Русские в британских университетах. Опыт интеллектуальной истории и культурного обмена - стр. 4

«As I remember, there are always some Russians in Cambridge. Through good chance I was acquainted with several of the Russians who are remembered with great affection in Cambridge.

At the head of my list must be the famous Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova, to whom my uncle the economist John Maynard Keynes was married in 1925, and to whom by a curious coincidence she had written on 29 February 1924. “I saw an atom this afternoon. I was taken to the Cavendish Laboratory where the physicists make their extraordinary experiments, and two companions explained things to me. It was interesting. One of the two was a young Russian called Peter Kapitza. He had made a wonderful instrument and seemed very clever, I thought”.

I do not think that Maynard Keynes remained in close contact with Peter Kapitza, but Lydia had a wide circle of devoted friends in Cambridge, whom she delighted with the frankness and wisdom of her comments, not only on theatrical and artistic matters but also on many other topics, delivered in her own special version of an English often deliberately misused but always sure to charm. A few years after her husband’s death in 1946, she moved permanently to his house in Sussex, where we visited her regularly until she died in 1981.

In July 1921 a young Russian physicist Piotr Leonidovich Kapitza came to Cambridge on a scientific visit and went to the Cavendish Laboratory to talk to Ernest Rutherford. He was cordially received, but when he then enquired whether he might work in the Laboratory for a few months, Rutherford replied that regrettably there was not enough space for him. It is related that Kapitza countered unexpectedly by asking at what accuracy Rutherford aimed in his experiments? When told that the answer was 2 or 3 %, Kapitza cheerfully pointed out that since there were already about 30 researchers at the Cavendish, one more would scarcely be noticed because he would be within the experimental error. This ingenious response was well received, and Kapitza quickly became enough of a favourite of the formidable Rutherford to be allowed always to address him straight to his face as “the Crocodile”, because of his habit in pursuit of a scientific problem of going straight forwards with gaping jaws.

Kapitza was soon admitted to Trinity College, where he became a very popular Research Fellow, and in 1929 he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society. His researches flourished, first through his invention of a new technique for generating briefly very large magnetic fields, and then for his elegant experiments on the behaviour of helium at very low temperatures. But unfortunately, at the end of one of his regular visits to the Soviet Union in 1934, he was firmly refused permission to return to Cambridge, and was obliged to remain for the rest of his life in Moscow conducting his researches at a new Institute for Physical Problems to which the instruments that he had designed were transferred. In 1966 he was permitted to return to England after a lapse of 32 years to receive the Rutherford Medal of the Institute of Physics, and I was happy to have an opportunity of talking to him at Churchill College, where his old friend John Cockcroft had become Master, and where he was elected in 1974 to an Honorary Fellowship. In 1978 he was belatedly awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on low temperature physics, and in 1984 he died in Moscow at the age of 87.