Vol 46, No 2 (2025)

The article examines the activities of Yakov Khaimovich Ioselev, a Leningrad hydrometeorologist and member of the All-Union Geographical Society, during the Great Patriotic War. Ioselev was called to the Red Army and defended Leningrad as head of the hydrometeorological division of the Leningrad Front Headquarters’ Operations Office. While tackling the problems of hydrometeorological service for the troops, he took the lead, applied scientific approach, and was highly respected by the commanding officers. When tasked with summarizing the hydrometeorological service’s experience, Ioselev’s report turned out to be so informative that it was forwarded to Leningrad State University and defended there as a Candidate of Sciences dissertation. The actual defense took place in the last days of the University’s functioning within the blockade ring, after which it was evacuated to Saratov. Until 2000, Yakov Ioselev’s dissertation was held in classified storage in the Central Archive of the RF Ministry of Defense. This document, which is of significant interest for the historians of the hydrometeorological service and science and for the historians of the defense of Leningrad, has been declassified and is now available to researchers.

On the 17^th of February 1937, Rainov completed the article titled “Pushkin and the issues of scientific creativity”. Looking into the text of the famous “little tragedy”, “Mozart and Salieri”, gave him an idea that Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri are living images, the poetic symbols of two profoundly different types of creativity. Rainov believed that Pushkin’s observations allowed analyzing various aspects of creative methodology incomparably deeper than it had been ever done in science before and that, guided by these observations, one may understand a lot not only about art but also about scientific creativity. Proceeding from this, outwardly simple, classification, Rainov demonstrated its effectiveness, drawing on the example of creative life of three great scientists: Ch. Darwin, J.-L. Lagrange, and I. P. Pavlov, whom Rainov called the Salieris of science. Unlike many Pushkinists and literary critics, he did not demonize Salieri, the essence of whose creative methodology was that, for him, his innate giftedness was but a material to work on and all of his creativity was a result of conscious reworking of the promptings of inspiration. In scientific practice, Rainov wrote, the Salieri type scientists – as in Pushkin’s play – are opposed by the Mozarts. Such Mozarts were A.-M. Ampère, a physicist, chemist, mathematician, and philosopher, V. O. Kovalevsky, a paleontologist, geologist, and zoologist, and I. A. Lappo-Danilevsky who was a mathematician. Just as Pushkin did not explain Mozart’s “creative methodology”, for Rainov, the creative paths of Mozart-type scientists remained a mystery and therefore, only a description of personality traits and qualities was given for these individuals, characterized by the quick, lightning-fast insights and intuitive penetration of the mind into the innermost essence, which enables the bearer of a genius mind to create new branches (fields) of science. It is shown in the introductory article to the publication of Rainov’s text that his first ventures into analytical perusal of Pushkin’s works date back to the early 1920s.