The Fate of Russian Translations of Cantor

This is the history of translating Cantor’s works into Russian from 1892 to 1985 in Odessa, Moscow, Tomsk, Kazan, St. Petersburg, Leningrad. Mathematicians and philosophers in Russia took the ideas of the theory of sets enthusiastically. Such renowned scholars and scientists as Timchenko, Shatunovsky, Vasiliev, Florensky, Mlodzeevsky, Nekrasov, Zhegalkin, Yushkevich Sr., Fet, Yushkevich Jr., Kolmogorov, and Medvedev took part in their popularisation. In 1970, Academician Pontryagin rated the theory of sets as useless for young mathematicians, and the translated works of Cantor were not published. We shall describe the tragic fate of this translation for the first time.