MEMORIES OF AB
Published in Vospominaniya ob Akademike A. B. Migdale, Ed. N.O. Agasyan et al., (Fizmatlit, Moscow, 2003), p. 28. Translated from Russian by James Manteith.
I had the good fortune to be a student of A. B. Migdal – AB, as we called him in person or in his absence – and to work in the sector he headed at the Kurchatov Institute, along with his other students and my friends, including Vitya Galitsky, Spartak Belyayev and Tolya Larkin. I was especially close with AB in the second half of the 1950s, the years most important for my formation, and AB's contribution to this formation was very great. To this day, I've often quoted AB on various occasions, as it's hard to put things better or more precisely than he did; I tell friends stories heard from AB, because these stories enhance life as AB himself enhanced it; my daughter is named Tanya after AB's wife Tatyana Lvovna, and so on. In what follows, I'll recount a few episodes in my life in which AB played an important or decisive role, and then will share some other memories of AB…
