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Under the Green Tent, a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2010)
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In the best traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Ulitskaya raises the bar with each successive book, taking on increasingly more demanding artistic and intellectual challenges and becoming a writer for everybody, not only for her own home readership. She moves far beyond the framework of tired cliches about the enigmatic Russian soul, and in place of laboured and portentous questions proffers her own answers.
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Her new novel can justly claim a place in the first rank of an international hierarchy of major works which form the ideas through which their age is understood.
‘Imago’ is a term from biological science and, trained as a biologist, Ulitskaya deciphers human personality in genetic and medical terms in all her books. The imago is the phase in the development of an insect which corresponds to its formal adulthood. The insect imago is capable of reproduction and gradually proceeds through life to death. For a human being, however, the civilised and intelligent homo sapiens, there is potentially more to this phase, a phase of maturity, adulthood, responsibility, mental development, self-sacrifice and struggle.
Imago begins with the death of Stalin and his monstrous funeral attended by many millions and fraught with death. At the funeral the crowd in the centre of Moscow trampled one and a half thousand people to death, a fact concealed by the Soviet censorship. The finale of the novel is the death of the great Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky.
The heroes of Imago are three friends who come together in solidarity during their school years and live their entire lives side by side. Three small boys develop in a Moscow school under the watchful eye of a gifted teacher. An embryonic talented musician, gifted photographer, and poet of genius are readied for complete self-realisation. They are surrounded by an intelligentsia which consists not only of outstanding and brilliant but also of broken, dependent and intimidated people. The system oppresses all of them, the tough-minded and those who are pathetically weak.
Many cave in at the first pressure from the KGB (the unfortunate photographer does so and becomes an informer), but many others resist the oppressive ideological force and rescue both their physical life and, even more importantly, their conscience. The artist, in the footsteps of Tolstoy, leaves the city, where he faces arrest, for the forests and villages and dissolves in the depths of Russia. Alongside the heroes are a great diversity of women, strong or crushed, bitchy or tender, and magnificently witty. Almost all of them are extraordinary people and their actions too are extraordinary. They love their men in their own individual way, frequently helping and saving them, sacrificing themselves in the process without regret.
The life of one KGB general, the father of the main heroine, is amazing. All his life he has loved a woman he himself sent to the Gulag, and who, when she is released from the camps, forgives him and their love continues. Equally amazing is the story of a former prisoner, an intellectual who fled Nazi Germany and was subsequently incarcerated in a Soviet concentration camp. Emerging from prison, he makes a career as a leading Soviet psychiatrist and is instrumental in consigning the post-war dissidents to the lunatic asylum because, in accordance with the clinical classification and his formal examination, they are ‘factually psychologically unstable’.
As always with Ulitskaya, Imago is a novel about love, about destinies, and about characters. It is authentic psychological prose, but her new work is also broader than these definitions.
Ultimately this is a novel about failure to grow to maturity, failure to emerge fully from the cocoon, about people of the late 20th century living on the dynamism of adolescence but often, stuck in the phase of the run-up, never actually managing to take wing. Only a very few do attain the heights of which a human being is capable and which is most often achieved as the result of a magical indomitability, or through the agency of a creative profession, or the power of love.
Imago has a resonance and a reach which extends beyond the bounds of Russian literature. It is about all people of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is about the fact that in contemporary civilisation full maturity is almost never attained, especially if an individual who aspires to spread their wings and fly has some hobble, ideological or government-imposed, leaden and emasculating, weighing them down. Infantilism (or adolescence) is increasingly found in the modern world as a permanent condition, when the main features of a human being are present but have not ripened, have not found full expression. What should follow childhood is accomplished in a deformed manner or not accomplished at all. Adolescent civilisations form, in which people have ceased to mature. In this book Ulitskaya offers an innovative genre, a kind of anti-Bildungsroman, which will undoubtedly provide many people with food for thought and debate.
As always with this author, however, apart from the philosophical and moral charge, there is also emotional depth and wonderful artistry, a unique gift which renders her books accessible in dozens of languages to millions of readers. Only in her writing do we find that armour-piercing irony which enables episodes to pass, often in a single paragraph, from high tragedy to almost Shvejkian comedy. Imago is a very serious and very funny book. -
The Scientific Autobiography of Alexander Luria
A life, a human life, is not a life until it is examined; it is not a life until it is truly remembered and appropriated; and such a remembrance is not something passive, but active, the active and creative construction of one’s life, the finding and telling of the true story of one’s life. Oliver W. Sacks, from the foreword to A.R.Luria's The Man with a shattered world.
