"

(End. Beginning at Issue No. 24 dated 6 June, 2022)

And here are the fruits of thought:

"I want to write an anthem for the intelligentsia - the intelligentsia of scientists, artists and actors, the intelligentsia of engineers and workers, the intelligentsia of peasants and hunters, sailors and fishermen…

The intelligentsia deserves it…"

"The path of humanity is the path of insights and sacrifices. Staircase of crucifixes. Glory to you who did not yield, glory to you who did not bend, glory to you who were possessed. You are the salt of the earth. And if the salt loses its power, what shall we salt ourselves with?

Glory to Pasternak.

Glory to Solzhenitsyn" (p. 189).

"I love you people, my companions in this incomprehensible world. In a world where there are whole Himalayas of good and evil, joys and misfortunes" (p. 130).

"O my country! My heart aches for you... For I see that great suffering awaits you... And the voice of your people has died away...

Only one CENSOR speaks. One, having taken all the responsibility upon himself, exorbitant and unbearable ... For he is offended by God, his mind is weak" (p. 293).

And as if summing up all the thoughts:

"My CREDO

I am flesh from the flesh of the Russian people. I am a Russian intellectual. I am from that glorious Russian intelligentsia that has never left its people in history and has always rooted for them with all its heart.

/…/ I am also a cosmopolitan - because I clearly understand the unity of humanity, our Great Community.

I hate the swastika.

I hate everything anti-human.

I hate cynicism.

I reject nationalism because of its stupid narrowness...

/…/ I believe in the power of Reason.

I believe, the science that has made us powerful, can also make us happy.

I believe that this will be achieved in a new religion that should restore the lost harmony between Reason and Emotion.

I am convinced that the path to it will be the path of Afflations and Crucifixions /…/"

The "Diaries" are preceded by an article written for the 75th anniversary of Dmitry Ivanovich by his students B. M. Barbashov, A. V. Efremov and V. N. Pervushin who, alas, also left us. As an epigraph to it, they chose his quatrain:

No one in the world will wake up
Souls gone to rest
But on Earth, strange to you,
Your songs will wander.

I would like to hope that after the "Diaries" and the album of paintings and drawings by Dmitry Ivanovich envisaged by the glorious creative team of the JINR Museum, the publication of his poetry collection will follow.

I am a painter

A tenacious visual memory, that is called photographic memory, is sometimes found among people who are not particularly distinguished by anything else. But only the people endowed with an artistic gift, from a continuous series of what they see, snatch and fix the pictures that struck them, or pictures born of their imagination, in order to reproduce them - in word or on canvas. An excellent example of this is V. Nabokov's memoirs "Other Shores". D.I. was also endowed with this gift. He captured in his paintings not only what he had seen, but also philosophically meaningful images, images-reflections. And in the diary, he entered both playful drawings, and numerous travel sketches, and diagrams of the routes of his water and foot trips and mountain hiking.

And here are a few "scenes in prose" from the diaries:

"Today, on the way to Dubna… I admired the sunset. It was truly fabulous: crimson clouds in the deep and dense blue of the sky and below a golden stripe with incandescent clouds floating in it. Then everything faded into purple. Colors of the north, I am their prisoner" (p. 46).

"The moon is shining, the wide road on the Dnieper is silvering, the wheels of the steamer are peacefully knocking, the red and green lights of the buoys are shining comfortably.

It is quiet on the Dnieper. How long will it last? What awaits you, dear people?" (p.74).

"A face distorted by life…" I met such people early in the morning going to work" (p. 92).

On the back cover of the "Diaries" there is a painting by D.I. that could be called "The Knowing Man": a child is standing on the ledge of a rock, looking up into the starry sky, into the universe. (Let me note parenthetically that a group of physicists-enthusiasts long ago proposed to the JINR Administration to decorate the rear fa?ade of the Cultural Centre "Mir" with a large-scale copy of this painting. We hope that this idea will be put into practice). Several paintings by D.I. are reproduced on the walls of the library named after him - "Blokhinka". The intended edition of the album has already been mentioned above.

I am a diplomat

Dmitry Ivanovich received great physicists who came to Dubna with visits, such as N. Bohr, P. Dirac and F. Joliot-Curie, outstanding cultural figures and politicians of various ranks - up to the highest and he knew how to keep up a conversation with everyone on an equal footing. Throughout his life, he was a member and even Head of many international scientific and public organizations and was vigorously involved in their activities. For instance, in 1966-1969 he was President of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Physics of IUPAP. However, this side of his activity in the diaries appears very sparingly. Here is one of the few such entries. He made it shortly before leaving for a meeting of the UN Scientific Advisory Board, of which he was a member:

"I am preparing to fly to the Council to U Thant ...

If I can do at least something for the sake of a peaceful sky over our country, I am happy..." (p. 169). (U Thant - Burmese diplomat, UN Secretary General from 1962 to 1971)

It turns out that in order to clearly confirm the diplomatic talent of D.I., like it or not, one has to use evidence from outside. Here is an excerpt from the memoirs of E.P.Shabalin, who participated in a conference in Japan together with D.I.: "At a banquet arranged for the participants of the conference, an American scientist proposed a toast to Otto Frisch as the "father of pulsed reactors." Dmitry Ivanovich immediately noticed that if someone has a father, then, obviously, there must be a mother. The hosts of the conference understood the hint and in the next toast, the Japanese physicist called D.I.Blokhintsev "the mother of pulsed reactors." The hall burst into applause. The Russian priority in the field of pulsed reactors has been restored" ("Brief biography of D.I.Blokhintsev". Dubna, 2017, p.51).

