The article is one of the last reflections of the outstanding mathematician, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Viktor Nikolaevich Maslov, who passed away in August 2023. In it, in a free manner, the motives of personal biography are combined and easily turn into wise judgments about acute social conflicts of our time, it is shown that the real history of people and events found compromises and mutual understanding between seemingly irreconcilable ideas and positions. The Polish roots of his (...) biography in his worldview are surprisingly linked to the proximity of the mathematical ideas of the Banach space of the great Polish mathematician Stefan Banach with the indexes of his name, with the friendship and cooperation of Polish and Russian scientists. Social-democratic family traditions on the maternal and paternal lines are perfectly combined with patriotic service to the state and are imprinted with vivid examples. He contrasts one – sided ideas about Ukrainian nationalism with the experience of such a politician as Makhno, who was merciless even to the slightest manifestations of anti-Semitism, but most importantly, this is opposed by the unity of the origin of languages and the interweaving of cultural ties. The author expresses his belief in the international potential of socialist ideas, which is poorly used in solving modern social conflicts, in particular, in Ukraine, which he, as a person with Cossack roots, experiences with particular acuteness. (shrink)

The article is written in the form of an essay. It examines what value for the course of the Great Patriotic War of 1941‑1945, in particular for the defense of Leningrad, had neutral-restrained position of Mannerheim and Finland as a state, expressed in relative distancing from Nazi Germany: non-participation in the storming and bombing of Leningrad, refusal to provide the German army the territory of Finland for hitting the city, to block the "Road of Life" on the lake Ladoga. It (...) is shown that this position was largely the result of the diplomatic efforts of the Soviet Ambassador to Sweden, Alexandra Kollontai, who had a special friendly relationship with Mannerheim. In the course of the argument, along with the analysis of objective and literarily documented facts, the author also relies on personal evidence rooted in the biography of his grandfather, the famous academician P.P. Maslov. The article uses a concrete example to show how personal positions and interpersonal relationships, subject to their own logic, become important elements of historically significant factors. (shrink)

The essay, which consists of two parts, analyzes the female images of two great artists Botticelli and Picasso. The essay has the character of an art history study with memoir interweaves. In the first part, the author makes an attempt to decipher the genius of Botticelli using the technique of analyzing the prototype of the artist's heroine and comparing it with the image of a real woman, similar to the Botticelli model. The artist's genius is revealed through the type created (...) by him, in a sense — invariant, of a beautiful woman, the spiritual and material image of which is repeated in reality. The energy of Botticelli's paintings, which is their secret, allowed the author to see in life a real copy of the artist's heroine. Using the archive of preserved personal letters of a beautiful lady, as if she descended from Botticelli's paintings “Spring” and “The Birth of Venus”, the author draws an analogy the epistolary legacy with cinema, when events are described not in strict chronological order, but rather individual important moments and experiences are highlighted and are scaled. According to the letters, the author reconstructs the character of his heroine and hypothetically transfers these character traits to the Botticelli model, about whose character there is almost no evidence left. The second part of the essay is inspired by a photograph of Picasso's wife Olga Khokhlova, preserved in the personal archive of the author's friends. The author embeds his story about the muse and the great love of Picasso and about his other paradoxical models in the circumstances of his personal life, in the situation of his youth, comparing the revolutionary changes in art at the beginning of the XX century with the moods of the representatives of the artistic intelligentsia of the 70s of the past century. The heroines of Picasso and the strange interweaving of the fate of the participants in the author's narrative represent the content of this part of the essay. (shrink)