Georg von Charasoff 25
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teaching the physical theories to students and with the persecution of
theoretical physicists. (Vizgin 1999: 1261)
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According to Klyukin, the physicist Timiryazev, a main proponent of the group of
mechanistic thinkers, referred to Charasoff in his Introduction to Theoretical
Physics (1933, in Russian) in the following terms: ‘An ingenious and simple
derivation of the Einstein-Lorentz transformation … goes back to the gifted
theoretician Professor G A Kharazov’ (quoted from Klyukin 2008: 335).
In parallel to his work in physics, Charasoff also continued to pursue his work
on the psychoanalytical interpretation of Russian literature. In March 1925 he
delivered a lecture at the Russian Psychoanalytic Institute in Moscow
40
on the
interpretation of Pushkin’s writings:
The members of the institute also heard addresses by guest speakers,
including one of the rising stars in Soviet psychology, Lev Vygotsky, on
December 14, 1924, and by G.A. Charasov, a literary scholar who spoke on
‘Pushkin’s Work in the Light of Psychoanalysis’ on March 21, 1925. (Miller
1998: 67)
In the reports of the meetings of the Russian Psychoanalytic Association
Charasoff’s lecture is summarised in the following terms:
25th meeting. — 21 March 1925.
Prof. G. A. C h a r a s o w (as guest):
Pushkin’s work in the light of
psychoanalysis. The speaker analyses several works of Pushkin and notes
some parallels between the social motives in Pushkin’s writings and his
psychic attitude. (1926: 125)
In the following week Charasoff presented a further paper:
27th meeting. — 28 March 1925.
Prof. G. Charasow (as guest): Methodological considerations on the
psychoanalysis of art. The speaker wants every work of art to be considered
as a dream of the artist. Every creative act has infantile motives, which are
socially transformed in the further development. (1926: 126)
In the same year Charasoff also attended a symposium on ‘Psychoanalysis and the
Arts’ in Moscow, which was organised by the Russian Academy of Sciences. In a
discussion of a contribution by V.M. Friche, Charasoff rejected the latter’s
objections to psychoanalysis. His comment on Friche was summarised in the
following terms:
What is so scary about someone telling you that a man is a machine, running
on some ionic-chemical energy which is also called sexual when directed to
securing progeny? This energy creates all social values because society is also
a kind of progeny. Creation of social values is called sublimation, or
distillation. But all processes are based on the same old rough sexual energy.
This energy is the matter from which everything elevated, social, is made.
There is nothing scary and awful in this, for as everyone knows from long
ago, everything emerges from matter and returns into matter. (Kharazov
1925b: 256-7; quoted from Kurbanovsky 2008: 895)
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26
History of Economics Review
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On the fate of Lily Charasoff
Dmitrii Bykov’s celebrated biography of Boris Pasternak (Bykov 2005; in Russian)
contains an interesting reference to Charasoff’s daughter Lily, in connection with a
description of New Year’s eve at the turn of the year 1926-27:
Pasternak welcomed the new year 1927 at home, almost in the same way as
described in Nabokov’s ‘Dar’: There, Godunov-Čerdyncev is supposed to
meet Zina for the New Year’s Eve ball, but sits down with his manuscript
‘The Life of Černyševskij’ shortly before leaving the house, begins to revise
it, allows himself to be carried away, and then writes all night long – Zina
returns home aggrieved, but the thing is finished. Pasternak, as we know,
loved to be alone in the house. In the darkness and privacy of a feast day it
was good to sit down on the writing table rather than on the festive dinner
table. Just as you receive it, so you will also live it: the year 1927 became for
Pasternak a year of intensive work and increasing loneliness. In the first night
of the new year he sketched the outlines of the second part of ‘Šmidt’,
bringing together finished sections and turning them into a unified style. He
also was not disturbed in his working mood by the visit of Lily Charazova
shortly after midnight. Charazova came in order to congratulate him and then
disappeared, and in the year 1927 she also disappeared from his life and from
life in general: she contracted typhus and died on 13 September.
Charazova meant a lot to Pasternak – her fate was a particularly cruel one for
a woman even in those days. She was born in 1903. Her father, Georgij
Charazov, lived in Switzerland then, as a political emigré (‘a gifted scoundrel,
mystical anarchist and proven genius, mathematician, poet, anything you like’
– is Pasternak’s characterization of him in a letter to Marina Tsvetayeva. In
1914 he left his children in Zurich and returned to Georgia, and Lily, when
she had just reached her 15
th
year, began to search for him in Russia. About
her Russian exertions very little is known – in the Preface to the failed
anthology of her poems (Charazova wrote in German, under the pen name
‘Maria Wyss’) Pasternak wrote:
‘There she got into an environment that never gave anything else to
anyone but disarray and suffering; where she, after having become a
mother at the age of seventeen and having been exposed to immorality
and suffered endless insults and torments, formed such ideas about life,
which guaranteed that any future elation would invariably turn into
balefulness for her.’
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This environment was, according to Pasternak, inspired by Nietzsche and
anarchy: ‘The Tbilisi children of the coffee-house period’. Charazova never
recollected herself – she forgot Zurich forever, and to Zurich, wrote
Pasternak, she must immediately be brought back, and it was not yet too late
– but it did not happen. Pasternak called her a beauty, ‘Mediumička’, and he
loved her countenance, but her poems he did not really appreciate –
sometimes reprimanding himself for, perhaps, ‘not noticing a great talent,
numbed by the soberness and pedantry of his standards’: he did not like in
those poems the arbitrariness, the dreamful illustrative quality and the
surrealism of Lautréamont-like shadows, but the roots of all this lay – not in
the attempt to follow the literary fashion, but in the drowsy, half-sleeping,
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