This is a guest post by Rachel McNellis, an archivist in the Manuscript Division and Josh Levy, a historian in the same division. It also appears in the July-August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.
In 1945, Margarita Konenkova was returning to Russia with her homesick husband, sculptor Sergey Konenkov. Before she left, she entrusted her New York neighbor with six letters received from Albert Einstein during their passionate affair. The neighbor left instructions that in case of her death, the letters be “burned without further ado.”
The letters were never burned. Instead, they ended up in the Library of Congress, closed to researchers until 2019.
Einstein, clearly infatuated, penned the letters between 1944 and 1945. One includes a sketch of a “Half-Nest,” a cozy room that resembles his home study. Though the sketch is simple, Einstein clarifies, he was not drunk when drawing it. He simply wished to capture the space he most associated with Konenkova.
The letters mix Einstein’s humanity with his genius. We see him incapacitated by illness, grounding his sailboat in stormy weather, railing against birthday parties as “stupid bourgeois affairs” but attending them anyway and smoking pipes that Konenkova sent him.
Then he becomes the renowned physicist again, debating Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, Wolfgang Pauli and Kurt Gödel in his home. Occasionally, politics emerge. “I admire Stalin’s sagacity,” Einstein declares, without context. “He does it significantly better than the others, not only militarily but also politically.” He worries over nuclear secrecy and calls the growing alienation between Russians and Russian-Americans “a kind of personal expatriation.”
The affair was, of course, a secret. While Einstein was a widower, Konenkova remained married. Still, their friends were discreet. When asked later whether an affair had occurred, one only offered, “I certainly hope so! They were two lonely people.”
In 1994, a Russian newspaper finally revealed the affair. Later, Sotheby’s, having read the discredited memoir of an ex-Soviet spymaster, announced that Konenkova had been a spy, pressing Einstein for intelligence about the bomb. Several historians have since declared the claim implausible.
Of course, these letters contain no evidence that Konenkova really was a spy. But they do shed a little light on a clandestine encounter between two lonely people.
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Comments (6)
WELL WAS SHE A SPY, OR WAS SHE A LOVER?
Hi,
If the story didn’t make it clear — definitely the latter, not the former.
Why are there metal paper clips attached to the letters, given the unsuitability of normal paper clips for preservation of paper? Are they of an archival quality that will not rust?
Hi,
Our librarians respond:
“This is a good question! Metal paperclips are often made of steel. They will rust and stain paper over time. We use stainless steel paperclips instead, which will not corrode or damage documents.”
Cheers,
n
She was married. I wonder how her husband would feel about those letters if he were alive today.
My stepfather looks identical to Albert Einstein . He was born 1947. His mother’s name was Margarita “Marge” for short. Honestly there’s a photo of his stepdaughter Margot and several people his sister, a man behind Margot who looks like a younger version of my stepdads “father”!! I’m convinced he had a baby with one of these women and his whole life was a secret. One of his sons looks like Albert Einstein as a kid..