Georg von Charasoff 27
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half-insane state, in which Charazova, forever doped by Russia, lived through
the revolution, the female tragedy and through her entire life. …
Charazova first met Pasternak on some evening in spring 1926, perceiving a
kindred soul in him, and reaching out for this kinship. He tried to rescue her –
but without success: It was the environment that fuelled the madness. (Bykov
2005: 94)
In the reminiscences of the poet and literary critic Mosei Altman (1990), one of
Georg Charasoff’s friends in Baku, Lily is said to have married the writer and art
critic Aleksandr Georgiyevich Romm (1887–1952). This is confirmed also in
Christopher Barnes’s biography of Boris Pasternak, where it is noted that Lily
moved to Moscow in 1922:
where she married the poet Aleksandr Romm. Unable to adjust to Soviet life,
she spent her last years in poverty and misery; a member of the Union of
Poets (SOPO), she wrote only in German and gave an evening of readings at
the Herzen house in March 1926; published translations of Russians in Die
Neue Zeit; five of her lyrics appeared posthumously. (Barnes 1989: 346)
Lily Charasoff’s literary remains have been preserved in the Russian State Archive
of Literature and Art (RGALI) in Moscow.
43
Georg von Charasoff’s death
The only source of information with regard to Georg von Charasoff’s death is the
following notice in Izvestia of 6 March 1931: ‘
The death of Professor Kharazov.
Kichkas March 5 (by telegram). On the night of March 5 died suddenly Prof.
Georgii Artemovich Kharazov invited temporarily to the Energy Institute at the
Dnieper’
(ibid.: 6). Apparently, Charasoff died on the night of 4 to 5 March 1931 in
the Kichkas colony near Zaporizhia, a major city in the south-east of the Ukraine on
the banks of the river Dnieper, when he was visiting the energy institute
Dnjepostro, which since 1927 was overseeing the construction of a dam and a
hydro-electric power station in the Dnieper river. Charasoff’s eldest son,
Alexander, seems to have been killed in 1937 during Stalin’s great purge. About the
fate of Arthur and Sergius nothing is known.
________________________________
* Department of Economics, University of Graz, Resowi-Centre F4, A-8010 Graz,
Austria. Email: christian.gehrke@uni-graz.at. An earlier version of this paper was
presented at the 16
th
Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of
Economic Thought in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, 17-19 May 2012, and at the
Conference ‘The Pioneers of Linear Models of Production’, 17-18 January 2013, at
the University of Paris-Ouest, Nanterre. A much longer German version, which was
presented at the Ausschuss für die Geschichte der Wirtschaftswissenschaften of the
Verein für Socialpolitik in Marbach/Neckar, 14-15 June 2012, is forthcoming in the
conference proceedings (see Gehrke 2015). I would like to thank the session
participants as well as two anonymous referees for most helpful comments and
suggestions. I am also grateful to the staff of the various archives mentioned in the
paper for help and advice. Special thanks are due to François Allisson (Lausanne),
Aaron Figursky (Graz and Moscow), Guido Hausmann (Jena), Karin Huser
(Zurich), Peter Klyukin (Moscow), Werner Moritz (Heidelberg), Nino
Parsadanishvili (Tbilisi) and Wilfried Parys (Antwerp). Finally, I would also like to
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28
History of Economics Review
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thank Maria Kristoferitsch (Graz), Andrea Kubista (Vienna), and Sigrid Wahl
(Graz) for translations from Russian sources. Of course, any errors or omissions are
my responsibility.
Notes
1
See Egidi and Gilibert (1984, 1989), Duffner and Huth (2013 [1987]), Kurz
(1989), Kurz and Salvadori (1993, 1995, 2000), Howard and King (1992), Egidi (1998),
Stamatis (1999), Klyukin (2008), Parys (2013, 2014), and Mori (2007, 2008, 2011,
2013).
2
Unless otherwise stated, all translations from German sources are mine. The hand-
written version of Charasoff’s ‘Lebenslauf’, which is preserved in the documents of the
Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Heidelberg
(Universitätsarchiv Heidelberg, H-V 3/2), differs slightly from the printed version
(cf. Charasoff 1902: 68). In particular, it contains the additional information that
Charasoff’s parents were members of the Armenian-Gregorian church. When he
registered at the University of Heidelberg in 1897, Charasoff also stated himself to be
of the Armenian-Gregorian faith, but in later documents he declared to be ‘without
confession’ (Meldekarte ‘Charasoff, Georg’; Stadtarchiv Zürich); his children were not
baptised (Vormundschaftsakten ‘Kinder Charasoff’, Stadtarchiv Zürich).
3
This date is wrong: Charasoff’s oral examination took place on 27 February 1902
(cf. Promotionsakten der Naturwissenschaftlich-mathematischen Fakultät, H-V-3/2 fol.
73, Universitätsarchiv Heidelberg).
4
For a comparative assessment of Charasoff’s and Dmitriev’s contributions see
Mori (2011).
5
Georg von Charasoff‘s first wife, Marie Seldovic, came from a Jewish family in
Odessa and the Jewish parents of his second wife, Marie Kriegshaber, also lived in
Odessa after 1906.
6
The Russian students with whom Max Weber was in close contact, mostly after
1901-02, were Bogdan Kistjakovskij, Sergej Zivago, Fedor Stepun, and Aaron
Steinberg. Though possible, it seems rather unlikely that Charasoff had contact with
Max Weber, who did not lecture in the period from 1897 to 1901.
7
Michael Reisner (or Reissner, Rejsner, von Reussner) was a law student in
Heidelberg in 1897-98. After the October revolution of 1917 he became a professor at
the law faculty of Petrograd University and was involved in the drafting of the first
constitutional law of the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, he worked in the Soviet ministry
of Sciences and Education and was responsible for the foundation of the ‘Communist
Academy’ in Moscow, which became a centre for Marxist social sciences. He was also
a founding member of the Russian Psychoanalytical Society in Moscow.
8
One of Königsberger’s best-known students is the Russian mathematician Sof’ja
Kovalevskaja (1850–1891), who attended his lectures from 1869 to 1871. She was the
first female student at the University of Heidelberg and later was also the first woman
ever to be appointed to a professorship in mathematics (in Stockholm).
9
Letter to the author from Prof. Werner Moritz (Archivdirektor Universitätsarchiv
Heidelberg), 7 July 2010.
10 On the history of the ‘Marburg school’, see Sieg (1994); on the role of the
‘Marburg school’ in the establishment of neo-Kantian philosophy in Russia, see
Dmitriev (2007).
11 In 1904-05 Otto Buek, together with the Jewish banker Benedikt Friedländer,
financed Senna Hoy’s anarchistic journal ‘Kampf. Zeitschrift für gesunden
Menschenverstand’, in which Buek also published an essay on Tolstoy (Buek 1905b).
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