In 1930, the First International Congress on Biophysics and Biocosmology opened in New York. Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky was elected his honorary president.
In the adopted Memorandum, he was named the founder of new branches of knowledge about man for the breadth of scientific interests that extended from the depths of a living cell to the Sun. He was called Russian Leonardo da Vinci of his age. And then he was only 42 years old, and he was entering a time of creative prosperity …
Childhood
The future scientist was born at the beginning of 1897 in the small village of Tsekhanovets near Grodno, where the military unit was located, to which his father, artillery officer Leonid Chizhevsky, was assigned. Mother - Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Neviandt - did not live very long after the birth of her son and a year later died of tuberculosis. His aunt, Olga Vasilyevna Leslie (Chizhevskaya), took care of the boy.
The father did not marry again and paid much attention to the upbringing and education of his son. Noticing his inclination to engage in science, he equipped at home a real laboratory, which Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky always considered the source of his scientific activity. From his aunt's mother, he absorbed interest in the humanities, and poetry and painting classes, which began in these early years, will accompany Chizhevsky all his life.
Following the head of the family, who by the end of his life became a general from artillery, who was assigned to various military units, they lived for several months in various cities of Russia and abroad, including in Paris.
Kaluga
In 1913, the Chizhevskys got the opportunity to permanently settle in Kaluga. This city played a decisive role in the fate of the future scientist - here he began his real scientific biography. Alexander Chizhevsky subsequently wrote that acquaintance and close friendship with Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was of crucial importance for the formation of his scientific interests.
The gaze of this unique thinker was directed into the depths of space and, perhaps, under his influence already in 1914, Chizhevsky began to study the influence of the activity of the Sun on the biological and social sphere of our planet. Another topic of his research is the effect of artificially ionized air on living organisms.
After graduating from high school at a real school in Kaluga, in 1915 Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky entered two higher educational institutions at once - he was officially enrolled in the Moscow Commercial Institute and was given the right to take a course at the Moscow Archaeological Institute. So his interest in various aspects of human life was embodied: in one course, he studies the exact sciences - physics and mathematics, in the other - the humanities.
"The frequency of the world historical process"
In 1917, two works on the competition for the initial scientific title were published in Moscow: Russian Lyrics of the 17th Century and Evolution of Physics and Mathematics in the Ancient World. Candidate for the title of candidate - Chizhevsky Alexander Leonidovich. His biography as a young scientist was interrupted by participation in the First World War. In 1916, he fought as a volunteer on the Galician front, served as a reconnaissance mortar unit, was awarded the George Cross and was wounded.
Even at the beginning of the war, Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky established the relationship between changes in solar activity and events on Earth. The severity of the military conflict in Europe, he found out, increased during periods of passage through the central meridian of the main star of our system of the maximum number of sunspots. Then he carefully studied the ancient annals of different peoples in search of confirmation of this pattern in history. The result was a successful defense of his doctoral dissertation on this topic in 1918.
The main conclusion of the young scientist was almost shocking: the cyclical nature of solar activity exactly corresponds to the periods of global changes in the Earth’s biosphere and in the course of life and socio-political processes. Many facets of the existence of human civilization were affected by the cosmos: the frequency of mental illness and mass epidemics, productivity and economic crises, the emergence of new scientific theories and the emergence of wars and revolutions.
Science and poetry
In subsequent years, the researcher continues his education, studying at the same time at two faculties of Moscow State University: medical and physical and mathematical. He develops the theory of electric exchange in living organisms by conducting experiments in a home laboratory in Kaluga, having made a discovery about the effect of light negatively charged aeroions on the human and animal organisms, and is working on a plant for the production of these particles, which later became known as the Chizhevsky chandelier.
However, he does not leave active poetry. The chairman of the branch of the All-Russian Poetic Union is also Alexander Chizhevsky. His books, published in those years, are “Physical factors of the historical process” (1924), and “Notebook of poems” (1919). Maximilian Voloshin and Pavel Florensky, Mayakovsky and Valery Bryusov, Alexey Tolstoy and Vyacheslav Ivanov spoke positively of his literary experiments. Professional artists noted the originality of his watercolor landscapes, which were painted in moments of rare relaxation.
The unity of scientific views and creative understanding of the commonality of man and the cosmos - this distinguished the scientist and poet Chizhevsky Alexander Leonidovich. The philosophy of his attitude to life is clearly expressed in the following lines:
We are the children of Cosmos. And our Birthplace
So soldered by Commonness and inextricably strong, What we feel we are merged in one
That at every point the World - the whole world is concentrated …
There is no prophet in his homeland …
The breadth of scientific interests of Alexander Chizhevsky can only be expressed in a list of scientific and practical industries, where his work is highly appreciated by colleagues: zoopsychology, heliobiology, aeroionization, ionization, biophysics, space biology, hematology, structural analysis of blood, electro-paint technology and much more. But most of them were foreign scientists. Chizhevsky received a worthy assessment of his scientific work in his homeland only posthumously. And he was refused travel at the invitation of numerous foreign scientific organizations.
And many scientific studies were carried out by scientists already in camps and "sharashka". The sharp discrepancy between his ideas and official scientific views was striking even to the most ignorant fighters for the triumph of communist ideology. Not surprisingly, Chizhevsky Alexander Leonidovich was among the repressed in Stalin's times. A short biography of him as a convict under the notorious 58th article of the Criminal Code began in 1942. After that, for 8 years he moved to different points of the huge Gulag - Ivdelag in the Northern Urals, Kuchino in the Moscow Region, Karlag in Kazakhstan.
This was preceded by long years of bullying, labeling obscurantist and sun worshiper, when Chizhevsky’s ideas about the influence of cosmic energy on the Earth’s biosphere were smashed in the press, persecuted supporters of this theory and removed the author’s book from print. Chizhevsky Alexander Leonidovich was released in 1950. He voluntarily stayed in the camp to finish the necessary experiments on the study of blood cells. Subsequently, he was rehabilitated, but completely - only posthumously.
