Thirty volumes.

The year of publication is 1978.

In English, “To bleat” means to bleat, mumble, talk nonsense, whine…

I lost confidence in the Great Soviet encyclopaedia at a very young age.

But when I bought the encyclopaedia Britannica in a second-hand bookstore, thirty volumes of it, I thought with reverence that this was a REAL encyclopaedia. Although I noticed that my good friend Professor M. Boleslavsky suddenly withdrew it from his library and filled the empty shelves with the Brockhaus encyclopaedia, because he was fluent in both English and German.

I asked him why?

He waved his hand: “NOT SERIOUS!”

A little later, my reverence began to somehow “sublimate”, because almost every time I searched for something, I came across nonsense, stupid mistakes and just ignorance and substitution of concepts in it.

Some time ago, I wrote a polite letter to the editorial office of this encyclopaedia, asking: “Do they have editors who check the content of articles and their adequacy to reality and professionalism?

The answer, which struck me as brazen narcissism, followed immediately:

“We have enough experts of the highest class whose articles do not need any editing or corrections!”

Yes, indeed, the “Highest”!!!!

Let’s look at it briefly…

Druskininkai is a balneocourt in Lithuania, suddenly, at the will of a “top–class expert”, moved hundreds of kilometers to Latvia (Article about Jacques Lipchitz, the sculptor “cubist” – Jacques Lipchitz)

Portrait of geneticist N.I.Vavilov, replaced by portrait of S.I.Vavilov, his brother, a famous physicist and President of the USSR Academy of Sciences. And the geneticist was put to death in the Stalinist camps (after all, genetics, like cybernetics, were declared then as PSEUDOSCIENCES!). Under the fake portrait, an ordinary photograph, of S.I. Vavilov, there is an inscription: A drawing by an unknown artist!!! Moreover, there is no article about S.I. Vavilov himself!

“Chaparral” is a prickly bush, and the name of an American anti–aircraft missile. It is reported that its range is EIGHT MILES or, in parentheses, five kilometers. It should be the other way around: five miles are eight kilometers.

The army – there is no such thing!

The solar corona is confused with the well-known atmospheric phenomenon “gallo” around the Sun’s disk!!! Moreover, the photo is given exactly of the real solar corona! But it is described as “gallo”! Links to the article are given about the true solar corona and its photographing during eclipses and using a coronograph!

The article on Brownian motion is not about him, but about purely formal mathematical calculations of the probabilities of chaotic motion of a particle, mentioning only Norbert Wiener, although Einstein, Smolukhovsky, and Perrin were engaged in the physics of this phenomenon.

The writer Nikolai Leskov, born in 1831, turns out to have been born in the USSR!

Writer Gleb Uspensky, born in 1843, was also born in the RSFSR!

Alexey Tolstoy, Soviet writer, was born in 1882, and of course in the USSR!

Ivan Bunin was also born in the USSR!

“DOLYA” is a Soviet measure of weight!

The lie about the famous German boxer Max Schmeling, an anti–Fascist, in the article is pro-Nazi!

The article “Life”, instead of giving a clear and concise DEFINITION, begins with the phrase that, this is such a complex and diverse phenomenon that it is IMPOSSIBLE to DEFINE it!!!

Lyon Feuchtwanger’s novel “The Oppenheim Family” (In the original, in German, “Die Geschwister Oppenheim”) in the encyclopaedia turned into “Oppermans”.

Robert Wood, an outstanding American physicist, was born in 1868, and, according to the encyclopaedia, already in 1869!!!! “he was the first to detect the emission of charged particles from a conductor under the action of an electric field” (an effect now called cold emission, autoelectronic emission, tunnel effect). A supergenius who surpassed even Hercules, who as a baby strangled a snake sent to him by Hera.

Samovar is a vessel widely used in the USSR and Iran for boiling water

(Samovar – metal urn, often of brass… widely used in USSR and Iran to boil water…)

There are simply no mentions of many famous and outstanding people and famous phenomena.

