From the History of Physics

S. I. Vavilov—Organizer of Popular Science Publications

S. I. Vavilov will enter the history of Russian science not only as a major research physicist and unsurpassed popularizer of physical knowledge, but also as an outstanding organizer of popular science publications.

In 1932 the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, on the report of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, adopted an extensive resolution outlining a fundamental reorganization of the country’s highest scientific institution. In particular, the Academy was instructed to engage systematically in the popularization of science.

As is well known, the Academy had been concerned with the popularization of science almost from the first days of its organization. The St. Petersburg Vedomosti published by it had a special supplement, the so-called “Additions to the Vedomosti,” in which articles on popular science topics were regularly printed. In the nineteenth century as well, the Academy was not alien to the popularization of science and issued special popular science publications, among which a prominent place belonged to the so-called Mesiatseslovy, containing rich information from various fields of knowledge and intended for a broad circle of readers. A historian of science cannot pass by this type of activity of the Academy of Sciences. Yet everything it did in this field was always episodic in character, and the role of the Academy of Sciences in disseminating knowledge was small.

The extraordinarily powerful cultural upsurge in the country, brought about by the Great October Socialist Revolution and the subsequent socialist reconstruction of the national economy, put forward an urgent demand that the most authoritative scholars take part in the cause of popularizing science. It was precisely this that prompted the corresponding point in the above-mentioned Government resolution.

In fulfillment of this directive, the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR immediately created a Commission for the Publication of Popular Science Literature, placing at its head Academician S. I. Vavilov, who shortly before that had been elected a full member of the Academy. The appointment of S. I. as chairman of the Commission for the Publication of Popular Science Literature was exceptionally successful. By that time he had proved himself not only as a research scientist, but also as a popularizer of science: the widely known works of S. I., The Eye and the Sun and The Experimental Foundations of the Theory of Relativity, had already been published.

Sergei Ivanovich headed the work of publishing popular science literature at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR for almost twenty years. Even the conditions of wartime could not suspend the publication of popular science

literature. As early as October–December 1941 in Kazan, public lectures by academicians began, including Sergei Ivanovich, who delivered the lecture “On Cold Light,” published as a separate edition in 1941 (the second edition appeared in 1949 under the title “On ‘Warm’ and ‘Cold’ Light”). At the beginning of 1942, on Sergei Ivanovich’s initiative, preparations began for the jubilees of Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, and Lobachevsky, which led to special editions intended for a broad circle of readers. The work carried out in connection with this showed that the popularization of knowledge, despite the difficult wartime conditions, was a pressing and steadily growing need, and that satisfying it was necessary and possible on a large scale. That is why the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR adopted a resolution to replenish the membership of the Commission, again placing S. I. Vavilov at its head.

Sergei Ivanovich understood popular-science literature not in the ordinary sense, but invested in this concept a special content. In the preface to the catalogue published in 1947, he expressed his opinion in the following words: “The character of the publications included in the academic popular-science series is varied. There are books and brochures intended for a very broad circle of readers; at the same time, the series includes publications for readers with a natural-science and physico-mathematical higher education, but who are not specialists in the given field. Among the books of the academic series one may encounter publications that, for the first time in world literature, expound one question or another, or even, in part, contain scientific research. In its work on publishing popular-science literature, the Commission proceeded from the general proposition that the series may include books necessary to scientific and literary quality, satisfying the criterion of sufficient breadth and interest of the topic and accessibility of exposition. Therefore, in the catalogue, alongside publications of the usual type of popular-science literature, one may also find books which later became textbooks in higher education or which became handbooks in scientific research.”*

The growth of Soviet culture, especially characteristic of the postwar years, placed ever greater demands on popular-science literature. Together with the expansion of the country’s printed output, this section of academic publications also grew continuously. In the last year of Sergei Ivanovich’s life (1950), the Academy of Sciences of the USSR issued more than one thousand printed sheets, which exceeded the prewar level by no less than five times. Such a scale led to the division of popular-science publications into a number of separate series. Beginning in 1948, six series were defined: 1) “Classics of Science,” 2) “Literary Monuments,” 3) “Memoirs,” 4) “Biographies,” 5) “Books and Problems of Contemporary Science”; the sixth consisted of books intended for a broad circle of readers having training at the level of the seven-year school, that is, for the country’s main reading public.

