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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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A Gloom Descends Upon the Ancient Steps, a novel by Alexander Chudakov (2000)
Rights sold: France - Christian Bourgois (2003), Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Poland - von Borowiecky, Spain - AUTOMATICA, Russia – Olma Press (2001), Vremya (2011), World English rights - Northwestern University Press
2001 RUSSIAN BOOKER Award nominee
2011 RUSSIAN BOOKER OF THE DECADE Awared winner
Set in Chebachinsk, a fictitious town in Northern Kazakhstan inhabited by political exiles, its panoramic narrative focuses on the relationship between Anton, a Moscow historian of the vital “1960s generation,” and his grandfather, a titan of physical and intellectual rigor from a hardy line of Vilnius clerics. The lucid and forthright prose style was described by critics as “clear, rich, glowing with good-natured humor, and free”. The novel’s overall effect is uplifting despite its unflinching presentation of the human toll of Stalinism. Chudakov told Radio Russia that his concern was to show that despite “all that,” Russia in this period actually continued to live a variegated and even positive national life.
In Chudakov’s novel, a series of discrete sketches, scattered reminiscences and barely interconnected episodes create a stunningly vivid image of the past. The novel’s structure is more “modular” than linear. Each chapter contains any number of chronological leaps from the Chebachinsk of about 1968 backward to Anton’s childhood and youth and forward to the present. Portraits of Anton’s family and other figures from various periods of his past are created along the way; many are given chronologically free-ranging chapters all to themselves.
In the novel’s opening, Anton returns to Chebachinsk in about 1968 as an established Moscow historian to visit his maternal grandfather, who is dying at age 93. As he contemplates Grandfather’s great physical vigor, evident even now in his sinewy arms, Anton’s thoughts plunge deep into the past. Grandfather is Leonid, a graduate of a Vilnius seminary, agronomist and director of a weather station. In scattered dialogues, we learn of Grandfather’s conservative, anti-Soviet and anti-statist views on political economy, religion and the arts, views which often bring him into conflict with his son-in-law Pyotr, Anton’s father. Although in many respects a naively loyal Soviet citizen, Pyotr nevertheless quite consciously saved his entire extended family from the repressions in Moscow by volunteering in the late 1930s for engineering work constructing a plant in Northern Kazakhstan. As Anton tours the Chebachinsk of the late 1960s, place after place triggers voluminous reflections on the previous decades. In the main, these reflections recreate the idyllic natural environment of Chebachinsk (“a Kazakh Switzerland”), the material hardships that his family of vigorous intellectuals must overcome there, Grandfather’s demanding program of home schooling for the precocious Anton, Anton’s overall development, and the social consequences of the family’s hard-won relative prosperity.
Chudakov’s novel is an example of both “prose of scholars” and the larger genre of the post-Soviet “memoiristic novel,” though, in contrast with much of the Soviet-period memoiristic literature already available in English, it is not predominantly the story of decent, flawed personalities perishing by the Communist system, but rather the story of decent, flawed personalities negotiating and surviving that system in its many “negative spaces,” its interstices and peripheries, its places of “silence, exile and cunning.”
What survives is not merely — and not always — individuals, but their cultural pattern and values. The novel is thus an extraordinarily concrete, first-hand witnessing of the limits and failure of the Soviet totalitarian project. Chudakov’s novel is a Bildungsroman of a boyhood and youth under totalitarian regime. It should appeal strongly not only to Russia specialists, for whom it will provide an artistic counterpoint to recent historiography of Soviet Russia, but to all readers interested in twentieth-century European history as lived experience.
The major discovery of 2000 for me was the novel by Aleksandr Chudakov, the preeminent literary scholar…. As a rule, the prose outings of famous scholars are indigestible: they are either lifeless philological exercises or flat, leaden chronicles. Chudakov’s book is a different story altogether: This is an authentic memoiristic novel, free of both impenetrably “meta-cerebral” passages and a dreary fixation on the everyday. The book has the sort of natural, human intonation that contemporary prose seemed to have lost long ago.
—Aleksandr Arkhangelsky, Izvestia, Dec. 28, 2000
The best book to come out in Olma-Press’s “Original” series to date. Imagine a small Kazakh town where members of the country’s various ethnic groups and socio-economic strata are forced to co-exist—all during the 1930s to 1950s, with additional elements of late 1950s Moscow university life, plus reflections on this experience from today’s perspective, all of it written in classic, intelligible Russian for a change. In short, plop down on the couch with it, and you’ll find it impossible to put down.
—Unsigned notice in Ex Libris, the literary supplement of
Nezavisimaya gazeta, Dec. 6, 2001
Now this “novelistic idyll” is one of the favorite contenders for the 2001 Booker Prize, with reviewers writing of a striking, authentic and unique type of positive hero.
—B. Kuzminsky, Vecherny klub, Aug. 31, 2001
“GRANDFATHER WAS VERY STRONG….” From the very first line, the novel sets its tone of indirect but uncompromising polemics with our clichéd image of traditional culture as a hothouse of exotic specimens always about to wilt or freeze, and with the image of men and women of traditional values as invariably weak, incapable of making their way in the world, doomed to be victims…. Chudakov’s novel is the story of a man of prodigious physical and moral strength who without lying or compromising manages to maintain his beliefs, his habits, his faith, his encyclopedic knowledge, his aesthetic tastes—to survive and help others survive as well, to his very last breath…. Grandfather’s house is an oasis of creation, common sense and the affirmation of life.
—Andrei Dmitriev, “Snatching Russia Back: A Prose Work That Was One of This Year’s Major Events,”Izvestia, Jan. 10, 2001
The resolving power of Chudakov’s memory is so great, the details of his past so astonishingly well preserved, that what we see here is not just one of his qualities as a writer, but a gift: the gift of long memory.
—Alla Marchenko, Novy mir (2001), № 5, p. 195
Aleksandr Chudakov’s A Gloom Descends… was in my view the major literary event of 2000. In it, a series of discrete sketches, scattered recollections and barely interconnected episodes create a stunningly vivid image of the past. And without editorializing digressions, global generalizations or great scientific discoveries by the main character. It turns out that all it really takes is good taste, an observant mind, attention to detail, a sense of comedy and tragedy, and the understanding that in literature, indirect characterization is far more powerful than direct authorial commentary—and black will emerge of itself as black, white as white, sanity as sanity, and madness as madness.
—Mikhail Edelshtein, Russkaya mysl
(La Pensée Russe) № 4389, Dec. 20, 2001
Chudakov … has defined his book in terms of genre as a novelistic idyll…. It could also be called a poem in the spirit of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Or, recalling Belinsky’s remark that Eugene Onegin was “an encyclopedia of Russian life,” it could be called an encyclopedia of Soviet life: how exiles survived during the Stalin period…. It is a book about the indestructibility of life itself.
—Boris Paramonov, “Russia in Life and in Art”
Broadcast on Radio Liberty, Jan. 1, 2003
Chudakov’s novel—indisputably one of the freest, most noble and most vitally necessary Russian books created since Russia’s liberation from communism—affirms the abiding significance of such simple and elusive values as family and ancestral tradition, labor and culture, mercy and responsibility, freedom and faith, and hope in our future—in our children and grandchildren.
—Andrei Nemzer, “In Memoriam. Aleksandr Chudakov”
Vremya novostei, Oct. 5, 2005
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