For example:

Janusz Korczak, Alexander Vertinsky, English actress Vivien Leigh, famous French actress Simone Signoret, famous Austrian traveler, the first European researcher of Islamic countries, Arminius Vambery, German physicist Voldemar Voigt (whose equations later became known as “Lorentz transformations”), Gerostratus, Joseph Schmidt, famous German singer, ANABIOSIS, writer Howard Fast, the famous German physicist James Frank, Nobel laureate, Stanislav Lem, whose works have been translated into 80 languages, also does not exist for this encyclopaedia, Dina Durbin, the famous American teenage actress, Stanislav Ulam, a Polish theoretical physicist, one of the “fathers” of the hydrogen bomb, Leopold Infeld, a Polish physicist-theorist, President of the Polish Academy of Sciences/

“Clairvoyant Prophet” and Hitler’s mentor Eric Jan Hanussen, Evelyn Waugh, an outstanding English writer – a couple of lines, Tzver – the creator of the chromatography method – a couple of lines. Keratin doesn’t exist either.

Lilliput, a word coined by Jonathan Swift, is missing, Dr. Vladimir Khavkin, recipient of the Highest Orders of the British Empire for his work on the creation of vaccines against plague, cholera, etc. in India. In Bombay, the Research Institute is still called after him, Balmont did not exist, Vladimir Jabotinsky, a journalist and founder of the revisionist movement in Zionism, is missing, The Rumkorff Coil does not exist. Karl Bryullov – similarly, there was no such painter, there is no concept of Agoraphobia, there is no Ritz physicist, there is no Ulugbek, there is no Aqua-Lung

Sidney Reilly did not exist, Voynich did not exist either, and Harun Taziev, the famous Belgian volcanologist, did not exist. The three moira – parks of Clotto, Atropo and Lachesis also do not appear. Marian Smoluchowski, who studied the Brownian Movement in parallel with Einstein, is not mentioned. Norma Shearer, the famous American actress, did not exist. There was also no Italian singer Totti Dal-Monte and singer-chansonnier Leonid Utesov. There was no Debake, Lee De Forest, De Bono, De Gaspery, De Beers, Decimation, de Broglie, more precisely, there are de Broglie waves, but de Broglie himself appears in a completely different place, without “DE”, but just BROGLIE! Then the waves should have been named without the “DE”. No! The waves of matter or probability are called DE BROGLIE waves, and he himself figures as BROGLIE! Similarly, the artist El Greco did not exist, there was a certain GRECO. There was no Madame Dubary or the Sanson dynasty either, there is no moon of Jupiter Io, there are no Johanson tiles. About the Nazi physicist Philip Lenard — the biography in the article ends in 1907, although he lived both wars safely and died in 1947, not a word about his and Stark’s Nazi beliefs and ideas!

Only Thomas and Heinrich Mann are mentioned about the family of German writers Mann, and Thomas’s son, Klaus Mann, a talented writer, does not exist!

Ettore Majoran, a famous Italian mathematician, does not exist for Bleatanica.

The doctor Robert Julius Mayer, who formulated the fundamental law of physics – the Law of Conservation of Energy, is mentioned in one line, and even that is a lie: Allegedly a physicist, although he was exactly a doctor!

Abakumov is not mentioned, although he was a well-known and odious figure.

There was also no place for the outstanding American philosopher Eric Hoffer.

Hans Selye, a Canadian physiologist, the founder of the theory of stress, did not receive the attention of the encyclopaedia, as Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya did not receive it.

But all sorts of sportsmen and whores who danced the cancan are carefully, abundantly and verbatimly mentioned!

The question is, WHO are encyclopaedias created for? For educated people who often use a variety of information in encyclopaedias and reference books, or for athletes and prostitutes who never look there? And they don’t even know about the existence of encyclopaedias.

They don’t even have bookshelves capable of holding thirty volumes of an encyclopaedia! OTHER INTERESTS!!!

People tend to make mistakes, but such a number of mistakes, caught by me PURELY by CHANCE, without the slightest intention to look for them, are no longer annoying blunders and mistakes. But the POLICY of the PUBLISHING HOUSE!

Hence the only obvious conclusion: In the editorial office of the encyclopaedia there are complete imbeciles who do not even ask themselves a question: WHO ARE WE MAKING IT FOR?

If I’m wrong, let my elder comrades correct me!

6 XII 2024