Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
View entire collection guide
Search this collection
Table of contents
Title: A. S. Esenin-Vol'pin papers
Date (inclusive): 1903-2010
Collection Number: 2016C44
Contributing Institution: Hoover Institution Library and Archives
Language of Material:
Russian
Physical Description:
3 manuscript boxes, 1 oversize box
(3 Linear Feet)
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.
Creator:
Esenin-Vol'pin, A. S. (Aleksandr Sergeevich), 1924-
Physical Location: Hoover Institution Library & Archives
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.
For copyright status, please contact the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
Materials were acquired by the Hoover Institution Library & Archives in 2016.
[Identification of item], A. S. Esenin-Vol'pin papers, [Box no., Folder no. or title], Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
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.
Scope and Content of Collection
Includes memoirs, other writings, correspondence, a police file, pamphlets, other printed matter, and photographs relating
to civil liberties and dissent in the Soviet Union.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Dissenters -- Soviet Union
Civil rights -- Soviet Union