![]() ![]() If you can’t do something you wanted to do, then you will be forgiven, but if you don’t want to try to do anything, you will not be forgiven. Vavilov saw the contours of a different kind of revolution - one no one else could envision, not in Russia and not anywhere in the world.ĭo what you can. Half a million peasants perished that winter as the aristocracy feasted on imported delicacies from Europe - grim structural inequality that became the ignition spark for the long-seething people’s revolution a quarter century later. Vavilov’s father had spent his life rising from poverty and now had a comfortable life as a merchant, so the family was protected from the worst of the famine - but from his precarious island of comfort, the boy watched the ocean of suffering and sorrowed. All the tsar could do was offer his subjects “famine bread” - loaves made of milled husks, bark, weeds, and moss, rationed out in the freezing cold. When Nikolai himself was four, the early arrival of winter decimated crops all over the country, sending millions into starvation. He had heard his father’s stories of growing up in poverty and constant hunger due to crop failures. The botanist, geneticist, and explorer Nikolai Vavilov (November 25, 1887–January 26, 1943) was still a boy when he arrived at his dream of ending famine. While the physicist Sergei Vavilov was presiding over Stalin’s Academy of Sciences and spearheading the Soviet atomic bomb project, his idealistic older brother was laboring at something of orthogonal impact on humanity - a way to end an elemental form of suffering that has haunted our species since its dawn. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.) Tomato, or Love-Apple, from Elizabeth Blackwell’s pioneering 1737 encyclopedia of medicinal plants. This magic was made possible by a visionary of science who set out to save humanity and died for his values the year my grandmother turned nine. ![]() ![]() Last summer’s seeds are already growing as I write. So it is that, year after year, my grandmother refined her tomatoes into a cornucopia of unparalleled sweetness and perfection. Each August, we did something that felt to me like partaking of magic - we would choose the sweetest, most succulent tomatoes from the vine, cut them open, carefully extract the seeds, and lay them out on newspaper to dry, knowing that they would become next spring’s seedlings and, with nothing more than sunlight and water, next summer’s bright red orbs of delight. I spent large swaths of my childhood by my grandmother’s side in rural Bulgaria as she tended to her subsistence garden, tilling and planting, watering and weeding. ![]()
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