Sergei Ivanovich participated in all the series except two; not being a historian or literary scholar, he did not work either in the field of “Literary Monuments” or in the field of “Memoirs.” The four series for which he wrote were constructed according to the model he had created. He was the first to show how the classics of science should be published. In the difficult years of the war, despite his immense burden of directing two leading physical institutions of the country and work in the responsible commissions of the State Defense Committee, Sergei Ivanovich translated from Latin and annotated I. Newton’s Lectures on Optics, which was the first attempt in world literature to publish the whole of this work of Newton in a modern language.

* Catalogue of popular-science books, 1932–1946. Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow–Leningrad, 1947, pp. 3–4.

This work (published only after the war), valuable in itself, served as a model for the series “Classics of Science” that was later begun at that time: subsequent editions were prepared on its basis.

Unlike the works of outstanding writers, the works of the classics of science had until recently been little or almost not studied. In the preface to the translation of one of Newton’s memoirs, printed in 1927, S. I. wrote: “A deep difference exists between the great poet and the great scientist. We remember every word of Horace, Shakespeare, Pushkin; every line is commented upon, the slightest variant of their literary heritage, and the poet is right in predicting:

So no, all of me shall not die, but some great part of me,
Fleeing decay, will after death begin to live.

It is quite different in science. The only large collection of Newton’s works was published in the eighteenth century and has not been reprinted since; there is no complete collection at all; Newton’s letters are scattered among various rare editions; Newton’s archive has, for the most part, not been published. And what does the physicist, astronomer, and mathematician remember about him, at best (if not in most cases)? Newton’s laws of mechanics and gravitation, experiments with the prism, interference rings, something about Newton’s disputes with Leibniz, and Voltaire’s anecdote about the apple. Instead of the living image of unprecedented creative tension there is a primitive scheme from an elementary textbook. The glory of the scientist, achieved chiefly by appropriation of ‘the laws of such-and-such,’ is only a pitiful shadow of the living glory of the poet.

The reasons are inevitable; there are many of them, but the chief one is the impetuous development of science. In science we live in the present; the front lines, especially in our days, are constantly shifting, while the trophies of the rear remain unsorted in the quiet and dust of libraries”*).

Thus S. I. wrote a quarter of a century ago. But during this time the situation has changed sharply. Interest in the past of science—both native and foreign—has now grown considerably. And in this there is no small merit of S. I. Vavilov, who devoted much labor to the history of knowledge. On his initiative, “forgotten” works of researchers whose names now glorify national science were brought out from the “dust of libraries” and made available to wide scientific circles. As an example one may point to the works of the father of chromatographic adsorption analysis, M. S. Tsvet, which became widely known thanks to their publication in the series “Classics of Science”**).

The direction that S. I. gave to the series he created differed radically from everything previously known in world literature. A similar series, also called “Classics of Science,” published by W. Ostwald during the twentieth century up to the Second World War, was surpassed by the Soviet series both in conception and in execution.

As is known, Ostwald’s series did not go beyond the limits of natural-science themes. In his series there were not always concise commentaries, let alone brief biographical sketches of the authors; their writings were often published only in extracts. The series created by S. I., however, was conceived as a collection of complete classical works from all fields of science. These scientific monuments were printed in full, with detailed commentaries and research articles illuminating the role and significance of the classic being published in the development of that field of knowledge in which he had become famous. This determined the success of the publication begun by S. I. Vavilov.

For no more than five years Sergei Ivanovich published the series “Classics of Science.” The first book of the series—Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things—appeared

) Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk, 1927, vol. VII, no. 2, p. 123.
) M. S. Tsvet, Chromatographic Adsorption Analysis. Selected Works*. Edited by Academician A. A. Richter and T. A. Krasnoselskaya, 1946.

in light at the end of 1945. By 1950 about sixty issues had been published and prepared for print. Chief attention was given to the works of Russian scholars who had enriched world science with most valuable contributions. Published or prepared for printing were the works of V. O. Kovalevsky, A. O. Kovalevsky, S. V. Kovalevskaya, K. A. Timiryazev, I. M. Sechenov, P. A. Kostychev, I. V. Michurin, M. S. Tsvet, D. S. Rozhdestvensky, N. P. Petrov, I. A. Vyshnegradsky, I. I. Pavlov, I. I. Mechnikov, V. Ya. Struve, A. M. Lyapunov, E. H. Lenz, Fr. U. Épinus, Assur, A. A. Markov, N. E. Vvedensky, V. V. Dokuchaev, K. F. Wolf, K. E. Baer, V. R. Williams, E. S. Fedorov, A. M. Butlerov.

