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H The Man WITH A Shattered World THE HISTORY OF A DRAIN WOUND A. R. WITH A LURIA FOREWORD BY Oliver Sacks BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY The Man with a SHATTERED WORLD Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/manwithshatteredOOIuri The History of a Brain Wound The Man with a SHATTERED WORLD A. R. Luria Translated from the Russian by Lynn Solotaroff With a foreword by Oliver Sacks HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS - © 1972 by Michael Cole Foreword copyright © 1987 by Oliver Sacks Copyright All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 library of congress CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION data Luriia, A. R. (Aleksandr Romanovich), 1902- The man with a shattered world. Translation Poteriannyi of: i vozvrashchennyi mir. eprmt ° ngini!ll >' Published: 0 1972. With new mtrod. , „ New , York : Basic Books, Inc., Includes index. 1. ZasetskiT, injuries Wounds and 4. Leva -Health. injuries Brain -Wounds and a. id 1987 0-674-54625-3 Brain — of- Patients - Soviet Unioni939- i945 - pers ° nai war Titr RD594.Z38L8713 3. -Complications and sequelae Perception, Disorders ISBN 2. — Panents — Soviet Union — Biography. ' 617\481044'0924 [B] 86-31866 7 1 2 Contents Foreword by Oliver Sacks Concerning the Book and From the Author The Past 3 War vii Its Author xix xxi 6 After Being Wounded The Rehabilitation Our F irst Meeting 8 Hospital 14 1 Excerpt from Case History No. 37 1 A Brief Summary of Brain Anatomy Digression) ( The First 2 2 First Steps in a Shattered His Vision World 36 36 His Body Space 21 41 46 Reading 61 A Student Again 65 Writing, the Turning Point “The Story 7 of a Terrible Brain Injury” 76 v 5 CONTENTS VI Why Did He Write? 83 My World Has No Memories” “My Memories Came Back from 87 the Wrong End” 95 The Peculiar Features of His IOI On Recollecting IO9 “Speech-Memory” J Words ( The Second Digression) Restricted to Undeciphered Images, Disembodied Ideas 1 1 Grammatical Constructions (The Third Digression) 122 My Knowledge Is Gone” A Story That Has No Ending “All “Were It Not for War Epilogue) Index 1 61 159 . . .” (In 1 1 39 57 Place of an Foreword to the 1987 Edition Oliver Sacks Aleksandr Romanovich Luria’s extraordinarily productive life spanned the greater part of this century (1902-1977) and saw the profoundest changes in our own lifetime enof human thought, approaches to brain and mind. His deavor was to explore the texture ways in which it could be damaged or disordered, and the