Memorial Laboratory of Yevgeny Zavoisky

Information About the Museum Excursion Persons

Excursion

For Kazan University the name of Zavoisky in Physics is as sacred as the name of Lobachevsky in Mathematics, Butlerov in Chemistry, and Baudain-de-Courteney in Philology. On January 21, 1944 Yevgeny Konstantinovich observed the phenomenon of electronic paramagnetic resonance (EPR) for the first time. The discovery initiated the new field of physics - magnetic radiospectroscopy.

Yevgeny Kostantinovich Zavoisky, Russian, born on September 28 (15), 1907 in Mogilev-Podolsky City in the Ukraine, was the third child in the family of medial officer Konstantin Ivanovich Zavoisky and his wife Yelizaveta Nikolayevna. Zhenya was a strong healthy boy: hot south sun, fresh air and crisp fruit, his mother's love and everybody's concern had a wholesome effect on him. Their family lived on the ground floor of a big wooden house in a quite and lonely street in the outskirts. Behind the house there was a vast orchard, gently sloping to the Dniester River.

In 1908 doctor Zavoisky and his family moved to Kazan. There he began to work as a junior physician at the Powder-Mill in the settlement named Porokhovaya Sloboda. The plant provided him with accommodation, and their family moved to a big council flat.

Parents paid a lot of attention to their children's education. There was a joiner's bench, lathe with a complete set of tools and book-binding press in their father's study. Children gathered minerals for collection, made experiments on Physics and Chemistry. Parents organized a domestic chemical laboratory for them.

There were A.P.Nechayev's books on nature and natural-science experiments in their home library. Vyacheslav, Zhenya's brother, wrote that Zhenya had read the book "Chudesa bez Chudes" (Wonders without Wonders) by A.P.Nechayev and reproduced independently almost all the experiments described there:

"According to the pictures in the book Zhenya made an electrostatic machine and two Leyden jars from bottles and demonstrated huge sparks in the darkness".

In 1915 the eight-year-old Zhenya entered the primary three-year school (as his mother had taught him reading and writing). Later Yevgeny Konstantinovich remembered:

"I built my first electric bell and electric friction machine at the age of seven when I could not read yet. Then I flew into a radio passion".

Zhenya studied at primary school for two years, from autumn 1915 to spring 1917. In the autumn of 1917 Zhenya with other pupils of his form moved to a new School No 10 in Zarechye district. The same year his father subscribed for excellent edition "Encyclopedia for Children".

Konstantin Zavoisky
and his wife Elizaveta

The Zavoiskys' Children:
Zhenya, Boris and Tanya
with Nanny and Batman.
Mogilev-Podolsky City,
1908

The Zavoiskys Family. Kazan, 1912

It was such a bell that Ye.K.Zavoisky tried to make
in his early childhood

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