230

FROM THE WORKS OF VYGOTSKY

p “One can hardly understand the history of labour and the history of speech separately. Man has created not only the tools which gave him mastery over nature; he has created stimuli for directing his own behaviour with the help of which he can control his psychic processes. This is seen clearly if one looks at the early stages of man’s development. On Borneo and Celebes sticks for digging which had smaller sticks attached to the end were found. While sowing rice, the stick was used to hoe the soil and the little stick produced a sound. That sound was something like a working exclamation or order to set the pace for the movements. The sound of the contrivance attached to the hoe replaces the human voice, or at any rate performs the same function.

“That blending of sign and tool as symbolically expressed in the primitive hoe shows how early the sign and later, its highest form—the word—began to play the role of human tools and how early the sign stimulus came to fulfil a specific function in the overall structure of the operations that took shape in the early stages of man’s labour activity.”

FROM MESHCHERYAKOV’S BOOK

“From the Marxist point of view, one must consider man as active and only then as perceiving, sensing, and learning. An attempt to apply the theory of historical materialism to the development of the human psyche was made by the outstanding Soviet psychologist Lev 231 Vygotsky in the 1920s and 1930s. Vygotsky’s studies gave us new insights into the development of the psyche, not only historically but also in the individual. The studies in genetic psychology by Leontiev, Luria, Zaporozhets, Galperin, and Elkonin have developed Vygotsky’s ideas, the essence of which is the importance of objects and norms of human culture and the communication between adult and child in the mental development of the latter. These studies provide theoretical and concrete scientific grounds for thinking that the child’s mentality is shaped by assimilating—’ acquiring’ to use Marx’s expression—social experience. This trend in psychology which realises the theory of activity in combination with the idea of the individual psyche as a basically social entity, is now prevalent in Soviet psychology. The categories of that scientific trend have been analysed by Leontiev. In the field of education and philosophy, the ideas of the role of practical activity in psychic development are being pursued by Ilyenkov, Davydov and others.”

DAVYDOV ON MESHCHER YAKOV’S AWAKENING TO LIFE

p “Many years have passed since Sokolyansky proved that deaf, dumb, and blind persons could be made intelligent. It is now a well-known fact. The process has been described in detail in lectures and popular pamphlets. However, his prewar results reproduced many times in experiments by Meshcheryakov can and must be provided with a profound theoretical interpretation because its results are of fundamental relevance for the whole of psychology. Let me dwell on two points: the character and role of the genetic modelling method in psychological studies and the nature of thought.

p “For decades, the descriptive method dominated genetic psychology. That made it possible to fix and describe the empirically observable psychic traits of children at various stages of development. The materials obtained by this method prompted some empirical correlations between the age of the children and their level of consciousness and intellectual maturity. Paradoxically, as these materials were accumulated, it emerged that mental development does not seem to be determined by training and education, but follows its own immanent laws. That idea was most 232 vividly and convincingly expressed in the work of Jean Piaget, a major modern psychologist. The idea confounded practicians. And one must say that within the framework of the descriptive method, this was the only conclusion possible.

p “Back in the early 1930s, Vygotsky came up with a hypothesis that mental development is realised in the form of learning. He believed that to find the interconnection between development and learning, a very different method must be used—the active and purposeful moulding of certain psychic qualities in a person. Initially, that process could best be carried out under special experimental conditions which model the process being studied. Once these conditions are known, the corresponding traits can be formed in man under ordinary circumstances. This new method was tentatively called ’genetic modelling’, and for many years it was neglected. And the traditional descriptive method often seemed adequate for the development of the child under ordinary conditions.

p “There is a breakthrough in psychological thinking associated with the work of Sokolyansky and Meshcheryakov who, due to exceptional circumstances, could handle children only by a method similar to the genetic modelling method. With a deaf, dumb, and blind child, everything must be formed at a predetermined level—the construction of psychic process is simultaneously a means of shaping personality and a means of studying it. In the language of today, it can be called unity of experimental training and instruction and the study of the nature of psychological processes.

p “The effectiveness of that method has now been demonstrated by numerous studies in child and educational psychology. One is still often asked what the essence of that method is. To this I can reply by advising a careful study of the works of Sokolyansky and Meshcheryakov. They contain both the theoretical principles of the method and its practical application. It is for historians to judge how the work of Vygotsky and the activity of Sokolyansky and Meshcheryakov are connected. One thing is clear already, however: in both cases we have a fundamentally new method of experimental research in psychology, apparently amply suited to serve its purposes. That circumstance 233 calls for both profound theoretical analysis and redressing a historical injustice. Our historians of psychology-have unfortunately overlooked the pointedly dialectical tradition of the theoretical model of the psyche, of the ’ego’, ’the soul’, or ’the self as expounded by Descartes, Spinoza, and later by Fichte, which one must bear in mind if one is to understand the present methods of revealing the mysteries of the soul. This method is central to all Meshcheryakov’s work.

