On May 15, 2012, at 18.00, Andrea Riscassi will speak in Circolo dei lettori (via Washington 56, Milan, Italy) of current political situation in Russia and of Mikhail Khodorkovskiy´s “La mia lotta per la libertà” (Marsilio).
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Biography of Mikhail Bulgakov, by Marietta Chudakova (1988, NF)
Rights sold: China - CCTP, Italy - ODOYA, Poland - Wydawnictwo Akademickie SEDNO, Ukraine - FOLIO, World English - GLAGOSLAV
MariettaChudakova’s Biography of Mikhail Bulgakov (first published in 1988), by now is THE ONLY FULL-LENGTH STUDY OF BULGAKOV’S LIFE. It remains the most important and reliable source of information about the writer. In her fundamental work Chudakova recreates the milestones of Bulgakov’s personal and artistic life against the historical background of his turbulent époque. The book is written in a vivid journalistic style, and contains abundant quotes from unpublished Bulgakov’s manuscripts and draft redactions of his novels, archive documents, and memoirs of writer’s contemporaries.
"They must know... They must know," anxious about the fate of his unpublished books, Bulgakov whispered to his wife Yelena on his deathbed. One of the main ideas of his central novel The Master and Margarita is that of justice, which inevitably triumphs in the life of the spirit, although sometimes belatedly and beyond the bourn of the creator's physical death.
Over the years that have passed since the day of Bulgakov's death, his former loneliness has turned into widespread interest in him from readers both in his native Russia and abroad. The growing popularity of his books, which are very "personal" and seem to talk to the reader directly, has attracted attention to the author himself, his biography, and his fate. The fame of Mikhail Bulgakov has taken root in time everlasting. He is dear to people as a writer and interesting as a man who retained throughout the vicissitudes of fate, the dignity and courage of a truly creative personality.
Writers with a great destiny know something about themselves that we do not know or dare not say about them until later. At this juncture interest arises in the figure of the creator himself, in his biography, his personality. Why do we know so little about him? Why does he grow more interesting each year? Bulgakov's destiny has its own dramatic pattern. As is always the case from a distance and after the passage of many years, it appears to contain little that is accidental and shows a clear sense of direction.
Chudakova's 2-part lecture on Bulgakov and Russian literature of XXth century broadcasted on Kultura TV channel, Russia, 2011
Part 2
Part 2
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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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