Inga Legasova’s reminisces
My dad, who was not yet my dad, saw my mother, who then still was neither mine, nor someone else’s mother at all, walking out of the Institute building, where they both were acquiring a serious profession, and said loudly to everyone around: "That's the girl I want to see the mother of my children." He pointed his finger at her in a very rude way, though he came from a good family. My mother was very much embarrassed, for she was rather shy, but she was smart enough to laugh at my father's words as if they were a witty joke.
But dad was a decisive person and never talk to the winds, so after the time allotted by nature, my mother, who had already become my mother by that time, took me to my father, who, after graduating from alma mater, refused to get a Moscow registration in his parents' apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt and voluntarily took on a direction to a Siberian city far from the capital to a large chemical plant.
Dad was given a huge apartment, since there were a lot of buildings with large apartments in that city, but there were only a few people who wanted to work there. But before my mother arrived, my father had managed to buy only a folding couch, a kitchen table, and eight stools in this mansion, on which his friends, who turned out to be the pride of the Soviet chemical industry over the years, and from whom I later learned the story of my parents' acquaintance, chattered every evening about the prospects for the development of Soviet science. Since at night on the couch, my parents tried to work on a project called "my brother", they had been putting me to sleep in a large suitcase on my mother's beautiful skirts and blouses, which she sewed for herself.
They called me Molecule, and for quite a long time I answered to this name. And when I started taking my first steps, my mother took into the habit of sewing the same dresses for herself and me. So I grew up with a sincere sense of the fact that mom and daughter should wear the same clothes.
When dad was transferred back to Moscow to the first most important Research Institute in his field, my mother, who already had worked as an assistant professor and taught the basics of general chemistry to students, and at the same time to my brother and me, insisted that dad explode things from time to time in his laboratory not just for the sake of scientific curiosity, but prepared his dissertation on everything that he had exploded there.
In order he wouldn't be bored to defend himself alone, she defended herself a little earlier, showing him how easy it is to do it. After the first dissertation, the second one passed easily under my mother's vigilant, interested attention.
She delved into everything that my father did at work, got him special books on chemistry: the old ones, as well as completely new ones that had just been published, subscribed him to all the professional journals published at that time, like him, reflected on the tasks that faced him, and often offered him original solutions, which he masterfully thought up, refined and turned into an incredible technical victory and at the same time into another State Prize for his entire research team.
After her doctoral degree, my mother began to instill my father that since he is seriously passionate about science and demonstrates clear practical results of his research, it is necessary not only to carefully describe them in our and foreign scientific literature, but also to find them really practical application. This is what dad began to do successfully, which resulted in new State Prizes, a corresponding membership and a full membership in the Academy of Sciences. Dad used to say that mother made him an academician, all the time guiding him with her gentle hand which way to go.
In the meantime, my mother somehow managed to take care of us, her children, without fuss. Moreover, her lessons were absolutely unobtrusive and it seemed to my brother and me that we ourselves knew what to do, and not because my mother gave us hints. Her delicacy was truly diplomatic. Any dispute had been coming to an end, in her quiet presence. I can't even imagine how she managed the department at the university with such innate delicacy.
Then my brother and I became mom and dad ourselves, making my mom a grandmother for two years in a row. And she played the role of a grandmother in an extraordinary way. She showed our sons chemical experiments in the kitchen and in the bathroom, in her test tubes, one substance, combining with another, had been turning into a completely different one. And the children stared at their grandmother's magic and learned. She knew how to teach masterfully. Everything that she had learned in her life, she gave to others with pleasure. The title of professor was completely deserved by her, because the word "professor" means "preacher of knowledge". In the family we have always considered mother to be weak, feminine, soft. But the strength of her spirit and character was shown after father’s death, when she had to resist the unjust slander that poured down on him, already passed away from his life.
My mother set a goal - to achieve justice and preserve the memory of her extraordinarily talented husband. She wrote a lot of articles about his life, two books, and achieved the title of Hero of Russia posthumously. Thanks to my mother, the Moscow school, which my father graduated from with a gold medal, now bears his name. My mother made the perpetuation of my father's memory a natural task for us - his children and grandchildren. Therefore, in Tula, where he was born, and in Kursk, where he began to study at school, and in the Mendeleev Institute, which my mother and father graduated from, and in Moscow State University, where he had led the department, and in his school there are bronze busts of him. And we erected a monument to him in the courtyard of his school, first of all, because my mother wanted it so. And at the Novodevichy cemetery, above my father and now above my mother, there is a statue of Grieving Russia, an image invented and named by my mother. And as sculptors, my mother herself chose a dynasty of extremely talented artists - Nikolai Alexandrovich Selivanov and his son Vasily Nikolaevich Selivanov.
Love. This is the energy that my mother gave to all her loved ones all her life. We have grown up on this energy, we have been saturated with this energy, and we are trying to give this energy to others. It wasn’t common in our family to talk about love. And I'm so sorry that I didn't tell you every day, mommy: "I love you."
Margarita Legasova
Source: Inga Legasova’s Facebook
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