“The past few decades have produced a mountain of literature about thought. While it contains much that is interesting and instructive, a lot is derivative. A tradition which is inherently linked with the descriptive method has established itself in these studies, yet its originators also pledge fealty to the method of genetic modelling. I think Meshcheryakov’s works have shown that thought is a form of operational activity. Besides, being a form of such activity, thought is least of all determined by the meanings of words and utterances. Philosophers have long established these propositions in the philogenesis of thought. Positivism and behaviorism were responsible for the prolonged separation of experimental psychology from these materialistic and dialectical traditions. Meshcheryakov’s work revived them by indicating ways for concrete experimental study of them.”

FROM ALEXEILEONTIEVS SPEECH AT A MEETING
OF THE ACADEMIC COUNCIL OF THE PSYCHOLOGY
DEPARTMENT, MOSCOW UNIVERSITY

p “The brilliant results of the work of Sokolyansky and Meshcheryakov were possible because they represented a blend of the best materialistic traditions of Russian science (Sokolyansky began as a pupil of Bekhterev and Pavlov) with Marxist-Leninist philosophy, with a dialectical materialist conception of the nature of consciousness and thought, and their connections with the external world. No other philosophical conception could offer the clue to the problem of instructing and forming the personality of deaf, dumb, and blind children either theoretically or in practice. And the logic of the search for a solution to this problem led Sokolyansky to overcome the mechanistic notions of the mind and personality which he entertained in his youth.

p “Before Sokolyansky’s work the world knew only two 234 instances of the education of deaf, dumb, and blind children, two landmarks: Laura Bridgman, a pupil of the American teacher Howe (a detailed account of her story was given by Charles Dickens) and Helen Keller, ’the miracle of the century’, who was instructed by Anne Sullivan. Although Howe’s achievements were rather modest (Laura, according to Lesgaft, was doomed to ’knitting stockings’ all her life), they deeply impressed many people of that time. But that was nothing compared with the sensation created by the instruction of Helen Keller. She became a writer, the focus of a high society salon, and lived her life basking in world fame; even American presidents thought it an honour to be photographed with her. Mark Twain compared her achievements with the victories of Alexander the Great and Napoleon. Helen Keller was surrounded by strident publicity, and she was portrayed as (and thought herself to be) a miracle—the miracle of a person consigned to eternal darkness being visited by divine inspiration, seeing the light of Logos.

p “Such a view of the phenomenon of Helen Keller was in accordance with the underlying ideas of twentieth century bourgeois philosophy. The church hailed the Keller phenomenon as support for its religious doctrines. That was facilitated by the failure of naive mechanistic theories to explain the phenomenon. There seemed to be only one option—to admit that man had an innate spirituality that needed only a slight external stimulus to be ’awakened’ and embark on ’self-development’.

p “This was the prevalent view until a kind of ideological antipode of Keller, Olga Skorokhodova, appeared in the Soviet Union. Her personality and her life—which was a life of heroic struggle and work, and not the sheltered life of a darling of high-society—can be seen as the embodiment of the scientific and moral principles which guided Sokolyansky in educating her. Olga Skorokhodova, like Helen Keller, became a writer. Those who have read her books will know that they record in excellent literary language the immense and arduous experience of her own observations and reflections on the world around her. Olga Skorokhodova’s books give us an inside look at the complex process of the birth of a soul through intense work, the path along which Sokolyansky led her. Along 235 that path there were doubts, setbacks and sorrows. Olga Skorokhodova was a member of the Young Communist League, she lived through the tragedy of the Second World War in which she lost her comrades (Sokolyansky’s school near Kharkov was burnt by the Nazis in the summer of 1941, and with it the ’defective’ inmates. She herself survived by a fluke). Initially a pupil and then an indispensable associate of Sokolyansky and Meshcheryakov, senior research worker at the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped, Olga Skorokhodova had done a lot to equip our students for life and university studies.

p “However, as long as Olga Skorokhodova remained the only person in our country to have conquered the handicaps of blindness and deafness, her experience could not serve as a clinching argument in our ideological dispute with the interpreters of the phenomenon of Helen Keller. To be recognised as valid, a scientific experiment must be duplicated. A unique incident, a stroke of luck is not a conclusive argument, because one can always say, ’anything can happen once’, and thus ascribe the success to unique qualities of the phenomenon which may not have universal relevance.

p “But now theoretical and philosophical conclusions will have to be made. Now we have not a unique phenomenon but a group of four excellent students. They are not ’ Mozarts’, but logical products of the colossal work over which Sokolyansky’s disciple, Meshcheryakov, has presided for the past fifteen years. These young people have come from a special school which has given a secondary education to dozens of deaf, dumb, and blind children, which puts an end to any talk about ’revelations’ or innate gifts.

p “The materialist tradition developed by Sokolyansky determined the path of his searches, which relied not on revelations or extraordinary circumstances and unique incidents but on a persistent search for a sensible way of moulding the mentality of children who were born blind and deaf or had lost their sight and hearing at an early age. I must add that the loss of hearing and vision in infancy leads to the same results as congenial blindness and deafness, because the budding human psyche quickly degenerates. The whole work was, of course, based on maximum use of the child’s remaining sensuous link with the 236 external world, the whole spectrum of its sensations. These are, above all, tactile sensations and also vibratory and olfactory sensations. To this one could add the so-called ’sixth sense’, a far from mystical, albeit somewhat more complex faculty which enables a person to identify an obstacle blocking his way or a space (an open door), etc., before him. These phenomena have been rather well described in the literature, so I need not dwell on them here.

