This story starts in an unusual way. To end up in Stockholm at the Nobel Prize ceremony, we have to start from Leningrad during the blockade. There are fires, a fight for survival, and sirens. Trams are forever frozen in the tracks. Bombs fall; dead lie on the streets piled on top of each other like logs. The logs to heat flats are long gone; books and furniture are used to feed fires. There are few figures on the street, pale and thin as ghosts. These are the people who, stranded in the cold, starving city, walk to a river to get drinking water from a hole drilled in the ice. A child with a serious, grown-up look on his face pulls a string with a sled, topped by a bucket. Those who still are able to walk bring life to those who have no more strength to rise from the bed.

     A blockade survivor, Evgenii Belodubrovsky, a Russian archivist and historian of literature, remembers that the first word he read once he learned the alphabet was the word “Nobel” written in large letters on the building where he and his family lived. Expanding his business to Russia, the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, had several factories in Saint Petersburg. In the 1910’s, caring about the welfare of his employees and shareholders, Nobel installed in their homes water-pipes that did not freeze when low temperatures frost-bit the city. Thanks to this magical plumbing, during the blockade, Belodubrovsky’s mother did not have to make her way through icy, slippery roads to a river for water. The inhabitants of the lucky home were able to provide water to their neighbors. As Belodubrovsky says, “Those who assist others have better chances of survival.”

     At the end of the eighties, remembering Nobel’s good deeds, Belodubrovsky sent a letter to the president of the Nobel committee, Baron Stig Ramel. His idea was to publish a book in Russian that would hold all the lectures of the Nobel laureates in literature. “Considering that my country and I, at this historical stage, are starting a new life after the bashful fall of the Iron Curtain, I would like to collect and print the thoughts of outstanding writers and poets who take us to different moral heights, so that the return to the oppressive, totalitarian regime of the past would not be possible.”

     And to this letter came the response. And then the required materials were mailed from Sweden to Saint Petersburg. And some months later, the invitation to visit the Nobel ceremony followed. We obtained the chance to interview Belodubrovsky about the ceremony he saw with his eyes in December 2003 in Stockholm.

Evgenii Belodubrovsky: The ceremony is still held much in the same way as it was held on the 10th of December, the anniversary of the Nobel’s death, in 1901. Nothing departs from the traditional ritual. The laureates with their relatives and friends, accompanied by envoys of their countries (the prize is given not only to an individual, but also to his/her homeland, and in case of literature, to the language) and ministers sit together at the King’s table. The other 1,700 guests are given place at tables according to the information they submit in their reply to the invitation (the languages you speak, your profession, et cetera). Spouses, as Nobel willed, sit separately.

     The menu of the celebratory dinner is decided by the Nobel Committee way in advance and is fantastically rich and diverse. Dinnerware is beautiful; waiters stand behind your back, ready to pour wine upon request. The men in frocks look like Antarctic penguins, especially when they all turn toward the King or a Queen. Women, in all their unmanageable glory, can wear whatever they want.

     The Russians grouped around Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg and an academic Abrikosov, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this year. Ginzburg was surrounded by Moscovites; Abrikosov sat by his colleagues and pupils, who, like him, live and work outside of Russia. I was not invited as a Ginzburg’s guest, so I was all by myself, enjoying the comfort of the well-known Grand Hotel, where the Nobel laureates stayed.

     Abrikosov was not socializing with people from Russia. Moreover, it looked to me that he was carefully avoiding all the Russians who were with Ginzburg. It did not cause any trouble, even though this deliberate alienation looked somewhat peculiar. No matter that Ginzburg thinks of himself as a Russian, and Abrikosov, after more than a decade spent in the U.S., considers himself an American, all of us were on the neutral territory of Sweden… And we were present at the celebration of the achievements of the worldly Russian science and spiritual union.

     I was able to talk to Ginzburg. We chatted about his colleagues: Kapitza, Landau (late Lev Landau is a Russian physicist, who received the Nobel prize in 1962 and who had been working together with Ginzburg; their work resulted in what is known in physics as the Ginzburg-Landau theory - MM), Andrei Saharov and others.

Margarita Meklina: I would like to provide our readers with short biographical information on the recent Nobel Laureates, the Russians Vitaly Ginzburg and Alexei Abrikosov. Vitaly Ginzburg, 87, a theoretical physicist and astrophysicist and a co-recipient of the Nobel prize with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony James Leggett “for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids” (they will split $1.3 million in the prize money), was born in Moscow, in 1916. His parents married when his father was 51 and his mother was 28. Ginzburg’s mother died from typhoid when Vitaly was only four years old. He studied at the Moscow State University, from which he graduated in 1938. Later he worked at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute. Now he lives in Moscow; he is a colorful person who has strong opinions.

     When another Russian Nobel laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, released a “historical” book in which he expressed his anti-Semitic views, Ginzburg urged the Russian Jewish Congress to publish a monograph that would refute many of Solzhenitzyn’s statements. Another example of Ginzburg’s non-conformism: in a recent interview to the Radio Svoboda, Ginzberg noticed the discrimination of women scientists in the Russian Academy of Sciences (“there are not so many of them there…”).

