born in July, so he would have been only just 17 for September start of academic year (obvs making some assumptions here, also calendar changes), that’s pretty young and September 1917 St Petersburg, one revolution already in February, the provisional govt collapsing, the war front collapsed, and a Deniken army marching on St Petersburg, total turmoil then the second revolution one month later. Curious time and place to enter university.Sergei S. Markoff wrote: ↑Sat Jul 18, 2020 4:50 pm Some more intriguing details from here: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02280296/document
«Finally, the trajectory of Vladimir Bernstein (1900-1936) constitutes another singular case, described in
detail in Finzi (1936). Born in 1900 in St. Petersburg, Bernstein entered the local university when he
was 17 to specialize in mathematics and became close to Yakov Viktorovich Uspensky (1883-1947).27
many Russian exiles in London, part of Bayswater is named after their origins. Two “types”, Jews who fled Tsarist pogroms in late 1800’s and White Russians, who fled the Bolsheviks. My best friend as a little kid was White Russian, the family ferociously anti-Jewish, the father worked in British Intelligence.Taking advantage of the proximity of the border, he decided to emigrate during the winter of 1919 by
reaching Vyborg on the other side of the Gulf of Finland. Unfortunately, he was seriously wounded by
bullet before arriving there, and he never fully recovered from this injury that led to his premature death
in 1936. Arrived in France in the mid-1920s after a stay in London,
Did you find any detail of where in London? Exiles tend to orient themselves to their own tribe, so to speak.
Finally the Mussolini dictatorship. That’s quite a path through European political history, yet he seems, maybe I am guessing, just entirely absorbed in abstract maths whilst trying to stay out of trouble in difficult times.he entered the Sorbonne and in 1930
defended a PhD on the singularities of Dirichlet series, dedicated to ‘his master Paul Montel’. The
lectures that Vladimir Bernstein presented at the Collège de France that same year on Dirichlet series
were published in 1933 in the Borel series of monographs on the theory of functions as Bernstein
(1933). The book was introduced by a very laudatory preface by Hadamard. It was in Italy, however,
that Bernstein decided to settle down (he had already published several papers in Italian journals). He
obtained Italian citizenship in 1931 and was responsible for teaching superior analysis in Milan and
analytical geometry in Pavia.»