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Georg von Charasoff 11
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Georg von Charasoff 11 _____________________________________________________________________________ allowed to attend lectures but could not take any exams (women were only accepted as regular students at the University of Heidelberg from 1900 onwards). It is very likely, of course, that Charasoff knew both Anna Seldovic and Ladislaus von Studnicki-Gisbert from his student days in Heidelberg. In Zurich, Charasoff appears to have led the life of an independent private scholar. Although his varying addresses are all close to the University and the central library, he did not enrol as a regular student before 1910. There is some evidence that Charasoff took a deep interest in Tolstoyanism, studying carefully Tolstoy’s works and exchanging several letters, between 1902 and 1908, with Vladimir Chertkov, the major representative of the Tolstoyan movement in England (see Charasoff’s letters in the Chertkov Papers at RGALI, Moscow). However, in his first years in Zurich, his main intellectual preoccupation still seems to have been mathematics. This can be inferred from a letter he sent to the mathematician David Hilbert of the University of Göttingen on 10 May 1904, which has been preserved in the Hilbert Papers. In this letter, Charasoff responded to Hilbert’s commentary on a set of papers which he had sent him earlier, and which Hilbert had apparently returned with the remark that Charasoff’s main results had already been proved by Hermann Minkowski. Charasoff fully accepted Hilbert’s judgement, noting that ‘from your assessment I now realise that I was apparently not sufficiently familiar with all the contributions of Minkowski’ (Nachlass David Hilbert, Code MS Hilbert 59, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen). In spite of this set-back, Charasoff seems to have continued his mathematical studies; in the summer term 1905 he enrolled as an ‘Auditor’ at the University of Zurich for the lecture on ‘Elliptische Funktionen’ (Elliptic functions) by Professor Heinrich Burkhardt. 15 Interestingly, at this very time Burkhardt was one of the two examiners of Albert Einstein’s inaugural dissertation Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen, which Einstein had submitted on 30 April 1905. It seems likely, therefore, that Einstein’s seminal contribution may have caught Charasoff’s attention very early on through conversations on mathematics and physics which he surely had with Burkhardt. There are only few other traces of Charasoff’s personal life and intellectual preoccupations in this period. In 1904, he apparently made a comment during a lecture on ‘Scientific socialism and religion’ that Georgij Plekhanov had delivered in Zurich. This is documented in Plekhanov’s ‘Notes during the discussion of the report’, among which there is inter alia the following remark of Plekhanov on ‘G. Kharazov’s bewilderment’: ‘If we are to agree with him, we must admit that the question of religion is finished. The existence of God cannot be proved. He considers my ideas common to all people. Very glad!’ (Plekhanov 1976: 61). An important event in Charasoff’s personal life must also have occurred in this period: his first wife, Marie Seldovic, must have died sometime between 1904 and 1906. Her death is registered in official documents of 1919, which concern the Charasoff children and which have been preserved in the municipal archive in Zurich (Vormundschaftsakten ‘Kinder Charasoff’, Stadtarchiv Zürich). In these documents neither the exact date nor the circumstances of her death are given, but since Lily was born in December 1903 and Charasoff publicly showed up with a girlfriend in spring 1907 (see below), it must have occurred in the interim period from 1904 to 1906. Around 1904-05, and in parallel to his mathematical studies, Charasoff also began to study the works of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk and Walras. In the Preface of Das System des Marxismus, dated December 1909, he stated that he had only become familiar with those works ‘in the course of the last four years’. Charasoff Downloaded by [Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi] at 12:40 30 March 2016
12 History of Economics Review _____________________________________________________________________________ must have studied the works of the classical political economists and of Marx much earlier, because he also states in his Preface that he had developed the main ideas of his treatise, including the notion of a ‘production series’, long before he had read the works of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. It is also clear, from references in his books, that he was acquainted with the contemporary literature on Marx’s economic theory, including Tugan-Baranovsky (1905) and Bortkiewicz (1906-07). In January 1907 Charasoff submitted a manuscript on Marx’s theory of value and distribution, via Otto Buek, to Karl Kautsky, the editor of the journal Die
forwarded the rejection letter to Charasoff. Apparently, Buek was involved because he had been responsible for producing a German translation of Charasoff’s manuscript. Neither the manuscript and submission letter nor Kautsky’s rejection letter is extant, but a letter from Georg von Charasoff to Karl Kautsky of 7 February 1907 has been preserved in the Kautsky Papers (Correspondence D VII 66, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam). In this letter Charasoff informed Kautsky that he did not consider the reasons which the latter had given for his rejection of the paper convincing and that he was keen to read a more detailed criticism of his views. (For a more detailed discussion of the Charasoff–Kautsky correspondence, see Mori 2007). Since the manuscript is not extant, it is unclear which of the concepts and ideas from his later books were contained already in Charasoff’s paper, which – had it been accepted by Kautsky – would have appeared almost simultaneously with von Bortkiewicz’s famous two papers (1906-7, 1907; see also 1952 [1906-7]). In the summer term 1907 Charasoff enrolled as an ‘Auditor’ at the University of Zurich again, this time in order to attend a four-hour lecture on ‘Psychiatrische Klinik’ (Clinical psychiatry) by Professor Eugen Bleuler. 16 As we shall see below (in Section 12), Charasoff in fact took a keen interest in psychoanalysis and seems to have studied Sigmund Freud’s and C.G. Jung’s writings very carefully. In June and July 1907 he stayed for a cure treatment in the ‘Kur- und Heilanstalt Schloss Marbach am Untersee (Bodensee)’, for the most part in the company of his friend Otto Buek. This can be inferred from the correspondence of Lidija Petrowna Kotschetkowa, who refers to Charasoff repeatedly in some of her letters to her husband, the anarchist, publicist and medical practitioner to the poor, Fritz Brupbacher. In Kotschetkowa’s account, the group of cure guests at ‘Schloss Marbach’ consisted partly of medium-ranked and high-ranked nobility from Russia and Western Europe (‘The Duke of Parma with his entourage, etc. etc.’), but also of social revolutionaries from Russia, like Leonid Schisko and Vera Figner.
17 Kotschetkowa commented on Charasoff’s personality in several letters. She was highly critical of him, and strongly disapproved of his manners and conversation:
A conceitedness, self-satisfaction and smugness which I have elsewhere encountered only in Bulgarians. All the time at the dinner table he talks about great things – the making of bombs, killings of anarchists, maltreatments in the German army, catholic religion, etc. etc. – and all this in a rather loud voice, and of course in German, among Germans and Catholics. … He fails to notice that nobody is interested in his conversation and that his style of arguing is simply unpleasant. He is not a wise man and I really regret that he does not get his nerves cured by Veraguth. 18 (Kotschetkowa to Brupbacher, 16 July 1907, Brupbacher Papers MFC 37, Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv)
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