Shvanvich: Story about Stalin, butterflies and tanks

14 October 2018, 21:08 | Ukraine
photo Odessa Daily
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Once, quite a while already, Yura Slusarev, a professor at the Invertebrate Zoology Department at St. Petersburg State University, told me a wonderful story. She is about the head of the department of entomology at the same university, Boris Nikolaevich Shvanvich.

Today, this story somehow emerged by itself in the head and stuck there tightly. I had to excavate the network. Biography of Shvanvich and others. Not everything fits there with what I heard before, but it looks like it was my sleeping memory that made a couple of amendments.. I will rely on what I remember from the story, and not on what I read. The legend is.

1942. Winter. The war is in full swing. Germans rod forward. At the rate of Supreme Commander - a scheduled meeting. Finally, the disagreeable and not very clear questions to the present marshals and generals are discussed.. Disguise. No, the generals know something about disguise - in the winter - white bathrobes, in the summer - khaki. But the Germans are somehow more interesting.. Their airfields are not too visible from the air, and the tanks for some reason, are spotty and striped, as is the uniform of some units and units.. Comrade Stalin demands that the masking be dealt with urgently and closely, and not anyhow, but strictly scientifically, with serious justification.. Like, the idea that green is green is not noticeable. This is a hedgehog clear. Need something more versatile. Stalin is annoyed. She knocks on the table. Requires immediate action. Generals scratching their heads. Offer to copy the enemy's disguise. Supreme furious. He needs principle and clarity.. How it works and why. And who can do this?.

Carefully squeaking throat, the word takes some freshly baked generals. He is from intellectuals. Maybe parents are scientists, and maybe he himself, in his past life, had time to move. The general timidly and confusedly reports that there was such a professor Shvanvich at Leningrad University. So he, at one time, headed the department of entomology, until it was dispersed in the early thirties, and was engaged in patronizing the coloring of the wings of butterflies. Maybe he will fit? Stalin hesitates vaguely and demands urgently, today, to bring this schwanvich to Moscow and deliver straight to him.

The generals are eased from the chairs with relief and run to fulfill orders. Scapegoat found. Even two. Because the initiative, you know ....

Call to Saratov where the university was evacuated. There is no Schwanwich and there wasn’t. Someone says he stayed in Leningrad. And there now, of course, the blockade.

Special flight is ready in twenty minutes. The plane flies to the blockade city.

Schwanwich found at home in bed. He no longer gets up.

Chicken broth in the entomologist poured directly on the plane.

At night he is already at Stalin's. The commander-in-chief peers incredulously at the overgrown face of the professors goner and expounds the essence of the task.. A little nodledavshiysya Shvanvich attentively listens and, it seems, even understands something.

- Well, what, professor, can you help the army and the front?.

- I can, - Shvanvich breathes in response.

- What do you need for this, professor?.

- Three days and two artists ....

Three days later, Boris Shvanvich reports to the entire Headquarters.. He avoids such tricky words as "mimicry" and "the principle of stereomorphism".

Everything is simple, elegant and affordable.. The basis of the concept, if in a nutshell - projecting and highlighting to paint in dark, shaded and concave - to highlight. The rest is details. Artists, under the leadership of Schvanvich, have already illustrated everything.. Seasons and seasons. For clarity, on the table are three-dimensional plaster models, painted so that their shape completely falls apart and flattened..

Shvanvich speaks about the "dismembering effect" and about the general laws of disguise.

Generals and marshals sit with their mouths wide open.

A year later, Shvanvich again at a reception at Stalin:.

- Ask what you want, professor ... Good job.

Shvanvich thinks literally for a second:.

- I want the department of entomology. She was. But now it is not.



From 1944 to 1955, almost until his death, Boris Shvanvich headed his favorite department.. To the question of whether Zhou is dreaming that he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that she is Zhou, he, quite deliberately, added some nuances.

Buried at Bolsheokhtinsky. On the grave - a monument depicting the structure of the structure of the pattern of the wings of daytime butterflies.. And - not a single tank. And he is a tank, there is. Just - not visible.




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