Ending.
Start from № 14 from 21.04.2016, № 15 from 28.04.2016, № 16 from 12.05.2016, № 17 from 19.05.2016
... That day late autumn has rented first embroidered shirts from gardens and groves. Quietly let down maple leaves in the institutes park. Here and students there rake it off to drift and burned. Smoke stretched to the ground and air become permeated with the smell of strong sadness.
But Evgen wasn’t confused. There was an hour before defense of a thesis To protect and he was walking among the trees thinking of his presentation. Legs were about to give up. It was hard to focus. The most needed thoughts were like burning from the high heat which fevered all his body.
They appeared only when the professor Ogievskii, which chaired the meeting, gave him the word. Evgen spoke briefly, but his presentation impressed even those who didn’t know about his disease.
Only the person who is truly obsessed with science could explain his thoughts in such a passionate and easy way. But suddenly Viktorovsky stopped and grabbed the edge of the board with both hands. The audience could see that the candidate for a degree was about to fall. But it only seemed so since Eugene put the chalk back, came to the department commission and was immediately answering the questions of the members of Academic Council.
Smohorzhevsky was the first to speak. He was reading the thesis review. It consisted of the thoughts of the scientist about the most important theoretic features of Eugene’s work. He seldom came to blackboard to illustrate them in examples. Then he wrapped the pages in a tube and spoke, not looking at them:
“So”, he turned to the members of Academic Council, “What Victor has done is hard to estimate. His thesis opens a new page in Mathematics. And, probably, a lot of time will be needed to estimate it in a proper way as it was in case with Galoise. And only some time ago we really could not neither ask nor answer a lot of questions about theory of differential equations. And particularly those where traditional methods along with Caratheodory’s method were useless. Now we no longer have such a problem. Viktorovsky has lead the theory of generalized solutions to its end. His method makes it possible to build them extreme. And before him nobody has ever managed to do it... So I am deeply convinced that Viktorovsky’s thesis fully meets the requirements needed for doctoral work. Yes, yes. You did not misheard, I said doctoral. And, therefore, I suggest to award the candidate for a degree with a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences degree.
Eugene did not hear any applause or exclamations, which were usual in case with Professor Smohorzhevsky. His words about Galoise totally blew Eugene’s mind. "Oh, great, immortal Galoise! If only I could do the tenth, hundredth of what you had given to descendants. And he will be happy if even one of his theorem ever will help humanity."
Berezansky was the second to speak. He also praised the achievements of theoretical thesis and pointed out so-called minor questions, with which Viktorovsky ended his speech.
“But only think of those questions!” he continued. “Take, for example, the questions raised by Vallee Poussin or Backstein. Just look how brilliantly Viktorovsky answered them. Perron’s method spreading? A generalization of Fukuhara’s theorem? Finally, I would consider Kneser-Tikhonov’s theorem generalizing to be classical... Needless to say, Viktorovskiy here proved that he is a talented mathematician.
Both Professor Berezansky and unofficial opponents supported Smohorzhevsky’s suggestion to award Viktorovsky with a PhD degree in mathematics.
Finally professor Remez asked for a word. He was speaking for a long time but members of the Academic Council were listening to every single word of him since he was both Viktorovsky’s supervisor and a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He said Viktorovsky’s thesis statement was a large cycle of original research related to one problem: building a theory of integral curves for field areas, characterized as explosive in a very general sense. He also added that these studies could be attributed to the set-theoretic direction of the modern theory of differential equations, which are increasingly attracting the attention of many mathematicians in the world.
“In reality”, said Eugene Yakovych, “Set-theoretic direction in the theory of differential equations is not only abstract theoretical value. It fully preserves its relevance and credibility of program statements of Rene Baire who was one of the great founders of the theory of functions of a real variable. Remember what he wrote in the preface to his famous lectures on discontinuous functions... So, I think”, continued Remez, “Each of the eight chapters of Viktorovsky’s thesis, if even taken separately, may be considered more than sufficient to complete the thesis for PhD degree Science. In general, it surpasses even doctoral level...
4
There had to be snow already, however it didn’t. Fogs and cold rains were appearing over Kyiv, near Shevchenko hamlet. Winds dispersed slush already before the blizzard and were breaking in closed windows of dull houses.
They caught up Viktorovsky as well. But Eugene reacted like if he didn’t heard it at all. Nothing on earth no longer worried him. Nothing could add strength. He said goodbye to everything and everyone, as one says goodbye when he leaves for a long, long way with no intentions of coming back. He only hasn’t said goodbye to the world of his abstractions yet. Exhausted from pain, from the incredible thirst, he was now fighting for every moment of life to devote himself to just conceived but not yet proven theorems...
After defending his thesis doctors examined him and insisted on hospitalization. But Eugene refused.
“Leave me”, he told them, “Save those who can still be saved. I will die at home.
He did not dare to write Sasha about his illness for a long time. He had been receiving such carefree and cheerful letters from her, so he just didn’t want to darken her happy days. But then he wrote. He told her that he had defended his thesis but caught a serious illness. He was only lying all the time and wasn’t sure if he would walk ever again. And Sasha stopped writing. He sent a few more letters, but there was still no response. “Just accept it”, he told himself. “Accept it... Who needs you when you’re like this?!" But he didn’t want to say goodbye to Sasha. She was as important to him as his own life. And, actually, there was no that much time left to say goodbye…
Eugene stretched his sick, completely dried up hand to the table, took a pen, a notebook and wrote: "My dear Sasha! My health is getting worse and worse. Now each letter can be the last one. Even now, it is so exhausting for me to write, I just have no strength. But believe me, at the very last minute of my life my best thoughts will be about you. Your Eugene."
The answer finally came a few days later. Without opening the envelope, Eugene told himself that it was the last holiday of his life. Because he was so sick the day before that he could barely stand it. But the holiday did not happen. In that letter Sasha apologized for a long silence, she wrote how bad it is when people get sick. And she said she would not write him anymore. She met another person whom she liked more. “I can’t even count”, those were her exact words, “What I like about him, but I will say: I like everything and he is the one whom I love and with whom I will always feel happy."
Like every moment of life, this was the final shot in the life of Eugene. But he could no longer change anything. This letter made him only get up from the bed, ignoring all the objections of his mother and sister.
“What are you going to do, son? Please, tell me”, worried mother.
“Nothing special. I just want to walk in the city...”
“But you haven’t been getting up for such a long time. Say what you need, and I’ll go for it.”
“I need nothing, Mom. Just want to walk in the city...” said Eugene, intentionally hiding that he wanted to say goodbye to the city. He thought he had already said goodbye but he actually forgotten.
His mother helped him to get up, gave him his suit. He wanted to tie shoelace himself, but didn’t manage to. He bent down and almost fell to the floor.