Biographies of great people, as a rule, are embellished by myths. This is never more true than in the case of A. R. Luria, one of the most brilliant psychologists of the twentieth century. Luria originated and developed many directions in the psychological sciences, including an historical development of cognitive processes, the role of speech in regulation of voluntary actions, and the cerebral organization of psychological processes. His life story is mingled with myths that often obscure the actual facts of his scientific life and personality.
Among the myths, the pre-eminent question is did Luria originate methods, ideas and theory? In his books, Luria described the history of a problem's development, giving consideration to the sources of his ideas, their analysis, and critical selection. All of the neuropsychologists who worked with Luria were struck by his astonishing creativity. J. Bruner wrote that he was quick to generate new ideas and readily innovated tasks to test these ideas. During the last years of his life, Luria generalized the stages of his life in a book that he designated as "an experience of a scientific biography." This is not a biography of events, but a biography of a life from the perspective of the development of scientific ideas.
This book is one of three Luria's so-called "romantic" books in which he gives a detailed, lively description of a single case from his practice. (One widespread myth is that Luria built his concepts based on investigations of single patients. However, the rest many his books are of "classical" orientation: they are based on enormous amounts of experimental data.) His autobiography is the last in this series, and the subject is not a patient, but the author’s life in science.
This book was translated into English and published by M. Cole and Sh. Cole (The making of mind: a personal account of Soviet psychology. 1979) with a foreword of M.Cole where he describes the circumstances in which Luria lived and worked. It was later published in Russian with a different title, The Stages of the Road Taken; A Scientific Autobiography. This text differed from the English one in several ways.
The peculiarity of Lurian destiny is that he explored psychological arenas that were particularly susceptible to ideological interference. A Western reader can hardly imagine to what extent the ideological situation in the USSR impacted his research and life.
Proposed version of Luria's autobiography has greatly benefited from his daughter's biography of her father, My Father, Alexander Luria. Yelena Luria, a professor of biology, was a gifted writer who published charming children's books. She was very close to her father and after his death wrote his biography from the perspectives of Luria as a father, husband, and individual in a complex time. In her book she described the events of his life in their logical and emotional interdependence. She also created a portrait of his extraordinary wife, Lana Lipchina, who was the center of a warm family life. Included in her book are many of Luria's correspondence to and from friends, including great scientists from around the world. She created a portrait of a versatile, creative, and sensitive man through his relationships with his family, work, and friends.
A book should include biographical notes. In the past Luria's followers have made annotations, but they are incomplete. Additional information has since become available that have allowed us to create a coherent picture of this complex man.
Customer Reviews from amazon.com on Autobiography of Alexander Luria (published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, USA, 2005) "For anyone who is familiar with and admires Alexander Romanovich Luria, this book is a delight. For those who are unfamiliar, or only vaguely familiar with him, it is an astonishing revelation." — PsycCRITIQUES
"Alexander Luria was one of the founders of behavioral neurology – a field that has now been given the fashionable name 'cognitive neuroscience. His autobiography vividly recalls the "golden age" of neurology. It is a welcome antidote to the kind of high tech gadgetry and reductionist, imaging-based neo-phrenology that now dominates the field; a thought-provoking read for any aspiring psychologist or neuroscientist." (VS Ramachandran, MD., Ph.D. Professor and Director, Center for Brain and Cognition UCSD )
"Luria was one of the major neuropsychologists of this century. His work is eerily prescient of developments that have occurred within the past decade. Luria continues to have a lot to say that is directly relevant to recent developments in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience." (Jeff Elman, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science, UCSD )
"Luria is even more relevant today than when he wrote, for it was he who first made us aware of the subtle interaction of subjective and cultural in the shaping of mind and experience." (Jerome Bruner, Ph.D. Research Professor of Psychology, NYU )
"This book is a real treat! It's an opportunity to learn, in his own words, the incredible diversity of Luria's autobiographical account of his contribution in so many areas of scientific psychology." (Elaine R Parent, Ph.D., San Diego, California)
"This is an excellent overview of how several disciplines developed from the collaboration of a few researchers in Russia. Luria worked with Vygotsky to undertake a revision of psychological methods and models, which had been dominated by a mechanistic, Pavlovian approach. They developed theories and performed rigorous lab experiments, but they also opened their methods to clinical techniques as well through interview and observation. Written by Luria, this text eschews much of his personal history and focuses on thought processes as functional systems and the logistics of his experimentation. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how neuropsychology and neurolinguistics developed, or to anyone interested in how the cognitive sciences developed from astounding rationality amid totalitarian conditions." (D. Mather, Los Angeles, CA USA)
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