Under the Protection of Alien Wings. Russian Emigrant Mathematiciancs in Interwar France: A General Picture and Two Case Studies of Ervand Kogbetliantz and Vladimir Kosticyn

The present chapter tackles a fundamental aspect of the 1920s and evokes the situation of the political refugees in Europe by following the various trajectories of mathematicians who fled the Bolshevik regime in Russia and settled down in Paris. For various reasons, there were not so many mathematicians among the Russian emigration, but their original path offers an opportunity to reflect upon their more or less easy adaptation to the local mathematical community of their host country, according to specificities linked to their political situation as well as to their mathematical choices. The chapter studies these questions by examining in detail the trajectories of two scientists with contrasted backgrounds: the Armenian-Russian mathematician Ervand G. Kogbetliantz who arrived in 1921, and the Russian mathematician Vladimir A. Kosticyn who arrived in 1928 after having occupied important functions at the university of Moscow under the Bolshevik regime.