The signs were already there in the summer of 1945, when Einstein was sailing on the lake at Saranac Lake in upstate New York, and the world was holding its breath. America had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was ending, and Margarita Konenkova, the woman the great physicist called his dearest one, came to visit him. She was anxious.
The FBI was investigating her, and by law, if she were caught, she faced the electric chair. There was a delicate request she had to make: she needed to meet with Soviet Vice-Consul Mikhailov. She told Einstein it was crucial for her. He gave in.
The FBI recorded the meetings. There were two of them, and what was discussed remained a secret. Mikhailov was soon expelled to the USSR as persona non grata. The ten-year romance between the most famous scientist in the world and the wife of the Russian sculptor Sergey Konenkov was doomed.
As a farewell, Einstein gave Margarita a gold watch and a page from his theory of relativity. How it all began goes back to the frantic heart of New York, to Times Square, the ticking heart of a nation of immigrants. Everyone there was in a hurry to chase new sensations. The more new impressions you had, the longer the day felt, and the longer the day, the more successful your life.
America was a country of immigrants. Albert Einstein had emigrated to America in 1933, when the Nazis came to power in his native Germany. Margarita Konenkova and her husband had been guests under the striped flag for ten years already. In two years, the stars would align.
In ten years, Margarita would have a serious chance to stay in the US forever. That chance was Einstein. Einstein, like other Jews, had been expelled from the Berlin Academy. His house was ransacked.
A bounty of 10,000 marks was placed on his head. “I didn’t know my head was worth so little,” Einstein joked. Like many others, he was ironic about America and criticized its flaws. But for his scientific research, freedom was essential.
He was an individualist and a rebel. “Democracy as a distinctive trait of the people is precisely what makes newcomers tie their future to this country,” Einstein said. “No one is inclined to debase themselves before others or certain classes. ”
Sergey Konenkov was languishing in America.
He had tried to return to Russia several times. Gorky had stopped him just in time: it was not the time to return, he warned, protect your talent. Konenkov and Margarita had arrived in the United States with an exhibition of Soviet art in 1923 and got stuck for twenty years. A peasant’s son, whose immense talent made him the Soviet Union’s number one sculptor, he was called the Russian Rodin.
All over the world, and especially in America, a new era was dawning, the era of celebrities. Stars were being ignited because everyone needed them. It was the time of the Great Depression. The British Times, followed by the New York Times and other global media, launched a grand promotion of Einstein and his new theory of time and the universe.
Einstein became the most famous scientist in the world. People flocked to his lectures. Ladies would faint at the sight of Einstein. America, and indeed the whole world, was swept by “Einstein-mania.
”
“No living creature deserves such a reception,” Einstein once said to his wife, Elsa. “I’m afraid we are impostors. We will end our days in prison. ”
Now he lived in Princeton, at the invitation of the Institute for Advanced Study.
The Institute was created as a paradise where prominent scientists were paid a high salary without any obligations. They didn’t have to teach, and they didn’t have to work anymore. All day long, they were finally able to do only what they loved most in the world: pure science. The institute had eighteen precious staff members, and Einstein became its crown jewel.
His first thought experiment took place when he imagined what a boy would see and feel while flying alongside a light beam. He thought in images. He had a gift for seeing and feeling the physical reality behind abstract mathematical formulas. Imagination is more important than knowledge.
He asked himself how it happened that it was he who discovered the theory of relativity. An adult never troubles their mind with questions about space and time, he reasoned. An adult thinks they understood it in childhood, but he developed so slowly that he began questioning space and time only when he was grown. Therefore, he delved into the problem more deeply than an ordinary child.
In life, Einstein was a humble, good-natured professor, sometimes absent-minded. He wandered the city, lost in his own thoughts. He never learned to drive a car; to him, it was too complex. He played the violin.
He helped children with their homework, and the residents of Princeton found him very sweet. His house in paradise was no different from the others. Here, a happy Einstein lived for twenty-two years until his very death. But behind that door lay tears invisible to the world.
And they were there. Einstein was married twice. His first wife, Mileva Marić, was, like Einstein, a physicist. She helped him solve mathematical problems when he was creating the theory of relativity.
