Collection context
Summary
- Creators:
- Esenin-Vol'pin, A. S. (Aleksandr Sergeevich), 1924-
- Abstract:
- Includes memoirs, other writings, correspondence, a police file, pamphlets, other printed matter, and photographs relating to civil liberties and dissent in the Soviet Union.
- Extent:
- 3 manuscript boxes, 1 oversize box (3 Linear Feet)
- Language:
- Russian
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], A. S. Esenin-Vol'pin papers, [Box no., Folder no. or title], Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
Includes memoirs, other writings, correspondence, a police file, pamphlets, other printed matter, and photographs relating to civil liberties and dissent in the Soviet Union.
- Biographical / historical:
-
Aleksandr Sergeevich Esenin-Vol'pin was a prominent Russian poet and mathematician, a notable dissident, political prisoner, and a leader of the Soviet human rights movement.
Esenin-Vol'pin was born on May 12, 1924 in the Soviet Union. His mother, Nadezhda Vol'pin, was a poet and translator from French and English. His father was Sergei Yesenin, a celebrated Russian poet, who never met his son. In 1933, Esenin-Vol'pin and his mother moved from Leningrad to Moscow.
Esenin-Vol'pin graduated from Moscow State University with a candidate dissertation in the spring of 1949. After graduation, he was sent to the Ukrainian city of Chernovtsy to teach mathematics at the local state university. Less than a month after his arrival, he was arrested by the KGB, sent on a plane back to Moscow, and incarcerated in the Lubyanka prison. Esenin-Vol'pin was charged with "systematically conducting anti-Soviet agitation, writing anti-Soviet poems, and reading them to acquaintances." His first psychiatric imprisonments took place the same year for anti-Soviet poetry. In 1950, Esenin-Vol'pin was released from the prison hospital and sentenced to five years exile in the Kazakh town of Karaganda as a socially dangerous element. In 1953, after the death of Joseph Stalin, Esenin-Vol'pin was released due to a general amnesty. Soon he became a known mathematician specializing in the fields of ultrafinitism and intuitionism.
Esenin-Volpin was institutionalized again in 1959 for secretly sending samizdat abroad. In 1965, he organized a legendary glasnost meeting, 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. In the following years, Esenin-Vol'pin became an important voice in the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. He was one of the first Soviet dissidents who took on a legalist strategy of dissent. He proclaimed that it is possible and necessary to defend human rights by strictly observing the law. Esenin-Volpin was again put in a psikhushka (psychiatric institute) in February 1968 as one of those protesting most strongly against the trial of Alexander Ginzburg and Yury Galanskov (the Galanskov-Ginzburg trial). After he had been confined, 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-Vol'pin was released almost immediately thereafter in 1968.
Esenin-Vol'pin spent a total of fourteen years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in prisons, psikhushkas, and exile. In May 1972, he immigrated to the United States, where he worked at Boston University. In 2005, Esenin-Vol'pin participated in They Chose Freedom, a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement. He died on March 16, 2016.
- Acquisition information:
- Materials were acquired by the Hoover Institution Library Archives in 2016.
- Physical location:
- Hoover Institution Library & Archives
- Rules or conventions:
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Indexed terms
Access and use
- Restrictions:
-
The collection is open for research; materials must be requested in advance via our reservation system. If there are audiovisual or digital media material in the collection, they must be reformatted before providing access.
- Terms of access:
-
For copyright status, please contact the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], A. S. Esenin-Vol'pin papers, [Box no., Folder no. or title], Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
- Location of this collection:
-
Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford UniversityStanford, CA 94305-6003, US
- Contact:
- (650) 723-3563