The published works of the classics of science served as the foundation for another series—biographical—which was also built according to the model created by Sergei Ivanovich. As in all the series, authors from among major Soviet scholar-specialists were brought in for the publication of biographies of outstanding figures of science. But the specificity of the biographical genre is undoubtedly more complex than all the other types of literature being published. In addition to purely scientific knowledge, the author of a biography is also required to have historical knowledge, since it is necessary to illuminate the public activity of the scholar, to explain historically the significance of his contribution to world science, and also to show his influence on subsequent research in his field of science. The difficulty of creating such monographs also explains the slow unfolding of the biographical series.

In creating a new model of this series, Sergei Ivanovich took upon himself an exceptionally difficult task—the life story of Newton, with his immense creative work, which proceeded under the tense conditions of the English revolution of the seventeenth century. The biography of Newton written by S. I. enjoyed equal success among physicists, mathematicians, mechanics, astronomers, and historians. What S. I. did in the field of studying Newton’s life and activity brought him the fame of the best expert in the world on the author of the Mathematical Principles. Following the book on Newton, the series was enriched by biographies of Lobachevsky, A. O. and V. O. Kovalevsky, Michurin, Fedorov, and Lavoisier. Not all these books are equal in execution; among them there are works which by right occupy a place alongside the work of S. I., that is, among them there are also less successful ones.

Later than the others, the series “Results and Problems of Modern Science” was created. As is evident from its title, this series is highly topical and it was intended that much attention be devoted to it. In essence, only in the last year of S. I.’s life did the systematic publication of books of this series begin. More than twenty titles were issued, with a volume of about 400 printed sheets. The authors of these books are major Soviet scholars with achievements of their own in the areas of science treated by them. A number of books in this series were awarded the Stalin Prize. These are The Microstructure of Light by S. I. Vavilov, the works of A. Grekov and A. Yu. Yakubovsky, M. A. Krasilnikov, and E. L. Krinov.

The books published in the series “Results and Problems of Modern Science” by no means fully reflect those scientific tasks whose solution Soviet scholars were working on. They did not even encompass the problems being developed in the USSR Academy of Sciences. Meanwhile, it was assumed that in the coming years the achievements of all Russian science would be reflected in the issues of this series.

There was also created the so-called mass series. According to S. I.’s plan, this series was to consist of a number of short monographs and even pamphlets intended for the less prepared, but interested, reader in one or another branch of science. At the same time S. I. required that the authors of these publications be scholar-specialists with achievements of their own in the fields of knowledge they were elucidating. He himself set an example by publishing in 1950, in revised form, the little book The Eye

and the Sun,” for which (as well as for “The Microstructure of Light”) S. I. Vavilov was posthumously awarded the Stalin Prize*). In that same year this series saw the publication of books by other eminent specialists as well—Acad. T. D. Lysenko, “Sowing Shelterbelts by the Nesting Method”; Acad. I. P. Bardin, “Socialist Industrialization and Ferrous Metallurgy”; E. L. Krinov, “Heavenly Stones”; A. G. Masevich, “Sources of the Energy of the Sun and the Stars,” and others.

During the last two years of S. I.’s life, several dozen volumes were published and prepared for printing in the series “Literary Monuments.” This series included literary works of major and even world significance. Their understanding, at times presenting considerable difficulties, was made easier for the reader by thorough commentaries and introductory articles.

The “Memoirs” series was smaller in volume, because the Academy of Sciences publishes only the recollections of scholars. Nevertheless, during this time the notes of K. E. Baer, N. I. Pirogov, I. M. Sechenov, S. V. Kovalevskaya, A. N. Krylov, V. A. Obruchev, A. E. Fersman, I. Yu. Krachkovsky, and N. F. Gamaleya were published.

Even from this brief review one can see how broadly Sergei Ivanovich approached the work of popularizing science, striving to respond to the varied needs of the people, who for the first time had gained access to science.

Sergei Ivanovich loved this work, put much energy into it, and was proud that, in developing it, he was carrying out the direct instructions of the Party and the government.

*) For S. I.’s review of this book, see UFN, vol. XLVII, no. 1, pp. 150–153.

M. I. Radovsky