His second wife, Elsa, was the complete opposite of the romantic and passionate intellectual Mileva. Elsa managed Einstein’s daily life and created a comfortable existence for him. She kept track of where he needed to be and gave him pocket money for expenses. Einstein began seeing Elsa while he was still married to Mileva.
He believed that men were not built for monogamous relationships and that jealousy was merely a lack of upbringing. Mileva gave up her scientific career for the sake of the family. She was gifted not only with an exceptional mind but also with the capacity for intense and profound emotions. She needed affection.
She wanted to save the marriage. Einstein issued his ultimatum, worth quoting in full. You will ensure that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order, that I receive regular three meals a day in my room, that my bedroom and study are kept tidy. And it is especially important that my desk is used only by me.
You will renounce all personal relations with me, except when they are completely necessary for social reasons. In particular, you will renounce my sitting at home with you, going out, or traveling with you. You will obey the following rules in your relationship with me. You will not require intimacy from me and will not reproach me for any reason.
You will stop talking to me if I ask you to do so. If I ask you to, you will immediately leave my bedroom or study without protest. You promise not to humiliate me before our children, neither with your words nor your behavior. Mileva fell ill.
She was prone to depression. She needed empathy and help, but Einstein would withdraw and immerse himself in his calculations. He had already proven the special theory of relativity and was now working on general relativity. “I treat my wife as an employee I cannot fire,” Einstein wrote to Elsa in a letter.
But when Elsa finally became Einstein’s wife, the same fate befell her too. Einstein’s acquaintances believed his heart never bled, that he had no heart at all, that he was incapable of love. But was that so? Among American medical scientists, there is an opinion that Einstein had a form of autism.
The true love I am denied on Earth, I must seek among the stars. Imagine that there is a universe inside you, and it is self-contained. In your universe, time and space are different from everyone else’s. You are here, yet at the same time, you are not.
You are in another layer of reality, separated from others by an invisible wall. He did not know how to build relationships. Because of this, the professors at the polytechnic institute where Einstein taught in his youth treated him with open contempt. Later, they felt guilty about it.
When it became clear he was a genius, friends and colleagues wrote that they knew no one as lonely and dispassionate as Einstein; that he was benevolent but indifferent, brilliant but detached; that his extraordinary kindness and courtesy were entirely impersonal; that he could not stand others feeling strong emotions toward him and would immediately withdraw. But did that mean he felt nothing? Perhaps he could not understand the pain he caused his loved ones, but that did not mean he did not feel pain himself. Perhaps it was even sharper, as he lacked the protection that comes from expressing emotions.
The bullet, so to speak, hit him straight in the head. An eclipsing of the mind by feelings, that was what he called it. To keep his sanity, he clung desperately to the strict objective reality of science, where there was no place for feelings. Science helps me soar from this vale of tears into an atmosphere of peace.
Unlike Mileva, Elsa understood nothing of the theory of relativity, but she did understand her husband, as she was Einstein’s cousin. She was of the same breed as him. She accepted that he was always distant, that they had separate bedrooms, and that Einstein continued to see other women. She was fine with that.
Life as Mrs. Einstein included many pleasant things. “Such a genius should have been flawless in every respect,” she once said. But nature does not work that way.
If it is lavish in one thing, it is too frugal in another. Elsa cared for Einstein, served him, and worshipped him. It was a mutually beneficial marriage. Now he was seeking proof for his new theory, the unified field theory.
“When I judge a theory, I ask myself: ‘If I were God, would I have arranged the world this way? ‘” Einstein believed that God would give him the solution. It had happened before, when the final piece for the theory of relativity was missing. “God told me to calculate the perihelion shift of Mercury.
” Everyone who is seriously involved in science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one vastly superior to the spirit of man. In the face of this spirit, we must feel humble with our modest powers. Now he intended to connect the micro and macro worlds, atoms and the universe. As the newspapers wrote, everything at once.
He was looking for the formula of God. In 1935, the Institute for Advanced Study commissioned busts of scientists from various famous sculptors. Einstein was assigned to a Russian sculptor. The Konenkovs became frequent guests at the Einstein home.
