Sonja Kovalevsky

  SOFYA VASILEVNA KOVALEVSKAYA (SONJA KOVALEVSKY) WAS BORN in Moscow in 1850 and died in Stockholm in 1891. The city is mathematically unlucky, René Descartes having died there in 1650 of some dreadful bronchial infection. A woman of very considerable talents, both as a mathematician and as a writer, Sonja Kovalevsky lived within the confines of an impudent Russian melodrama, simultaneously its heroine and its victim.

Within that melodrama, there was wealth, privilege, and a luxurious estate; there was an overbearing father, a man whose moods could ruin the household’s peace; there was a most musical Mama, the daughter of a famous Russian astronomer; there was an older sister, Anya, first-born and so best-loved, and a younger brother, Feyda, the household Prince and heir, Big Anya and Little Feyda attracting dangerously unstable elective affinities from their parents; there was a strict, prim, and humorless governess, mad for decorum and discipline (of course there was); and there was that staple of every Russian melodrama, an eccentric but fun-loving uncle, who, as she relates in her memoir,  A Russian Childhood, told an eager unloved child fairy tales, arranged a chessboard to suit her pudgy fingers, and talked with great dreaminess about “squaring the circle, asymptotes, and other things that were unintelligible to me and yet seemed mysterious and at the same time deeply attractive.”

As a child, Sonja Kovalevsky acquired the rudiments of nineteenth-century mathematics by studying a textbook written by yet another Russian figure scuttling in from the theater wings of time, a Professor Tyrtov, who just happened to be a landowner, a man of means, and a neighbor, his conviction that women were incapable of mastering mathematics dissolving in helpless admiration as the shy but determined Sonja Kovalevsky deftly sorted through the complicated formulae of his textbook and solved the problems that it presented. Having discovered her talent, Tyrtov persuaded her father that she must be allowed to continue her education, Sonja Kovalevsky becoming their communal ward, a little innocent being transferred from the care of one well-meaning wise guardian to another.

 For all that, her father’s assent required four years before it was fully forthcoming, but in the end, and with the sense that he had done a manful but difficult thing, he allowed Sonja Kovalevsky to study analytic geometry and the calculus in Saint Petersburg. She was tutored, of course, and chaperoned, and kept cozy, comfortable, and captive, the distance in her life from the ordinary world, in which men freely took up their studies in large, noisy, boisterous groups, serving only to inflame the intensity of her desires, her pitiful pained ardor.

No one doubted that Sonja Kovalevsky was remarkable—not her Russian tutors, at any rate. And no one doubted that she deserved a university education. But Russian universities were closed to women. If Sonja Kovalevsky could not study at home, she would have to study abroad. In nineteenth-century Russia, as in contemporary Islam, an unmarried woman’s freedom to travel was almost as difficult to obtain as her freedom to study, if only because her latent erotic power was considered so dangerously unstable a force that any father would be made uneasy by the thought of his darling daughter reclining with easy indolence against the cushions of the international sleeper departing Saint Petersburg every evening, her decorously shielded limbs a provocation to plump Russian businessmen, military officers, card sharks, land-owners, bureaucrats, Swiss officials, and even the ministers of various tea and pastry wagons.

A woman sitting alone and—of all things!—reading a treatise on mathematics was widely regarded among even educated men as an invitation to debauchery. Anna Karenina had spent a good deal of time traveling alone on the night-sleeper from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, after all, and even though she was a married woman, no one could miss the associative clack of trains, travel, and treachery.

What Sonja Kovalevsky might have done abroad while living alone and doing as she pleased was an exercise in her family’s already agitated erotic imagination. The solution was a masterpiece of contrivance: an arranged marriage to one  Vladimir Kovalesky, a biologist by training, a paleontologist in prospect, and an ardent admirer of Charles Darwin. By surrendering her liberty, Sonja Kovalevsky gained her freedom. She decamped for Heidelberg, a beautiful university town in the nineteenth century, and today still lovely, graceful and gabled.

Her professors’ glowing testimonials enabled her to meet  Karl Weierstrass, one of the eminences of the German mathematical academy. Kindly, rumpled, and disheveled, Weierstrass challenged Sonja Kovalevsky with a set of problems he had prepared for his advanced students, and when she had solved them with a positively alarming degree of ease, determined generously that her “personality was [strong enough] to offer the necessary guarantees” for advanced training. To the uncles she had already acquired, Sonja Kovalevsky added a powerful new uncle, so that she appeared in European mathematical circles as the glowing star at the center of an avuncular galaxy.

Thereafter, her short life was consumed by her ardent nature. The contrived and pathetic marriage into which she had entered as a matter of convenience made demands of its own, and both she and Vladimir Kovalesky discovered to their surprise that an arrangement to which neither was committed became one in which both were consumed.

After four years in Heidelberg, the couple returned to Saint Petersburg, where Sonja Kovalevsky discovered almost at once that a society unwilling to allow her an education was equally unwilling to afford her a position. She gave birth to a daughter, whom she seemed equally to have adored and to have neglected. She wrote for various theatrical and literary publications; she started a novel. Persuaded like so many other talented women that her gifts were fungible, she and her husband embarked on a number of business schemes, each one a notable, even a spectacular, failure, disasters accumulating until their marriage dissolved under the strain.

 Vladimir Kovalesky took his own life in 1883.

It can hardly be said that Sonja Kovalesky lived a life without honors—only that she lived it without luck. Decamping from Saint Petersburg for Paris, where her sister was already making the acquaintance of various revolutionary bohemians, men whose commitment to violence was offset by their indifference to work, she reentered the mathematical scene, and with that special gift she had for attracting uncles, caught the eye of  Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a student of the great Weierstrass, and a powerful and determined mathematician in his own right. Mittag-Leffler became her last champion, in the end persuading the University of Stockholm to award her a probationary position, one of those awkward arrangements so familiar in academic life in which every requirement except decency is satisfied.

She continued to work; she achieved many notable results in the theory of ordinary and partial differential equations, and in 1888, she received the Prix Bordin from the French Academy of Science. Like the Russians, the French were prepared to honor achievement without ever making it possible. Her position in Stockholm was made permanent; and she was elected to the Russian Academy of Science. Her hope that as a member of the Academy she might be rewarded by an academic position was not fulfilled, circumstances that she met with a characteristic mixture of contempt and resignation. In 1891, she died quite suddenly after suffering from pneumonia, and now survives as a face engraved on a Russian postage stamp, and a name attached to a crater on the far side of the moon.

All this belongs, I suppose, to the universal history of sadness; but in her autobiography, A Russian Childhood, Sonja Kovalevsky recalls with some sense of wonder an early memory.

 She was eleven. Her bedroom required wallpaper, and for reasons that even Sonja Kovalevsky cannot explain, the walls were covered with notes and scribbles from a calculus text owned by her military-minded father. Her uncle had already introduced her to mathematics, but not to higher mathematics or the formulas of the calculus.

“I noticed certain things,” she wrote, “that I had already heard mentioned by uncle. It amused me to examine these sheets of hieroglyphics whose meaning escaped me completely but which, I felt, must signify something very wise and interesting.”

But, really, isn’t this is how we all are, much impressed by things we do not understand and hoping that they represent something very wise and interesting?

HUMAN NATURE

David Berlinski