Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1857-1935
Kaluga is a wonderful city. It lies a bit off the beaten path, with no stunning historical architecture or monuments to antiquity. But perhaps it is easier to understand Russian history and culture here than in the towns of the Golden Ring, where you can barely take two steps without running into a group of sightseers being shepherded by a booming tour guide. Kaluga is an ancient city, dating back to the early 14th century. Its name is even more ancient, probably of Finno-Ugric origin, which implies that people lived here before the dawn of history and before Slavs came to these parts.
The city’s heyday came during the 18th and 19th centuries, when local manufacturers of paper and cloth brought prosperity to the town. But at the end of the 19th century a fateful decision was made. The city rejected the idea of having the railroad come through town, and by the time they realized the impact this would have on commerce it was too late. Today the city does feature a train station, and you can travel there from Moscow by rail in just over three hours. Nevertheless Kaluga is off the major lines, and this is a stroke of luck for lovers of old architecture: perhaps because the city did not develop as rapidly in the 20th century as it did in previous centuries, many marvelous buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries have been preserved. As you wander the city’s quiet, tree-lined streets, or stroll through its park or along the banks of the Oka River, which nobody took the trouble of lining with granite, you feel immersed in the history of a Russia that existed outside Moscow and St. Petersburg; you understand that much of what was important and interesting took place outside of Russia’s capitals.
Who among the great names of Russian history has not been to Kaluga? Pushkin and Gogol spent time here, and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky passed through on their way to one of Russia’s most renowned monasteries: Optina Pustyn. Shamil, the captive head of the rebellious Caucasian state which refused for many years to submit to the Russian Empire, spent several years here. As a matter of fact, the locals were quite fond of him. He was an honored guest at a few high-society functions, and the ladies were only sorry that the imam’s wife made appearances so rarely.
But Kaluga’s pride and joy is Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky – a man symbolic of so much that is Russian. He was born in September 1857 in a village outside Ryazan, but made his way to Kaluga early in life and remained there until his death in 1935. The Tsiolkovsky Museum in Kaluga, located in the house where he lived, allows us to imagine the daily life of this great dreamer. An incommodious little wooden house, modestly if not shabbily furnished, is where this deaf teacher of physics and mathematics lived with his family.
Tsiolkovsky lost his hearing as a child after a bout with scarlet fever, and quite likely this auditory isolation reinforced the young man’s striving to sense the majesty of the cosmos, to become part of the infinite universe. Tsiolkovsky was a strange man. He taught mathematics and physics – exact sciences – but amazed and entertained his pupils with his musings, absentmindedness, and enthusiasm. If you add deafness to the mix, you can imagine what the teacher had to put up with from the young men at his gymnasium, although apparently they loved him.
Tsiolkovsky also amazed the adult population of Kaluga. Coachmen crossed themselves in fear when they saw the tall, lanky, nearsighted teacher riding his bicycle along the banks of the Oka, his raincoat flapping behind him like wings. “Winged devil,” echoed in his wake, but of course he could not hear these commentaries. At home, Tsiolkovsky’s wife had long since come to terms with her husband’s eccentricities. When he might have been helping out around the house, he was just as likely to bring in rotting phosphorescent branches from the woods, using them to make a map of the night sky for his children.
The abstract dreamer is a typical figure of Russian provincial life. Here in this tiny house, after returning from the gymnasium, deaf to the clatter of pots and the cries of his own children, Tsiolkovsky read the works of another dreamer, Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that mankind comprised a unified whole and that the main challenge facing civilization was the revival of past generations. Tsiolkovsky went even farther. Seen from his little world in Kaluga, the cosmos seemed to him a unified, animated being. The most important task facing mankind, Tsiolkovsky felt, was to delve into and comprehend this unity. Like many who lived at the dawn of the 20th century, Tsiolkovsky had faith in the limitless possibilities of science. He spent his nights bent over calculations and designs for contrivances that would someday be able to carry people into space, where they would of course encounter other life forms. If mankind would take up the mastery of space, then the blossoming of science would, in turn, bring good fortune and prosperity to all people. Society itself would change if it were constructed in accordance with scientific postulates.
So lived this dreamer, publishing his little-noticed brochures at his own expense, until his fate intersected with designs for a different utopia and entirely different dreams. The Bolsheviks also wanted to remake the world and to bring happiness to mankind, however much their plans for achieving this may have differed from the ones Tsiolkovsky dreamed of in Kaluga. The idea of mastering space was appealing to them both from a military perspective, as an opportunity to develop rocket technology, and as a symbol of the omnipotence of mankind, capable of changing life not only in the Russian Empire, but throughout the universe. By the 1920s, the teacher from Kaluga had already been elevated to the status of hero, and by the early 1930s he had become a prominent cultural figure. Later, in the 1960s, he was cast as something close to the father of space travel, although the connection between Tsiolkovsky’s designs and the rocket that carried Gagarin into orbit is somewhat tenuous.
Today, just a half-kilometer from the house where Tsiolkovsky lived, there is an impressive museum devoted to the history of space travel. You can see the tiny spaceships that carried the first cosmonauts into the sky, their space suits, equipment, and tubes of space food. You can even enter a real spacecraft and see how science marched toward the conquest of the cosmos. The museum also has a planetarium with a map of the night sky projected onto the ceiling, not made from decayed branches, but with modern technology. Tsiolkovsky would probably be thrilled. Do spacecraft help us feel the living breath and soul of the universe? Is science capable of creating a society that will achieve human happiness? The teacher from Kaluga had an answer to that question. Do we?
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