Sergey Timofeevich, a Russian peasant by nature and a Russian truth-seeker by spirit, did not fit well into American reality. From the early thirties, he closely associated with members of the theosophical society “Disciples of Christ. ” He immersed himself in the study of the mystical texts of Nostradamus, Newton, and the Bible. Margarita was distressed by this.
Her husband acted strangely: he distilled moonshine at home, trained cockroaches, played the flute, and turned down wealthy clients. He was becoming a clear sociopath. Margarita had her own eccentricities. Once she locked herself in a bedroom with Chaliapin.
Sergey Timofeevich began to beat furiously on the door and weep. She emerged to the guests and coldly reproached her husband, fixing her hair. “People are watching, it’s shameful. ”
She was Konenkov’s model and muse.
He fell in love with her at first sight upon seeing a girlhood photo. She was someone else’s fiancée at the time. Konenkov stole her away from a friend. By the time of the engagement, he was already an academician.
Margarita was twenty-two years younger, but she called her husband “baby” until her very last days. She was not a beauty, but she was elegant, experienced, and sophisticated. She was alluring. Her photographs would never show this hidden sexual magnetism.
Her charm was revealed to a much greater extent in Konenkov’s sculptures. It is precisely such women that secret services take note of. Einstein posed for the sculptor. Margarita entertained him with small talk, and he explained the theory of relativity to her.
“The upper half plans and thinks, while the lower half determines our fate. ” The fact that she was another man’s wife did not bother his upper half at all. And Sergey Konenkov saw everything: how Einstein drew caricatures of his sculptor, how Margarita turned on her charms, how they chatted and laughed. “Marriage was invented by some bore without a drop of imagination,” Einstein used to say.
Poor Elsa. She died a year later, in 1937. Einstein didn’t even go to the funeral. He was seized by a feeling.
The arrow had struck his heart. Work on the bust dragged on incredibly long. Konenkov would explode, cancel sessions, then return to that cursed head, and finally immortalized Einstein as a kind of simpering dandy. The relationship shows through.
A photograph of a star nebula with an autograph, a gift from Einstein to Konenkov, speaks volumes. They undoubtedly conversed on lofty topics. A woman stood between them, but something much greater brought these two great men together. It was God, and these were two very different understandings.
The physicist believed in simple laws that God created for the universe. Order and mathematical beauty. That God punishes and forgives, that He cares about people, Einstein did not believe. He said that the pursuit of science leads to the emergence of a special religious feeling.
Konenkov had long ago paid his tribute to human passions in full measure, to carousing, to wine, and to revolution. But he was strongly drawn to ancient sources of wisdom. He was a hero and a child of the Silver Age. Even before America, he traveled across all of Europe and reached Egypt.
The Pyramid of Cheops became the foundation of his own theological calculations. He believed that the program of the entire history of the human race was encoded in it, and for many years he searched for the keys to it. Einstein didn’t know how to care for his loved ones, but he considered it his duty to care for humanity as a whole. He helped scientists who, just like him, had fled Nazi Germany.
I am glad that you gave me this opportunity, and I was able to express myself as a human, a true European and a Jew. Physicist refugees told him that in Germany, they had split the Uranium nucleus. Now the Germans could create a new, incredibly powerful weapon: an atomic bomb. Einstein was a pacifist.
But when Hitler attacked Poland, Einstein changed his convictions. Since the splitting of the atom became possible thanks to Einstein’s formula, he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, in which he suggested that America beat the Germans and be the first in the world to create an atomic bomb. This was his choice, for he knew that a bomb is a bomb. Thus, the Manhattan Project was born.
They fooled around and made up a shared name for themselves. Almar. Albert and Margarita. Almar, so be it, let them be.
But Sergey Timofeevich was drawn to a star named Alcyone, the one that stands motionless over the Pyramid of Cheops. All ancient texts and data of modern astrophysics led him to the conclusion that this star is God the Father, the control center of the Universe. For ten years, he studied the Bible, the texts of Nostradamus, Newton’s mystical writings, and finally created his own chart of Earth’s history on ten pages. There are no analogues in world culture.
