T. I. Rainov on A. S. Pushkin and Scientific Creativity (In Commemoration of the 225th Anniversary of the Poet’s Birth)

On the 17th 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.