Georg von Charasoff 11
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allowed to attend lectures but could not take any exams (women were only
accepted as regular students at the University of Heidelberg from 1900 onwards). It
is very likely, of course, that Charasoff knew both Anna Seldovic and Ladislaus
von Studnicki-Gisbert from his student days in Heidelberg.
In Zurich, Charasoff appears to have led the life of an independent private
scholar. Although his varying addresses are all close to the University and the
central library, he did not enrol as a regular student before 1910. There is some
evidence that Charasoff took a deep interest in Tolstoyanism, studying carefully
Tolstoy’s works and exchanging several letters, between 1902 and 1908, with
Vladimir Chertkov, the major representative of the Tolstoyan movement in England
(see Charasoff’s letters in the Chertkov Papers at RGALI, Moscow). However, in
his first years in Zurich, his main intellectual preoccupation still seems to have been
mathematics. This can be inferred from a letter he sent to the mathematician David
Hilbert of the University of Göttingen on 10 May 1904, which has been preserved
in the Hilbert Papers. In this letter, Charasoff responded to Hilbert’s commentary
on a set of papers which he had sent him earlier, and which Hilbert had apparently
returned with the remark that Charasoff’s main results had already been proved by
Hermann Minkowski. Charasoff fully accepted Hilbert’s judgement, noting that
‘from your assessment I now realise that I was apparently not sufficiently familiar with
all the contributions of Minkowski’ (Nachlass David Hilbert, Code MS Hilbert 59,
Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen). In spite of this set-back, Charasoff
seems to have continued his mathematical studies; in the summer term 1905 he
enrolled as an ‘Auditor’ at the University of Zurich for the lecture on ‘Elliptische
Funktionen’ (Elliptic functions) by Professor Heinrich Burkhardt.
15
Interestingly,
at this very time Burkhardt was one of the two examiners of Albert Einstein’s
inaugural dissertation Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen, which
Einstein had submitted on 30 April 1905. It seems likely, therefore, that
Einstein’s seminal contribution may have caught Charasoff’s attention very early
on through conversations on mathematics and physics which he surely had with
Burkhardt.
There are only few other traces of Charasoff’s personal life and intellectual
preoccupations in this period. In 1904, he apparently made a comment during a
lecture on ‘Scientific socialism and religion’ that Georgij Plekhanov had delivered
in Zurich. This is documented in Plekhanov’s ‘Notes during the discussion of the
report’, among which there is inter alia the following remark of Plekhanov on
‘G. Kharazov’s bewilderment’: ‘If we are to agree with him, we must admit that the
question of religion is finished. The existence of God cannot be proved. He
considers my ideas common to all people. Very glad!’ (Plekhanov 1976: 61).
An important event in Charasoff’s personal life must also have occurred in this
period: his first wife, Marie Seldovic, must have died sometime between 1904 and
1906. Her death is registered in official documents of 1919, which concern the
Charasoff children and which have been preserved in the municipal archive in Zurich
(Vormundschaftsakten ‘Kinder Charasoff’, Stadtarchiv Zürich). In these documents
neither the exact date nor the circumstances of her death are given, but since Lily was
born in December 1903 and Charasoff publicly showed up with a girlfriend in spring
1907 (see below), it must have occurred in the interim period from 1904 to 1906.
Around 1904-05, and in parallel to his mathematical studies, Charasoff also
began to study the works of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk and Walras. In the Preface of
Das System des Marxismus, dated December 1909, he stated that he had only
become familiar with those works ‘in the course of the last four years’. Charasoff
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12
History of Economics Review
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must have studied the works of the classical political economists and of Marx much
earlier, because he also states in his Preface that he had developed the main ideas of
his treatise, including the notion of a ‘production series’, long before he had read
the works of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. It is also clear, from references in his
books, that he was acquainted with the contemporary literature on Marx’s
economic theory, including Tugan-Baranovsky (1905) and Bortkiewicz (1906-07).
In January 1907 Charasoff submitted a manuscript on Marx’s theory of value
and distribution, via Otto Buek, to Karl Kautsky, the editor of the journal Die
Neue Zeit. Kautsky rejected the manuscript and returned it to Buek, who
forwarded the rejection letter to Charasoff. Apparently, Buek was involved
because he had been responsible for producing a German translation of
Charasoff’s manuscript. Neither the manuscript and submission letter nor
Kautsky’s rejection letter is extant, but a letter from Georg von Charasoff to Karl
Kautsky of 7 February 1907 has been preserved in the Kautsky Papers
(Correspondence D VII 66, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam).
In this letter Charasoff informed Kautsky that he did not consider the reasons
which the latter had given for his rejection of the paper convincing and that he
was keen to read a more detailed criticism of his views. (For a more detailed
discussion of the Charasoff–Kautsky correspondence, see Mori 2007). Since the
manuscript is not extant, it is unclear which of the concepts and ideas from his
later books were contained already in Charasoff’s paper, which – had it been
accepted by Kautsky – would have appeared almost simultaneously with von
Bortkiewicz’s famous two papers (1906-7, 1907; see also 1952 [1906-7]).
In the summer term 1907 Charasoff enrolled as an ‘Auditor’ at the University
of Zurich again, this time in order to attend a four-hour lecture on ‘Psychiatrische
Klinik’ (Clinical psychiatry) by Professor Eugen Bleuler.
16
As we shall see below
(in Section 12), Charasoff in fact took a keen interest in psychoanalysis and
seems to have studied Sigmund Freud’s and C.G. Jung’s writings very carefully.
In June and July 1907 he stayed for a cure treatment in the ‘Kur- und Heilanstalt
Schloss Marbach am Untersee (Bodensee)’, for the most part in the company of
his friend Otto Buek. This can be inferred from the correspondence of Lidija
Petrowna Kotschetkowa, who refers to Charasoff repeatedly in some of her letters
to her husband, the anarchist, publicist and medical practitioner to the poor, Fritz
Brupbacher. In Kotschetkowa’s account, the group of cure guests at ‘Schloss
Marbach’ consisted partly of medium-ranked and high-ranked nobility from
Russia and Western Europe (‘The Duke of Parma with his entourage, etc. etc.’),
but also of social revolutionaries from Russia, like Leonid Schisko and Vera
Figner.
17
Kotschetkowa commented on Charasoff’s personality in several letters.
She was highly critical of him, and strongly disapproved of his manners and
conversation:
A conceitedness, self-satisfaction and smugness which I have elsewhere
encountered only in Bulgarians. All the time at the dinner table he talks about
great things – the making of bombs, killings of anarchists, maltreatments in
the German army, catholic religion, etc. etc. – and all this in a rather loud
voice, and of course in German, among Germans and Catholics. … He fails to
notice that nobody is interested in his conversation and that his style of
arguing is simply unpleasant. He is not a wise man and I really regret that he
does not get his nerves cured by Veraguth.
18
(Kotschetkowa to Brupbacher,
16 July 1907, Brupbacher Papers MFC 37, Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv)
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