Creative Energy: Portfolio Principle of Alexander Gorkin

Alexander Pavlovich Gorkin’s professional life is an example of faithful service to geography on the one hand, and on the other hand, an example of an absolutely non-canonical scientist with very broad interests, diversified creative activities, which became the subject of the research. The subject of the study is the period of A.P. Gorkin’s professional activity, which lasted for almost 60 years from the 1960s to the 2010s. The research question of the article: where was the creative energy of A.P. Gorkin directed during his working life and what lessons should the new generation of Russian geographers learn from it? The identified research question determined three tasks to be solved: (1) to assess the forms of manifestation of scientific creativity of A.P. Gorkin in the methodology of the “portfolio approach” adopted in economics; (2) to identify cross-cutting features of Gorkin’s scientific creativity in all areas (publications, lectures, encyclopedias, etc.); (3) to determine the elements of Gorkin’s creative heritage. The information base of the work was taken from the intellectual system of case studies of scientometric data of Lomonosov Moscow State University (“ISTINA”). The novelty of the research lies in the systematic approach applied for the first time to the study of the scientific creativity of a talented scientist: not only the traditional publication activity, but also his educational, teaching and lecturing activities are considered as parts of the whole. Main results: (1) the “investment portfolio” of Gorkin’s creative energy calculated for the entire cycle of his professional life consists of 660 equivalent articles, including 300 equivalent articles as education of young personnel for economic geography, 220 as publication activity, 80 as teaching activity, 60 as lecture activity; (2) the thematic triad that runs through A.P. Gorkin’s publications, in the titles of his students’ dissertations, and in his lectures—theoretical and methodological problems of socioeconomic geography, geography of post-industrial industry, and social geography; (3) the most important lessons of A.P. Gorkin for us: the values of collectivism in science that he possessed; interest in the study of big, systemic phenomena and the art of posing major problems of the economic geography; topics for long-term research study—spatio-temporal patterns of modern economic activities; the role of industry and other sectors of national economy in the process of “densification” of the space-time continuum of socioeconomic development of mankind; measurement of mobility and inertia of location in socioeconomic geography.