But such intellectual plasticity at international meetings did not always help D.I. when clarifying relations in the "native" academic environment and it was hardly sometimes appropriate. Here is the entry on page 44 of the "Diaries":

"And yesterday, N.N.Bogolyubov, at a reception with the Hungarians, after drinking, said, "I can tell you (what is on the mind of a sober person that is on the tongue of a drunken one): you are a wonderful person and you have passed your path wonderfully. They beat you, they did so many troubles to you, but they did worse to themselves. And you erected a historical tower on these sorrows and you saw both in science and in life ten years ahead (for this, there were beats, that's how ...)"

However, in real life D.I. didn't look like a diplomat at all. We have already spoken about his participation in subbotniks; let me share an episode from the mid-1960s. On a hot summer day, a large company of JINR staff members landed in Kletinsky Bor. Dmitry Ivanovich was also there. After swimming, we started playing football in the meadow and he also played with us - he was the left back in the team where I played the center back. And in the course of the game, sometimes it turned out that I reacted quite loudly to his oversights and he did not take offense at me. Could I have imagined as a student that I would yell at a person, with whose wonderful textbook I taught and passed quantum mechanics! He was not offended by Maya Zhuravleva either who after the game when we sat down by the fire and ate buckwheat porridge with stew, went down to the Volga, scooped up water in a rubber cap and sneaking up splashed it on D.I.

I note, by the way, that unlike football D.I. perfectly mastered mountain skiing, mountaineering and scuba diving, that were popular among physicists. In a word, his versatility, the scale of his personality in all the incarnations designated by him, was manifested with sufficient completeness in sports. So, the compilers of his brief biography A.A.Rastorguev and E.P.Shabalin quite rightly called it "The Man of the Renaissance."

I would like to end the story about Dmitry Ivanovich who so clearly revealed himself to us in the "Diaries" that are hardly intended for a broad reading public, yet are all the more convincing in their authenticity, with the following entry:

"I saw the old world...

I saw the Revolution...

I starved for two wars...

I was in the hands of the Inquisition.

I launched the world's first nuclear power station...

I participated in the revolution in physics.

I participated in the development of "A" and saw atomic explosions.

I was the first to design AE^* for space and a pulsed reactor.

I developed Obninsk (IPPE) and established JINR!

I saw the geniuses of our time and was their interlocutor...

I saw the Earth and flew over it and I was one of the first to understand its smallness.

I climbed the highest peaks.

I wandered in the taiga, swam through the rapids.

I raced down the slalom slopes.

I loved and I was loved by beautiful women ...

I have children and I have grandchildren.

I wrote books and poems...

I urged people to understand that our Earth is a spaceship...

Lord, I thank You!" (p. 258)

________________
(^*Atomic engine.)

On 31 May, the Museum of the History of Science and Technology of JINR hosted a presentation of the "Diaries". The long-awaited event - it took six whole years to prepare handwritten notebooks for printing, many parts in which required deciphering and searching. The history of this time-consuming and painstaking work, with its sometimes detective details, certainly deserves a separate story. We confine ourselves to naming the main characters of the plot. This is primarily the daughter of Dmitry Ivanovich Tatyana Dmitrievna Blokhintseva: the book was published on her initiative, she provided the manuscripts and carried out the general edition. Her younger brother, Igor Dmitrievich Blokhintsev, took an active part in the work. A huge contribution to the preliminary preparation of the book for publication was made by the employees of the JINR Museum K.E.Kozubsky and A.A.Rastorguev: this is the decoding of various kinds of illegibility, abbreviations and acronyms in the manuscript and the identification of many personalities by the initial letters of their full names, etc. And Director of the museum N. S. Kavalerova not only helped them, but also negotiated with the publishing house and concluded an agreement with them and which is very important, perfectly determined how the book would look. JINR Chief Scientific Secretary S.N.Nedelko creatively participated in solving a number of important editorial issues. I have listed almost all the members of the editorial board, only one person is not named - E.V.Kalinnikova, an employee of the publishing department. Frankly, we rarely pay tribute to the quality of editing books we read. But this is the rare case when the work of the editor not only attracted attention, but aroused admiration that I gladly address to Elena Vladimirovna. She not only clarified and identified numerous multilingual quotations, but also solved sometimes seemingly unsolvable riddles. Head of the publishing department A. N. Shabashova spoke about this in detail at the presentation. And we should pay tribute to the employee of the department I.G.Andreeva: she superbly made up a polygraphically very difficult book with an abundance of drawings and diagrams.

At the presentation, everyone who was lucky enough to get hold of the "Diaries" spoke about the significance of this event and about the enthusiasm with which they are read. Their circulation - 500 copies - is not intended for the mass reader, but everyone who wants to get acquainted with them has such an opportunity: firstly, the book was transferred to all libraries in Dubna and secondly, on the site of artistic creative work of JINR staff creativescience.jinr.ru a new one has appeared in addition to the five existing sections - "Memoirs and Diaries" and there one will find the book in electronic form. It will be followed by E.P.Shabalin's memoirs, already prepared for publication and a very interesting set of already published brochures with memoirs and interviews of JINR physicists, published in different years in the Institute's newspaper; the preparation of these publications is the merit of A.A.Rastorguev. I also take this opportunity to thank LIT employee T.V.Tyupikova, who provides technical assistance in organizing and filling the site.

The materials of this new section of it will undoubtedly serve to enrich our understanding of the history of JINR, making it lively and exciting. Therefore, I urge all employees and veterans of our Institute who have written or are going to write memoirs to address them to our website. This, however, also applies to its other potential participants - poets, prose writers, artists, musicians and masters of photography and applied art. Creative people, feel free to share your creations! Write to vardenga@jinr.ru.

Genrikh VARDENGA