Alexander Esenin-Volpin

Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin (also written Ésénine-Volpine and Yessenin-Volpin in his French and English publications; Russian: Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Есе́нин-Во́льпин; May 12, 1924  – March 16, 2016) was a prominent Russian-American poet and mathematician. A notabledissident, political prisoner and a leader of the Soviet human rights movement, he spent a total of fourteen years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in prisons, psikhushkas and exile.

Life

Alexander Volpin was born on May 12, 1924 in the Soviet Union. His mother, Nadezhda Volpin, was a poet and translator from French and English. His father was Sergei Yesenin, a celebrated Russian poet, who never knew his son. Alexander and his mother moved from Leningrad to Moscow in 1933.

Esenin-Volpin was free from conscription due to "psychiatric" reasons. Hispsychiatric imprisonments took place in 1949[2]:20 for "anti-Soviet poetry", in 1959 for smuggling abroad samizdat, including his Свободный философский трактат (Free Philosophical Tractate), and again in 1968.

Esenin-Volpin graduated from Moscow State University with a “candidate” dissertation in the spring of 1949. After graduation, Volpin was sent to the Ukrainian city of Chernovtsy to teach mathematics at the local state university. Less than a month after his arrival in Chernovtsy he was arrested by the MGB, sent on a plane back to Moscow, and incarcerated in the Lubyanka prison. He was charged with "systematically conducting anti-Soviet agitation, writing anti-Soviet poems, and reading them to acquaintances."[3]:639

Apprehensive about the prospect of prison and labor camp, Volpin faked a suicide attempt in order to initiate a psychiatric evaluation. Psychiatrists at Moscow's Serbsky Institute declared Volpin mentally incompetent, and in October 1949 he was transferred to the Leningrad Psychiatric Prison Hospital for an indefinite stay. A year later he was abruptly released from the prison hospital, and sentenced to five years exile in the Kazakh town of Karaganda as a "socially dangerous element." In Karagada, he found employment as a teacher of evening and correspondence courses in mathematics.

In 1953, after the death of Joseph Stalin, Volpin was released due to a general amnesty. Soon he became a known mathematician specializing in the fields of ultrafinitism and intuitionism.

In 1965, Esenin-Volpin organized a legendary "glasnost meeting" ("митинг гласности"), a demonstration at Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow demanding an open and fair trial for the arrested writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. The leaflets written by Volpin and distributed through samizdat asserted that the accusations and their closed-door trial were in violation of the Soviet constitution RSFSR Criminal Code. The meeting was attended by about 200 people, many of whom turned out to be KGB operatives. The slogans read: "Требуем гласности суда над Синявским и Даниэлем" (We demand an open trial for Sinyavski and Daniel) and "Уважайте советскую конституцию" (Respect the Soviet constitution).[5] The demonstrators were promptly arrested.

[Volpin] would explain to anyone who cared to listen a simple but unfamiliar idea: all laws ought to be understood in exactly the way they are written and not as they are interpreted by the government and the government ought to fulfill those laws to the letter [...]. What would happen if citizens acted on the assumption that they have rights? If one person did it, he would become a martyr; if two people did it, they would be labeled an enemy organization; if thousands of people did it, the state would have to become less oppressive.

Fellow dissident and human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva on the approach spearheaded by Esenin-Volpin

In the following years, Esenin-Volpin became an important voice in the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. He was one of the first Soviet dissidentswho took on a "legalist" strategy of dissent. He proclaimed that it is possible and necessary to defend human rights by strictly observing the law, and in turn demand that the authorities observe the formally guaranteed rights.

In 1968, Esenin-Volpin was again hospitalized. After his 1968 psychiatric confinement, 99 Soviet mathematicians sent a letter to the Soviet authorities asking for his release. This fact became public and the Voice of America conducted a broadcast on the topic; Esenin-Volpin was released almost immediately thereafter.: Vladimir Bukovsky was quoted as saying that Volpin's diagnosis was "pathological honesty".

In 1968, Esenin-Volpin circulated his famous "Памятка для тех, кому предстоят допросы" (Memo for those who expect to be interrogated) widely used by fellow dissidents.

In 1969, he signed the first Appeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights, drafted by the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR. In 1970, Volpin joined the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR and worked with Yuri Orlov, Andrei Sakharov and other activists.

In May 1972, he emigrated to the United States, but his Soviet citizenship was not revoked as was customary at the time. He worked at Boston University. In 1973 he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. In 2005, Esenin-Volpin participated in "They Chose Freedom", a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement.

He died on March 16, 2016, aged 91.

Mathematical work

I have seen some ultrafinitists go so far as to challenge the existence of 2100 as a natural number, in the sense of there being a series of “points” of that length. There is the obvious “draw the line” objection, asking where in 21, 22, 23, … , 2100 do we stop having “Platonistic reality”? Here this … is totally innocent, in that it can be easily be replaced by 100 items (names) separated by commas. I raised just this objection with the (extreme) ultrafinitist Yessenin-Volpin during a lecture of his. He asked me to be more specific. I then proceeded to start with 21 and asked him whether this is “real” or something to that effect. He virtually immediately said yes. Then I asked about 22, and he again said yes, but with a perceptible delay. Then 23, and yes, but with more delay. This continued for a couple of more times, till it was obvious how he was handling this objection. Sure, he was prepared to always answer yes, but he was going to take 2100 times as long to answer yes to 2100 then he would to answering 21. There is no way that I could get very far with this.

Harvey M. Friedman "Philosophical Problems in Logic"

His early work was in general topology, where he introducedEsenin-Volpin's theorem. Most of his later work was on the foundations of mathematics, where he introducedultrafinitism, an extreme form of constructive mathematics that casts doubt on the existence of not only infinite sets, but even of large integers such as 1012. He sketched a program for proving the consistency of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory using ultrafinitistic techniques in (Ésénine-Volpine 1961), (Yessenin-Volpin 1970) and (Yessenin-Volpin 1981).

Mathematical publications

• Ésénine-Volpine, A. S. (1961), "Le programme ultra-intuitionniste des fondements des mathématiques", Infinitistic Methods (Proc. Sympos. Foundations of Math., Warsaw, 1959), Oxford: Pergamon, pp. 201–223, MR 0147389Reviewed by Kreisel, G.; Ehrenfeucht, A. (1967), "Le Programme Ultra-Intuitionniste des Fondements des Mathematiques by A. S. Ésénine-Volpine", The Journal of Symbolic Logic (Association for Symbolic Logic) 32 (4): 517,doi:10.2307/2270182, JSTOR 2270182
• Yessenin-Volpin, A. S. (1970), "The ultra-intuitionistic criticism and the antitraditional program for foundations of mathematics", in Kino, A.; Myhill, J.; Vesley, R. E., Intuitionism and proof theory (Proc. Conf., Buffalo, N.Y., 1968), Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 3–45, MR 0295876 Reviewed by Geiser, James R. (1975), "The Ultra-Intuitionistic Criticism and the Antitraditional Program for Foundations of Mathematics. by A. S. Yessenin-Volpin", The Journal of Symbolic Logic (Association for Symbolic Logic) 40 (1): 95–97, doi:10.2307/2272294, JSTOR 2272294
• Yessenin-Volpin, A. S. (1981), "About infinity, finiteness and finitization (in connection with the foundations of mathematics)", in Richman, Fred, Constructive mathematics (Las Cruces, N.M., 1980), Lecture Notes in Math. 873, Berlin-New York: Springer, pp. 274–313, doi:10.1007/BFb0090740, ISBN 3-540-10850-5, MR 0644507