Svetlana and Michael

About the Book

The lead theme of the book is revealed by the words „beauty once seen is never lost”. Story develops against the grandeur of the old imperial Russia providing a dramatic contrast to the woes and poverty of the present day Russia destroyed by over seventy years of social experiment known as communism. Life in Moscow today resembles the days of Al Capone in Chicago at the onset of the previous century. Determined to understand this enigmatic country author embarks on the course of seeking the reasons and manifestations of the ruthless human behavior that dominates this eleven time zones empire, where Shakespearean “to be or not to be” is converted to a more pedestrian statement “to survive or to perish”. The story is told in three languages: English, Russian and Polish.

About the Author

The author graduated from the Nowodworski High School of Krakow, in which Joseph Conrad was a student a century ago. Next he studied Theoretical Physics at the prestigious Jagiellonian University established by king Jagiello in 1364 in Krakow, Poland (it s the same school where Copernicus was a student). Most of his formative years he lived in Poland and then he left for America, where he joined California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Some years later he worked as a university professor at various schools across the United States. He also taught in Germany, Russia, China, Slovenia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia. During his academic carrier he became a Fulbright Fellow and a recipient of a coveted Lady Davies science award given by the Government of Israel. For several years he was a consultant to NASA while he participated in the Cassini Mission to Saturn at the mission command post in Jet Propulsion Laboratory - California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. In 1970 he was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University in England. His office there was located in the same college, where the great Isaac Newton once worked. Although he claims to be a domestic type of man, yet he notoriously likes to travel to Mexico, Russia, Poland, and the Balkans – and above all – to Moscow and Akademgorodok (meaning "Academic Village" for the young talented Russian scientists). This unique village is located near the city of Tomsk in the remote forests of Siberia.