Stalin's Meteorologist. Olivier Rolin
daughter, Eleonora, who was not yet four at the time of his arrest. There were pressed flowers and colored illustrations of plants, drawn with a confident hand in crayon or watercolor, simple and clear. There were pictures of the aurora borealis, frozen seas, an Arctic fox, a hen, a watermelon, a samovar, an airplane, boats, a cat, a fly, a candle, and birds. The dried flowers and the drawings were beautiful, but they had not been composed solely to be visually pleasing: they had an educational purpose. The father was using plants to teach his daughter the basics of arithmetic and geometry. The lobes of a leaf represented the elementary numbers, its shape symmetry and asymmetry, while a pine cone illustrated the spiral. The drawings were answers to riddles.
I was moved by this long-distance conversation between a father and his very young daughter, whom he would never see again, his determination to play a part in her education despite being far away. And I was moved by the daughter’s steadfast love for the father she had known so fleetingly, to which the commemorative book I leafed through at Antonina’s bore witness. He was, Eleonora said, an accomplished pianist, and she remembered hearing him play the Appassionata, the Moonlight Sonata and Schubert’s impromptus. He was fond of Pushkin and Lermontov. Until 1956, the year of his posthumous rehabilitation, she wrote, my mother waited for him to come back. When I misbehaved, she added, my mother would tell me that I’d be ashamed when my father came home. Judging myself through his eyes became the rule by which I lived. The idea of writing the story of this man, one of the millions of victims of Stalin’s madness, began to stir in me. Later, in Moscow, meeting people who had known Eleonora at the end of her life did the rest. She became a renowned paleontologist. I never had the opportunity to meet her: she had died not long before, in circumstances I shall describe. I regret that she didn’t live long enough to know that the album she dedicated to her father’s memory had the unforeseeable consequence of sparking another book, far away, in another country, in another language.
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he was born in 1881, in Krapivno, a village in Ukraine whose name means “the place where nettles grow.” There are a lot of nettles in South Russia and in Ukraine and consequently there are a lot of Krapivnos (the name appears in the third line of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry). His village was on the outskirts of the little town of Nizhyn, whose high school has the honor of counting Gogol as an alumnus. His father, Feodosy Petrovich Wangenheim, was a barin, a minor nobleman, a deputy at the zemstvo, the regional council set up by Alexander II. The family’s very un-Russian name suggests a distant Dutch origin, possibly a ship’s carpenter who came to build Peter the Great’s fleet and was rewarded by being given a piece of land in Ukraine. A photograph shows Feodosy Petrovich as a man with a pleasant face framed by waves of grey hair and a bushy beard, and perhaps a slightly lecherous look. I imagine him like a character out of Chekhov—idealistic, loquacious, full of woolly ideas about social progress, a womanizer, a gambler, weak. He prided himself on his knowledge of agronomy and he planted an experimental field in the village of Uyutnoye, which lay on the railway line from Moscow and Kiev to Voronezh. On summer evenings in Uyutnoye, after inspecting his black currants, gooseberry bushes, and raspberry canes and watching the sun turn red beyond the rye fields, he would sit beneath the veranda in the company of women in light, swishing dresses, chatting with the doctor and the investigating magistrate over a cigar and brandy, discussing the education of the masses and criticizing the Tsar’s authoritarianism. One of the girls, sitting at the piano, plays a little piece by Schubert, or maybe Chopin. Pure conjecture. Daughters, on the other hand, it is a known fact that he had four with his wife Maria Kuvshinnikova, and three boys, including Alexey, the cloud enthusiast. In any case, it was certain he was not reactionary because after the Revolution he refused to emigrate like one of his sons, Nikolay, and became an advisor to the People’s Commissariat of Land Cultivation. And he allowed all his children—even the girls!—to study the sciences.
