The Greatest of New Years: that our age of science is also the age of the humanities, from our St. Petersburg correspondent, 1 January 2017

“S nastupivishim!”: “Happy upcoming New Year!” So the new year begins here, ahead of yours, and we have been enjoying the sparkling lights in the Nevsky Prospekt. There are fewer tourists here now, and so much gaiety among friends and family. There are also moments of reflection, as this city, created out of nothing, has seen its share of mortal monuments: the Semyonov Palace, where Dostoevsky faced the firing squad, the Peter and Paul Fortress, even the Neva itself, the final place of Rasputin. Then, too, we recall The Stray Dog, where Mandelstam and Gumilyov, Akhmatova and Blok toasted the short-lived future of poetry.

But I am hopeful, now that the new year has arrived. I am as hopeful as Akhmatova in late 1945, when her son returned from the front and Isaiah Berlin visited in Fontanka House, breaking through her isolation. There is a sense that the darkness will yield, and days will get longer.

What am I speaking about? Your readers will think me digressive, but I am talking about something dear to all of them: the fate of the humanities. One might like to say “future,” but since I am feeling auspicious, I say “fate.” For the humanities – literature, philosophy, history – are all destined to greater things, in this greatest of new years.

I can hear some cynical laughter among you, as you ask about the basis of my belief. What is your job, your acumen? You are just being fantastical, tipsy perhaps from New Year’s revelry and optimism. Even those close to me here ask me: “how could you – a graduate of the Steklov Institute, who has published on Birman-Murakami-Wenzel algebra, and is one of the youngest women in the Russian Academy of Sciences – how could you maintain such a position?” I know, I stand to be mocked like Stepan Trofimovitch in The Devils, when he asserted that “boots were of less consequence than Pushkin.” Or I am told again about Dead Souls, when Chichikov visited the estates of Skudronzhoglo and Koshkaryov: in the first, everything runs smoothly, for the exclusive focus is on agricultural practice; with the second, chaos reigns, despite – or because of – the advanced education offered to the peasants. So how do the humanities, or culture in general, help any of us live well, and not rather ensure in us a melancholy state of unease, even a sense of futility?

In answer I resort to my favorite mathematician Pascal, who said that the heart has reasons that the mind cannot know. I say that henceforth we will appreciate the leadings of the heart as much as those of the mind, and the exchanges between the two, since this is what Dostoevsky and Gogol reveal. Their ‘critiques’ of the humanities are those by the humanities, in the play of character and literary irony. We are led to question further, through the beauty of their writings and the passions they elicit, just where the humanities have fallen short. If only more scientists understood this!

But they do – this is precisely the point of my letter, which I am composing in such high spirits. For scientists, with their technology, are showing us, time and again, the strength of the humanities. We are demonstrating the power of literature, history, and philosophy, even when scholars in these fields seem to have given up: now there is an irony worthy of Bulgakov or Nabokov! I cite a few examples, known to your readers through your site:

In Norway, researchers have discovered how learning centers in the brain are activated more intensely when we write with a pen, rather than type with a keyboard. We should urge Microsoft, who funded this study, to pursue these tests further, only now have people write or type poetry – say the wondrous line from Tsvetaeva’s “The Poet,” “for the path of comets / is the path of poets,” and then compare the energy in their minds with that when writing or typing out textbooks (or cookbooks, or instruction manuals). What a difference we might see!

And that study in Britain, about how baby-talk nurtures the minds of infants better than literate speech: what of using the same method to see how bi-lingual parents foster the development of their children, or even how the minds of school children develop when hearing sounds of different languages?

And – not to bore you, as you see my point – there was that promising American study that was able to identify how the brain activity in speakers and listeners showed the depth, or shallowness, of their understanding and mutual rapport. Have actors – or any other pair – read together the final conversation between Onegin and Tatyana, when he sees her again in St. Petersburg and asks her to run away with him. How might we trace out her mixed emotions, and show, in the age of science, the profound and lasting beauty of the poem!

I am writing as a scientist, and may possess, in your eyes, little authority. But numbers have their own elegance and meaning, as Pythagoras has said. More importantly, the age of science is also the age of humanities. Unravelling the mystery and meaning of human existence requires a feeling and understanding for our history and literature. If Akhmatova and Yevtushenko warned us about the pain of remembering our past, they knew, through their verse, that the past remains present, awaiting our recall:

And the Muses went deaf and blind,
and rotted like a seed in the earth,
so as later like a Phoenix from the ashes
to rise again into the blue ether.

Akhmatova wrote these lines here, in old Leningrad, sixty years ago. Now I hear the Muses stirring…. S nastupivishim!