The past flew away swiftly, irrevocably. Life, cut off from everyday life, broke into a small apartment in the Hospital, all in its own way, forcing Karnovsky to quit for a while the master's exams, because there were fights with "hustlers", who announced that the capital of the "Ural-Volga states" is located in one of the city districts, behind the dirty little channel Bulak. In June 1918, he left for Moscow with his mother and girls: the Czechoslovak Corps went up the Volga River and was not far from Kazan.
... He returned in winter to the frozen city, to a stolen apartment in the Hospital, to the university, immersed in impenetrable darkness. The younger brother was mobilized by the whites and died; Karnovsky learned about it only a few years later. We had to start somewhere. It was necessary to continue something. He tracked down Professor Mavrin and proved to him that "red arapia", as the old man called the Bolsheviks, does not object to the study of the theory of functions of the real variable and the higher mathematics in general.
So again began the university, science and a new countdown of time, which was even more demanding than before.
After the master's exams, Konstantin Pavlovich was offered a special course at the university. He agreed, but almost all his free time gave to the organization of the Polytechnic Institute.
It was time, when after the liberation of the Volga region in the city gradually restored the old life. It had a feature that immediately captured him - the possibility of the incredible, as he put it in a conversation with Lavrov. This possibility required a great deal of effort, also unbelievable. It was almost impossible to imagine it, but "logically" - he proved to the skeptical, hungry Lavrov - "quite understandable".
The Polytechnic Institute was created on the basis of a vocational school. But there was no vocational school in sight for a long time: students were mobilized by white people or ran away, there were two broken lathes in the workshops, an electric motor from Yablochkov's time and a disassembled internal combustion engine.
In the autumn of the nineteenth Karnovsky was appointed dean of the Rabfak, and he agreed again, thinking that, in fact, he himself was the first Rabfakovtsev when he worked at the factory brothers Krestovnikovyh and was engaged in the nights. He still went to the factory first to recruit students and ask that the workers help him equip a study of teaching aids. Then, six months later, when the students suddenly came up at once, the case became for the teachers, and then came in handy the reputation of Konstantin Pavlovich, as a polite, quite intelligent young man, who had a lot of acquaintances among the rich Russian and Tatar families. He found teachers and among them one major engineer, who predicted the Soviet government's quick and inevitable death.
It was more difficult with the program for slave factories and technical universities, about which there were endless disputes. Karnovsky took part in the discussion and from the very beginning took a sharp position. First, he experienced one method, then another, which was strongly recommended in the collection of "New Deed". Both melted like steam in a not heated auditorium, packed with people in soldiers overcoats who used one book for three and warmed their frozen fingers with breath. There was no hope that they would be able to access the strict system of mathematical knowledge that had developed in the twentieth century. For them, the way to mathematics was through technology. Obviously, somewhere here and it was necessary to search for new methods of teaching.
It is possible that if he hadn't come to the old Mavrin's house, helping him to clean up the library and the half-burned archive, he wouldn't have thought of this, in fact, simple idea. The archive and library were unique, with books not only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Kazan was one of the scientific centers of Europe, but also from the eighteenth century.
Karnovsky, who has always been interested in the history of science, began with Chebyshev and, moving back to the eighteenth century, read two memoirs by Euler. He was looking for a simple, visual approach to higher mathematics and traced its development, stopping at those stages that naturally linked mathematical and technical thinking. Genius Chebyshev suggested a lot. Still, unclear considerations enthusiastically supported Lavrov, who liked to repeat that "only the simple can throw light on the difficult.
Of course, it was a retreat, but it was a retreat - as Lavrov said - and Kutuzov.
The new methodology, which was based on old "to abstract" methods of teaching, was developed to the smallest detail, and, although the article by Karnovsky caused new heated debate, he, without answering, started the case. Time showed that he was right - in the end, it was his methodology that became the basis for teaching mathematics at the Rabbinfachs and technical universities.
Previously, the "countdown of time" concerned only the inner life of Karnovsky. Professor Mavrin considered him the most capable of his students, and he was needed by the department, the university. Now it turned out that he was needed by hundreds of people who wrote with gross mistakes and at best knew the multiplication table. He became the center of keen interest, impressed him with his novelty. His analytical mindset, "punctuality", which Lavrov joked about, suddenly turned out to be extremely important not only for him, but also for those who ran to him with the runaway with the case. He was not asked, but required to know.
To be continued...