Schnirelmann committed suicide in Moscow on 24 September 1938, for reasons that are not clear. According to Lev Pontryagin's memoir from 1998, Schnirelmann gassed himself, due to depression brought on by feelings of inability to work at the same high level as earlier in his career.[3][4] On the other hand, according to an interview Eugene Dynkin gave in 1988, Schnirelman took his own life after the NKVD tried to recruit him as an informer.[5]
He was an extremely talented mathematician whose premature death in 1938 prevented him from fulfilling his potential... He was a charming young man. The great misfortune of his life was that his lodgings consisted of no more than a wretched furnished room, to which he was ashamed to bring his friends. It was with great embarrassment that he let me see it once. People told me that this alone was what had kept him from marrying.
— André Weil, The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician, p. 107-108
^Schnirelmann, L.G. (1930). "On the additive properties of numbers", first published in Proceedings of the Don Polytechnic Institute in Novocherkassk(in Russian), vol XIV (1930), pp. 3–27, and reprinted in Uspekhi Matematicheskikh Nauk(in Russian), 1939, no. 6, 9–25.
