Cora Landau-Drobantseva. Academician Landau. How We Lived. Memories

Concordia Terentyevna Landau, wife of the brilliant physicist Lev Landau, began writing her memoirs after her husband's death in 1968 and worked on them for over ten years. The result was three substantial volumes. Bound and supplemented with photographs, they circulated for a time in samizdat form among physicists, but soon almost all copies were destroyed by academics and their wives, who were sanctimoniously outraged by this frank text, the shocking details of the personal lives of great Soviet minds, and the unflattering assessments of the "untouchables." But "manuscripts don't burn," and the publication of Concordia Landau's memoirs in book form is further proof of this.