I’d like to think that watching the clouds rolling above the infinite plain sparked off Alexey Feodosievich’s curiosity about meteors. Painters and writers have depicted this Russian or Ukrainian rural landscape countless times. A dizzying profundity of space, a vastness where everything seems immobile, a silence broken only by the cries of birds—quails, cuckoos, hoopoes, crows. Wheat or barley fields, expanses of blue grass dotted with yellow wormwood flowers, bounded by a rutted path. Birch and slender poplar groves, the golden domes of a church gleam in the distance, the roofs of a village, the occasional thin glint of a river: it is the landscape of The Steppe (which is set in this borderland between Ukraine and Russia), “At Home” and many other short stories by Chekhov, who was writing during those years. It is the landscape of Yesenin’s poetry, of Ivan Shishkin’s and Isaac Levitan’s paintings. Sometimes, far off in the immense distance, the funnel of a steam engine is a reminder that in the heart of this apparently frozen time something new is happening, which could possibly be progress but might also be a threat. And, overhead, in a sky exalted by the vast flatness of the land, the clouds “irregular and marvelously rotund” that the young narrator contemplates dreamily in The Life of Arsenyev by Ivan Bunin, the menacing clouds that the landscape artist Savrasov painted in 1881, the year Alexey Feodosievich was born, cast giant shadows over the shimmering fields.
Those landscapes devoured by emptiness can also be seen in some color photographs taken at the beginning of the twentieth century by another noble passionate about science and technology, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who scoured the Empire, from the forests of Karelia to central Asia, to build up a photographic archive—3,500 plates, just under 2,000 of which have been preserved. This photographer-inventor, whose self-portrait beside a river in Georgia shows a long, mournful, bespectacled face with a drooping moustache beneath a soft hat, bears witness, like Chekhov, like his friend Isaac Levitan, like Bunin, like—in their own way—the Wangenheims father and son, to an era when Russian history seemed to be taking a different, more peaceful, more enlightened course than the dark, terrible one to come. The striking thing about his plates is not just the miraculous fidelity of the colors, but the way they give the viewer the feeling of being literally sucked towards the line where the sky and earth meet. What lies beyond, over there? Nothing. The edge of the world, perhaps, or the infinite repetition of the same things. Woods, fields, the steppe, paths, crows’ flights, tiny belltowers beneath the clouds. Russia is a forest, les, and Russia is a plain, pole. And Russia is space, prostor. I do not know much for certain or of significance about my character’s childhood, but I am certain that space played a part in his formative years.
And so I would like to imagine that, lying in the grass like Bunin’s Arsenyev, Alexey Feodosievich dreamed one day: “What breathtaking beauty! I wish I could climb on to that cloud and float away, drift among those terrifying heights, in the immensity of the sky . . .” Maybe he did dream of doing so. But I think the truth is probably simpler and more prosaic: it was his father who passed on his vocation. Because the decidedly curious Feodosy Petrovich also dabbled in meteorology, having built a small weather station on his land. It was at home that Alexey first learned about the land and the sky, attending regional agricultural conferences with his father, studying the magnetic anomaly of the Kursk region, proposing a new method for calculating the number of plants per square meter (more reminiscent of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet than Chekhov), and, in Uyutnoye, reading the graphs traced by the little styluses of the recording instruments on rolls of graph paper—rainfall, humidity, atmospheric pressure, the strength and direction of the wind. He graduated from the Orel gymnasium with very good or excellent marks in all subjects: Greek, Latin, mathematics, catechism, French—curiously it was only in geography that his marks were merely “satisfactory.” At the turn of the century he gained admission to the mathematics department of Moscow University’s faculty of physics and mathematics, and got himself expelled almost immediately for taking part in the student protests of 1901. In Russia, they don’t do things by halves, especially protests, and the minister of public education was assassinated by a Socialist Revolutionary student.
Alexey certainly didn’t go to such extremes. In reply to the dean who questioned him he stated that in principle he was against violence, but admitted that he had attended meetings and voted, and he was thrown out.
Next came military service, followed by the Kiev Polytechnic Institute where he earned a diploma (with distinction) in the speed of cyclones. He then enrolled at the Moscow Agricultural Institute, but had not yet chosen between the earth and the sky; he wrote articles comparing the respective