Fight at the Frontal Lobe

By R.Z.S.

THE MAN WITH A SHATTERED WORLD

by A.R. LURIA 165 pages. Basic Books. $6.95.

Nobody promised Comrade Zasetsky a rose garden; it did not seem necessary. Before going off to fight the Germans in 1941, he was young, healthy, bright and idealistic. He had three years of polytechnical training behind him and a beckoning future in research or development, or perhaps even a prestige niche in Soviet middle management. But in March 1943, outside of Smolensk, a German bullet not only destroyed Zasetsky's future but eliminated most of his past as well.

The wound damaged a part of his brain that deciphered perceptions of the world and bound them into some kind of order. Like a broken mirror with some pieces missing and others jumbled, Zasetsky's shattered mind reflected the world as senseless fragments. He could not tell left from right; he could not be sure where his arms and legs were. He saw a pair of glasses as disparate lines and circles that could just as well have been a bicycle-if he could only think of the word.

Although Zasetsky could still speak in those simple phrases and sentences that had become reflexive, he could no longer remember anything he had learned. In the hospital he tried to decide-while attempting to muffle his rising urgency-whether to ask for a bird, a duck or a bedpan.

Not only did the logic of grammar escape him but the wound left him with half vision. Unless he moved his head, he could see only half a page, half a word, half a letter. The ability to analyze was also gone. During a prolonged reschooling period, a simple statement like "An elephant is bigger than a fly" took hours of explaining before the relationship was understood. Grasping a basic geometry theorem meant up to two months of solitary "thinking," only to have the theorem forgotten days or even hours later.

Shattered World. "This strange illness I have is like living without a brain," writes Zasetsky. How long it took him to compose that sentence is not precisely known. But after 25 years of daily effort, he has managed some 3,000 pages about his illness. The Man with a Shattered World is a selection of Zasetsky's writings, arranged and commented on by A.R. Luria, professor of psychology at the University of Moscow. The book is equally as remarkable a document as Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968), which was about a man, otherwise rather ordinary, who suffered from a mind that could not forget anything.

The determination with which Zasetsky fought-and still fights-to escape "that know-nothing world of emptiness and amnesia" makes him anything but ordinary. The mystery of his doggedness lies somewhere in the undamaged frontal lobe of his brain. There, at the seat of the personality and emotions, he was able to battle, as Luria says, "with the tenacity of the damned." Writing is Zasetsky's laborious way of thinking. His achievement is that he has managed, after untold agonies and frustrations, to describe his unending confusions with terrible clarity. It would take a lobotomized Samuel Beckett to match it. -- R.Z.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.