Yesenin-Volpin, Leaf of Spring, Poetry Philosophy, 1st US Ed. 1961

"A Leaf of Spring in two parts: Poetry and Philosophical Treatise" (bilingual -in English & Russian-- Original Russian with facing page of English translations, by Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin, English translation by George Reavey, published by Frederick A. Praeger, stated First American Edition 1961.

The book consists of two parts- first part is a Poetry, including author's variation of Poe's "Raven". the second part is Philosophical Treaty on ultrafinist and intuitionist concepts.

Original dust jacket [a few small damages, clipped price on the front flap], hard boards; original publisher's greenish cloth with brown lettering on spine [some soiling]; 5.1/2" x 8.1/4"; 173 pages, a few small stains, very good condition.

In 1962, after "A Leaf of Spring" was published in the West, Esenin-Volpin was denounced in the Soviet newspapers Pravda and lzvestia by party ideologue Leonid llyichev as a "poisonous mushroom" and was taken from his home in Moscow by a team of psychiatrists and orderlies to the Mental Hospital. He was injected with amanozine, and kept for almost three months.

Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin (1924-2016) was a prominent Russian-American poet and mathematician. A notable dissident, political prisoner and a leader of the Soviet human rights movement, he spent a total of six years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in mental institutions and inner exile. He is a founder of the theory of ultrafinitism in mathematics.

Esenin-Volpin graduated from Moscow State University with a dissertation in mathematics in the spring of 1949. A few months later he was arrested and charged with "systematically conducting anti-Soviet agitation, writing anti-Soviet poems, and reading them to acquaintances." Attempting to avoid prison and labor camp, Volpin faked a suicide attempt and was transferred to mental institution. A year later he was abruptly 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, Volpin was released due to a general amnesty. Soon he became a known mathematician specializing in the fields of ultrafinitism and intuitionism. In 1957, when the Soviet Government staged its Moscow Youth Festival, he was picked up on the street and put away at the Gannushkin Psychiatric Hospital in Moscow for almost a month to keep him from mingling with foreign visitors. in 1960, he was again confined to the Leningrad psychiatric prison for a year and kept on reserpin, the Russian name for pills that seemed to lower his already low blood pressure and produced painful chills.

Yesenin & #8208; Volpin's fifth commitment to a psychiatric prison in 1968 raised an outcry. He may have been a dissident, but he was also a brilliant mathematician whose work had appeared in the publications of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and other Soviet journals; 95 leading colleagues, including academy members and Lenin Prize winners, signed a petition to the Soviet Minister of Health. He was released within three months.

In May 1972, Esenin-Volpin was permitted to emigrate to the United States, but his Soviet citizenship was not revoked as was customary at the time. He worked at Boston University. In 1973, he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.

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