On the bookshelf

His poems contain love and anxiety

On 6 March, the JINR Museum of History of Science and Technology hosted a presentation of a collection of poems by the outstanding physicist, first director of the Joint Institute Dmitry Ivanovich BLOKHINTSEV. The book, published by the JINR Publishing Department, introduces us to another facet of his personality.

I.D.Blokhintsev

Opening the evening, deputy director of the Museum N.S.Kavalerova noted that the release of the collection of poems was the next stage in the great work with the legacy of Dmitry Ivanovich after four years of preparation for the publication of his diaries. Igor Dmitrievich Blokhintsev did a huge amount of work, sorting through Blokhintsev's archives - workbooks, philosophical notebooks, paintings - in the dust and mouse droppings of the BLTP basement. We didn't immediately come to a consensus on how to publish poems, if selected, then on what basis? Museum council member E.P.Shabalin proposed publishing the entire surviving poetic heritage.

Thanks to the efforts of the Institute's staff and the Chief Scientific Secretary S.N.Nedelko, it was possible to preserve the entire huge archive. Poems were found in the margins of workbooks and separately, so during the analysis of the archive, Igor Dmitrievich came up with the idea for the collection. "I did technical work - I compared handwritten and typewritten versions of poems," Igor Dmitrievich said. "And we discussed the concept of the collection in the museum with N.S.Kavalerova, G.L.Vardenga and E.P.Shabalin. I digitized the originals, then they fell into the gentle hands of the Publishing Department employees. It is impossible to overestimate the work of E.V.Kalinnikova, A.N.Shabashova, V.O.Tamonova. The Publishing House's wizards restored the richness and brightness of the drawings in the margins of the poems and they were also included in the book." I.D.Blokhintsev expressed his deep gratitude to everyone who supported the idea of creating the collection.

Igor Dmitrievich spoke about his father's childhood, showing his childhood drawings and his first poem. While studying at the technical school, more serious drawings and complex drawings appeared and then, as he noted, "theoretical physics won, although the engineering mindset always helped him". And then we saw in photographs, poems and drawings of Dmitry Ivanovich his life, refracted in the fate of the country - the student years of romantic travels around the USSR, the pain of the war in Spain, the severity of 1937, the premonition of the Great Patriotic War and its trials, the post-war confrontation between the USSR and the USA, the burden of making decisions and responsibility for them in the 1950s-1960s.

We heard the voice of Dmitry Ivanovich himself - Igor Dmitrievich digitized the surviving tape recordings of the author's performance of some poems. In December 1953, even before the launch of the first nuclear power plant in Obninsk, when all the technical problems had not been resolved, the battle for the launch was still going on and it was not clear how it would end, the "Obninsk Song" was written: "All the bridges are behind, Everything is completely burned. We can't go back, Only death is behind us..." The launch of the nuclear power plant changed a lot in the life of Dmitry Ivanovich, as I.D.Blokhintsev noted. And although Blokhintsev did not want to leave Obninsk, he enthusiastically took up the organization of JINR. The workbooks preserved options for the structure of the Institute, notes on how many rooms should be allocated to each laboratory, how many electricians and janitors are required, on the meeting of the housing commission and how to resolve the dispute between M.G.Meshcheryakov and B.M.Pontecorvo. After the previous ten years of working in complete secrecy, Dmitry Ivanovich's way of life has completely changed. He travels abroad and at every opportunity, visits famous museums of fine art and new poems are born from meetings with their masterpieces. "He has a lot of pessimistic poems and notes in his diaries, he was worried about the future of civilization," I.D.Blokhintsev noted.

G.L.Vardenga compared Blokhintsev to the titans of the Renaissance that read several poems and an excerpt from Dmitry Ivanovich's diaries at the evening. I.E.Leonovich that had worked at the JINR Universal Library for 40 years, recalled that 15 years ago, thanks to the Director of the Institute A.N.Sissakyan and with the support of Dmitry Ivanovich's family, his name was assigned to the library. Today, the memory of Blokhintsev is preserved in the names of the city streets and the Universal Library. V.A.Nikitin spoke about his meeting with Dmitry Ivanovich, from which he remembered for the rest of his life that one should not trust the theory very much and even if you made a mistake in the experiment, it will help others.

I.D.Blokhintsev, using special equipment, digitized some of the amateur films, of which a large number were preserved in the family archive. We saw some of the footage at conferences, during the visits of famous physicists to Dubna and Dmitry Ivanovich abroad, as well as on family hiking trips. Those gathered sometimes easily and sometimes did not immediately recognize I.M.Frank, V.P.Dzhelepov, M.A.Markov, I.V.Chuvilo, A.M.Baldin, A.A.Tyapkin, calling their names out loud. And the evening suddenly became homely and warm for everyone.

Olga TARANTINA,
photo courtesy of the JINR Museum