SCHERSCHEVSKY, A. B.

Berlin-Charlottenburg, Verlag C. J. E. Volckmann Nachf, 1929 [but 1928]. 8vo. 134,+ (2) pp. Illustrated. Publisher’s (?) brown cloth-backed boards. Owner’s inscription and lilac stamp on title. Alicke, The Moon in Science & Fiction 310: ”a rare early book on the subject.” Ley, Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel (1959), p. 508. First edition, which, contrary to what is stated in the imprint, was printed in 1928. Alexander Borisovich Scherschevsky (1894-1937) was born in St. Petersburg, where he studied at the Polytechnic Institute and worked at the Lebedev aircraft factory before moving to Germany in 1919 to study at the Berlin Technical University. During the 1920s he made a threadbare existance as a writer on aviation in the German press and was the first to introduce the Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s name to a German audience. Scherschevsky’s own name eventually came to the attention of the German physicist and rocket developer Hermann Oberth, who hired the Russian in 1929 to help him build a liquid-fueled rocket to be launched at the premier of Fritz Lang’s movie ”Frau im Mond”. The engagement proved to be utterly unproductive as it turned out that Scherschevsky knew nothing about the practical aspects of rocket engineering, a fact that had disastrous consequences when a rocket exploded and nearly blinded Oberth on one eye. After having unsuccessfully tried his increasingly lethargic helper as a proof-reader, Oberth decided to let him go.Scherschevsky returned to the Soviet Union in 1932 and found employment at the Gas Dynamic Laboratory in Leningrad, where he worked alongside Soviet rocket pioneer Valentin Glushko. However, his behavioural pattern from Germany repeated itself, and he contributed little to the work at the laboratory. In 1933, when the Leningrad rockets group merged with the one in Moscow, Scherschevsky found himself without a job. After a few years of earning a living translating documents at a local library, he was arrested by the NKVD in the autumn of 1936, accused of being a German spy, and executed the following spring. Recent studies suggest that Scherschevsky may have been a double agent, since he regularly reported to the Soviet embassy in Berlin about the developments in German rocketry during his time in that country.Scherschevsky’s ”Die Rakete für Fahrt und Flug” is his only book on the subject, and one of the earliest works with the aim to popularize rocketry for a larger audience. As the title suggests, the book treats its subject broadly, with the author advocating the idea of using rockets to propel airplanes as well as spaceships. Among the subjects treated are air resistance, weightlessness, cosmic radiation, rocket engines and propellants, and references are made to many of the theoretical and practical pioneers in the field of rocketry, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Robert Esnault-Pelterie, but also to the first descriptions of rockets in medieval texts, and to the works of Galilei and Newton.”Although it is true to say Alexander Scherschevsky’s odd personal habits and political naivité alienated him from his contemporaries and ultimately led to his death, he still deserves to be remembered as one of the first aviation writers to promote spaceflight to the general public. Unfortunately an anonymous death amongst millions of other victims of the ’Great Terror’ has effectively purged his name from the space history books.” (Dominic Phelan in Space Chronicle, vol. 69, pp. 36-39, 2016.)