Drawing the divine plan of the ages, Konenkov stepped into the position of a prophet. After all, if Earth’s history is programmed and you hold the key to this program, then knowing the past means you can read the future. And some things began to be revealed. In thirty-nine, he sent Stalin a photocopy of the first page of his cosmogony.
In it, he warned Stalin about the start of the war with Germany no later than the spring and summer of forty-one. That was thirty-nine. And Konenkov predicted victory in May of forty-five to Stalin back in August of forty-one, when our army was bleeding and nothing gave hope. They drove to the resort town of Saranac Lake, where Einstein and Margarita met.
They had a wonderful time on Einstein’s yacht, while the world prepared for war. “My dear,” Margarita wrote to her husband, “our mice are at war. ” Margarita had pet rats; she never parted with them. “Kroshka and Snezhok have been in solitary twice, but nothing helps.
Seraya Tuchka is daydreaming as always, sitting on the roof. Sending big kisses, Margarita. Einstein sends you his regards. ”
Konenkov also wrote letters.
“My brother in Christ, Iosif Vissarionovich, there is a figure in the Holy Scriptures that fits you. You Bolsheviks, though atheists, are doing God’s work, which is peace and brotherhood. And you took your slogans from the Gospel, without even suspecting it. Now, during the second coming of Jesus Christ, he has soldiers.
The Red Army is with you. We will see each other soon, dear Iosif Vissarionovich. ” Did anyone else ever address the proletarian leader like that? Einstein rented a house at Saranac Lake.
Local owners remembered him being there with a woman they took for his wife and mother. But Einstein’s mother died before he even emigrated to America. Who was this other woman, so caring that she left a mark in local folklore about Einstein? Thanks to Einstein’s letters to Margarita, we can imagine how it was.
After all, imagination is more important than knowledge. “Dearest one, Margarita, I washed my hair by myself, but not as well as you used to do it. I am not as diligent as you. ” Margarita took care of Einstein, and she was allowed things Einstein’s unfortunate wives could only dream of.
She would wash his hair when she was with him. And when she was away, he would longingly write her letters and sonnets. Local residents said Einstein was there with a friend, not a wife, and that friend worked for Russian intelligence. The Soviet Union, after all, was interested in the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project.
Margarita was pragmatic. Unlike the two lovers who were geniuses seeking cosmic meanings, she lived in this world and worked for it. Did Mrs. Konenkova have an illicit mission?
Probably. What it consisted of, we can only guess. Direct evidence that Margarita was a Soviet agent exists only in the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, in his reference to the trusted agent “Lucas. ”
Margarita’s finest hour came during the war.
She became the executive secretary of the Russian War Relief committee, with Einstein’s backing. That’s where she unleashed the full force of her active nature. Five hundred people collaborated with her. Among them were Rachmaninoff, Michael Chekhov, Prince Chavchavadze, with chapters all across America.
She steered American public opinion toward sympathy for the Russians through concerts, film screenings, and meetings. She moved in the highest government circles. She had her own box at the Metropolitan Opera. One and a half million dollars was raised by the society for Russia under her leadership.
That is a huge sum. There is a theory that Einstein knew Margarita was cooperating with intelligence. Perhaps she told him that she had been assigned a task or was under pressure. But to admit she had been spying on him for nine years, that’s unlikely.
After all, Einstein believed that Margarita was attached to him. Otherwise, why would she have been seeing him for so many years? With an aging, sickly, crazy professor, as they called him. Why did she take care of him?
He didn’t possess any serious secrets. He wasn’t cleared for the Manhattan Project. The FBI decided that Einstein’s views were too radical and he was unreliable. Furthermore, Soviet intelligence had agents in the very heart of the atomic project, inside the laboratories.
Stalin learned of the American scientists’ progress even before the group’s leader, Oppenheimer. Perhaps the Soviet government wanted to lure Einstein through Margarita. He had already been invited before the war. Later, in 1946, he received an invitation signed by Academician Kapitsa, certainly at the behest of the Kremlin leader.
This would have been quite a successful propaganda move in the Cold War. But Einstein did not want to part with his freedom. “I am a convinced democrat. I am as much an opponent of Bolshevism as I am of fascism.