Alexei Abrikosov, 75, was born in 1928 in Moscow, and received his doctor’s degree in physics in 1951 at the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow. After moving to the U.S. in 1991, he retained dual Russian and American citizenship and began working as an honorary researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. However, the prize was given for the work he did while in the Soviet Union in the 1950’s. Both Ginzburg and Abrikosov note, Abrikosov more bitterly, that their achievements in physics should have been recognized decades ago. However, during the time of their major discoveries, Western scientists were not so well aware of them because of the Cold War.

Evgeny Belodubrovsky: As far as I know, physicists are the elite among the laureates of the Nobel Prize. And this tradition has held true since December of 1901, from the time when the first Nobel laureate was announced. This was Wilhelm Roentgen who discovered X-rays in 1870. It does not matter that Nobel himself was a chemist. Even when Lord Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand’s first Nobel Prize winner, was awarded the prize in chemistry in 1908, everybody knew that he actually was a physicist who belonged to the Royal Physics Society. This year was no different. Everybody cared about the physics laureates, not the literature laureates. And nobody expected that after the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 2000 to the Russian Zhores Alferov, the winners would be Russians again.

     You ask me about my impressions… I think that a coat and tails, with its swallow tail, completely changes the appearance of a person. Ginzburg usually dresses simply. He wears a jacket and a baseball cap so that he looks like an aficionado of the “Spartak,” a Russian soccer team. In front of King Carl XVI Gustav, he, similar to other laureates, looked very solemn, very official. That’s why the next morning it was funny to watch the laureates waiting in line to the Grand Hotel’s reception to return their rented pretentious costumes…

Margarita Meklina: Which speeches did you remember? And what about J.M. Coetzee, the current Nobel laureate in literature, who emigrated from South Africa to Australia, but now teaches in the U.S.? I heard that he is very reclusive; there were even rumors that he wouldn’t come to the ceremony at all…

Evgenii Belodubrovsky: I remember the speech of the professor of the Sweden Academy who was presenting the laureates in medical science to the king and a general public. Certain points of his talk were illustrated with musical fragments, which, under his guidance, were played by trumpeters with red bows over the shoulder, seated under the ceiling of the City Hall…

     Coetzee also gave a very serious, very ironic speech, half of which I couldn’t hear because of a professor of psychology who sat, wheezing, close to me. Coetzee looks like a typical academician, very disciplined and straight as a stick… He is very precise, very sober, and his glance is piercing and sharp… I felt that close to him I needed to be silent, even though somebody pointed at me and said to him that I’m from the city of Dostoevsky… And Dostoevsky is the hero of one of his novels, The Master of Petersburg… Coetzee waved at me and smiled, and it was one of the most luminous smiles I’ve ever seen in my life.

Margarita Meklina: Please tell us about your book with the speeches of the Nobel Prize laureates in literature… Did you get in contact with the relatives of Alfred Nobel?

Evgenii Belodubrovsky: The Nobel family’s relatives are disseminated throughout the world. Alfred Nobel himself did not have children, but his brothers and uncles did. At the ceremony of 1997, among the guests there were approximately ten people with the last name “Nobel”; this time, there were fewer…

     As for the book itself… the uniqueness of this undertaking is that all the translations were mostly done from the language in which they were written originally by the authors… The photos of the laureates, as well as the texts, were lifted from the yearly publications “Les Prix Nobel. 1901-2001.” The most important thing is that the Nobel Committee gave us a copyright, without asking for any compensation in return.

     Luck followed me. The executive director of the Nobel Foundation is Mr. Michael Sulman, an academic in the Sweden Academy, who, being a son of the ambassador of Sweden to the USSR, had spent his childhood and youth in Moscow. He speaks perfect Russian and he knows our life… His grandfather, Mr. Ragnar Sulman, was an engineer-chemist, a companion-in-arms and biographer of Alfred Nobel. Mr. Ragnar Sulman was also an executor of Alfred Nobel’s will, making sure that the idea of Alfred Nobel was realized. So, Michael Sulman, a grandson of Ragnar Sulman, was my biggest helper, and by his personal invitation I was able to visit the Nobel ceremonies three times.

Margarita Meklina: I wish Evgenii Belodubrovsky, who continues to live in Sankt-Petersburg, success with the publication of the second, updated edition of the Nobel Prize speeches. In conclusion, I would like to add a little episode that touched me, even though Evgenii himself was reluctant to tell me about it…

     They say that the former Russian president Yeltsin decided to make Russia a capitalist society after seeing an American supermarket with shelves full of produce. And now imagine an adult who spent a childhood in Leningrad during the blockade… a person who saw death from starvation during World War II, a Russian intellectual who has experienced bread lines during the nineties, when the Communism was collapsing… It was hard for him to see, at the Nobel ceremony dinner, the abundance of food… Evgenii Belodubrovsky is full of projects – he anchors a cultural program on Russian TV, he contributes his research and prose to numerous Russian publications, he is preparing for publication some letters of the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov – however, very often it’s hard for an educated person living in Russia to generate a decent income and to feed himself well. And maybe spending a childhood during the blockade was the reason… But at the celebration he saw crumbs from a cake on the table and started, under shrill glances of his neighbors, proper ladies and gentlemen in fashionable gowns, to pick them up so that no food would be wasted… This was his habit during and after the war. When he was questioned, he had to explain, and others did understand. With this little scene we would like to end the story about the Nobel Prize Committee and about a little boy who was saved with the water from Nobel’s pipes and who later was invited by the Nobel Committee to Stockholm.