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Boris Weisfeiler, born in Moscow in 1941 and naturalized in the United States in 1981, was a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania and a seasoned hiker. In 1985 his traces were lost in the south of Chile, in the midst of a military dictatorship, not far from the infamous ‘Colonia Dignidad’. Douna Loup’s book “Boris, 1985” brings him back to life.
The starting point of the book “Boris, 1985”published in France by Ediciones Zoé, is a song written in homage to Marta Ugarte, a communist leader, tortured and executed by the secret police of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in 1976. Listening to that song, one day in January 2018, the Writer Douna Loup recalled Boris, a character involved in a family mystery who disappeared under the Chilean military dictatorship.
Boris was the great-uncle of Douna Loup, born in the USSR in 1941, a brilliant student but whose youth was difficult, a victim of anti-Semitism, he chooses to emigrate to the United States where he adopts nationality. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Boris loved, in addition to mathematics, taking long walks through the wildest spaces possible. In one of them, in a mountainous area in southern Chile, in 1985, his traces were lost forever.
Thirty-four years later, his great-niece undertakes the investigation, reopening the file on the sinister German ‘Colonia Dignidad’ sect that thrives under the Pinochet regime and is probably no stranger to the disappearance of the American mathematician. Douna Loup explains to RFI the origin of this book:
“The starting point was when I attended a concert and heard this song ‘Vino del Mar’ by Inti Illimani, dedicated to Marta Ugarte, a Chilean woman murdered by Pinochet’s soldiers. That made me think of this great-uncle Boris, who also disappeared in Chile, I knew he was a mathematician and above all a great traveler, but I had little information.”
Approaching the missing
“I felt very close to him, as I did research and met his friends, I felt who he really was, and that moved me deeply, otherwise I could not have written this book. I felt that I was really in touch with him, in empathy and understanding with his whole life, from the Soviet Union to the United States, his love for nature and solitude, which I share.I have the impression that even in his relationship with mathematics, there is something close to poetry. , a search that in my case goes through language, through words, and in his through mathematics, a kind of search for beauty, for realization and understanding of the world, which for him went through that place. “
Meeting with an ex-cop
“The meeting with Sandro Gaete was crucial because he investigated the case a lot, he was very involved in the investigation, and he made me understand, better than anyone, the failure of the process. There is the hypothesis that the police patrol that arrested him did so. disappear, but I can’t believe the theory that he drowned. To begin with, the body never turned up, his backpack was discovered weeks later… Boris had experience, he had crossed torrents in Alaska and seen that river in Chile , even during a flood, it’s hard to believe… Surely the fact that he was born in Russia played against him “
The landscapes
“The landscapes are impressive, when I approached that river where they last saw it, I had the feeling of being able to connect with it, through those landscapes that were the last thing he saw and that must not have changed so much. There was a a feeling of closeness, also a desire to pay homage to him and connect with his life path. In particular this strong relationship with nature.”