I stand against all dictatorships. ”
On July 6, 1945, Einstein was sailing on the lake. Shortly after America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Margarita visited Einstein. “My dear,” she wrote to her husband from Princeton, “how are you, my darling?
How are my little pets doing? My dear, the question of packing your sculptures worries me constantly. After all, time is flying, and we are still in the same place. We don’t even have passports in our hands.
Kisses, your Margarita. ”
Margarita was anxious. The FBI was investigating, and if caught, she faced the electric chair by law. After her meeting with Vice-Consul Mikhailov, which the FBI recorded, the ten-year romance with Margarita was doomed.
The ship from Seattle sailed to Vladivostok without stopping at any ports. It was taking the Konenkovs away. Perhaps, besides the sculptures, there was something else there, something not for customs. The Konenkovs were removed from the packing process.
Embassy staff did everything, and in great haste. Margarita didn’t even have time to quarantine her favorite pet rats. That was a grievous loss. “Dearest Margarita, you must have already covered most of your sea voyage.
And I hope that you and your health are doing well. Everything reminds me of you: the wool blanket, the dictionaries, the beautiful pipe we thought was lost, and many other things in my room, which has become a lonely nest. ” This was the third letter he had sent without receiving a single one in return. “I am sitting on my striped semi-circular sofa, watching my small world in the quiet night.
Today, I believe, must be New Year’s for you. Happiness in 1946. ”
“Dearest Margarita, I have been thinking for a long time about how I can solve this problem. You don’t get my letters, I don’t get yours, or neither of us gets anything at all.
But despite people talking about my sharp scientific mind, I am completely unable to solve this problem. I hope that you found everything in good condition in your beloved, rugged old homeland. ”
Six months later, he finally started receiving letters from her, but she couldn’t come. The mousetrap snapped shut.
It was a dead end. “Dearest Margarita, your letter of March 31st was in transit for exactly a month. I hope that you will find a new, joyful life in the old homeland to which you are so deeply attached. ”
The joy of meeting the Motherland was short-lived.
Konenkov walked out onto Red Square. The sermon did not take place. The brothers in Christ immediately escorted the prophet to the Lubyanka. It was only through Margarita’s efforts that he managed to get out of trouble, secure a studio on Pushkin Square, and get lucrative commissions.
Konenkov sculpted all the members of the Politburo during the period of “Kuberija. ” Among his own, he was an outsider and provoked fierce envy. Here is the ambiguous triumph of freedom in the famous Samson Agonistes. The hero broke his chains.
This is what Konenkov shows. But it is also a ruinous moment of destruction. That is what the Bible says. And the prophet fell silent.
But what about the free Einstein? He spoke often, calling for the creation of a world government that would establish control over atomic weapons and the armaments of all countries. That is why, in the late forties, he earned the reputation of a naive man. A star, a decorative figure.
He could no longer influence anything. Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prize to atone for his guilt. I find myself in a similar situation. He continued to be honored.
They even offered him the presidency of Israel. They couldn’t help but offer, and he couldn’t help but refuse. Shortly before his death, Einstein said: “Perhaps I will be forgiven. ”
All modern technology is based on Einstein’s discoveries.
Photocells, lasers, nuclear energy, fiber optics, space travel, and even semiconductors. But no unified field theory, no formula of God. “Dearest Margarita. Many believe that physical phenomena are incomprehensible.
This includes the rapid and complete agitation of life. In any case, it is very interesting what you wrote about lightening your hair. I was very happy to hear that. I wish you all the best.
”
In her final years, Margarita was bedridden. She outlived Konenkov by twenty-five years and Einstein by twenty-five years. She died in 1980 in slavish dependence on her own housekeeper. They say she simply starved her to death.
Thus passes the glory of the world. Perhaps only there, where the pendulum of earthly clocks does not swing, beyond the veil of time and space. “We will read Tolstoy, and when you get tired of it, you will lift your eyes full of tenderness to me, and I will see in them the reflection of God. You say that you love me, but that is not true.
I call upon Cupid to persuade you to be merciful to me. ”