p “In general, in the case of such children, there is a highly inadequate basis for the development of a full-fledged mind because of the extreme scarcity of sense information. The result is a very discouraging picture: while the brain is intact, contact with surrounding people is absent. Hence, learning is impossible. Even the objects of the surrounding world are not initially discrete, and the sensations originating in the organism itself are mixed and confused with external sensations so that no clear image of the external world is formed. Complete helplessness in space and, what is most amazing, a total absence of orientative reactions. There is no need for objects, there are just elementary organic needs which cannot generate organised or oriented behaviour. For, to use Sechenov’s words, organic needs contain ’no elements that could direct movement one way or another or modify it according to terrain or accidental meetings’.

p “The psyche, in this case—if one can use the word psyche at all—is something amorphous, unorganised and chaotic both objectively and subjectively. No stable images can be isolated from this stream of sensations.

p “In order to use the remaining sources for cognition of the surrounding world and development of the mind, an actual basis for their development had to be found, so a long search began. Eventually the process of learning to handle objects provided the clue for the modelling of the human mind. Let me specify—I am referring to human handling of man-made objects, i. e., objects made by man and for man the combination of which creates, in Marx’s words, the inorganic body of man. It is through such actions that the deaf, dumb, and blind child can first become aware of the functional qualities of objects, i. e., the way they are used by the social man, and come to identify objects as things existing separately from one another and from the 237 person handling them. By being included in the ’working process’ and ’working communication’, to use Meshcheryakov’s favourite expressions, the child comes to regard the external world in a human way and gets a human image of that world.

p “Actions with objects which the child carries out jointly with the teacher and under his (manual) guidance provide the basis for acquiring gestures, the elementary language of communication. Initially, the gesture is the same action performed in the absence of a real object (spoon, towel, doll, etc.) and by virtue of that, acquiring a new function, the function (meaning) of a sign, a form of communication with another person collaborating in operational actions. Gradually the gesture is ’reduced’, i.e., becomes more symbolic, which prepares a natural transition to the verbal (initially, finger) denotation of actions and their objects and for a system of such denotations, i.e., language in the proper sense of the word.

p “Having mastered language deaf, dumb, and blind children have new horizons opened before them for the development of their mentality and personality and new possibilities for operational activities involving the senses. The secret of success was that the whole process of education and instruction was geared to the gradual transformation of actions with external objects into internal actions, i.e., the ’internalisation’ of external activity. This applies equally to all forms of activity—intellectual, moral, emotional, aesthetic and any other. Even facial expressions were no exception. I remember the plaster masks with the help of which Sokolyansky taught his children human facial expressions. He regarded mime as a kind of language, a means of communication. But having become a means of expressing emotional states, the mime exerted immense influence on the organisation of the emotional sphere. Human facial expressions humanised the emotional sphere.

“And, of course, the solution of the problem of deaf, dumb, and blind children offers some instructive facts for the linguist who is wrestling with the problem of the links between language, speech, and thought; for the teacher, who is seeking ways to combine intellectual and moral development with education through labour; for 238 the socio-psychologist investigating small ethic groups; and for the psychophysiologist studying the link between the work of the hand and the work of the brain... I very much hope that today’s event will attract the attention to the problem of deaf, dumb, and blind children that the matter deserves due to the moral, theoretical, and practical educational opportunities offered by the solution of this problem.”

FROM BONIFATY KEDROV’S SPEECH AT A MEETING OF
THE ACADEMIC COUNCIL OF THE PSYCHOLOGY
DEPARTMENT, MOSCOW UNIVERSITY

p “The unique experiment of Sokolyansky and Meshcheryakov is the first and only one of its kind in the history of science. And all its implications must be somehow confirmed and assessed. I think a major serious scientific work analysing and summarising the educational and psychological aspects of the matter and showing its profound philosophical significance is necessary. In communicating with the deaf, dumb, and blind students, I became convinced that their intellectual histories provide us with invaluable material for understanding the nature of creativity, scientific discovery, and human talent. For literally every step in the life of such people is a discovery... Our present students should not be passive objects of observation. They are already equal partners in the experiment revealing the nature of creativity, and it is our duty to provide them with an opportunity to make their contributions to science. If we could form a serious scientific team around these students to continue the noble cause of Sokolyansky and Meshcheryakov with their aid, it would, I am sure, be one of the most significant efforts in the history of human thought.

“During his lifetime, Meshcheryakov managed to publish an excellent and profound book Awakening to Life which, however, does not exhaust the material accumulated over the decades. If we could organise a scientific team to replace him to some extent after his untimely death, it would be the finest possible tribute to his memory...”

FROM EVALD ILYENKOV’S SPEECH ATA MEETING
OF THE ACADEMIC COUNCIL OF THE PSYCHOLOGY
DEPARTMENT, MOSCOW UNIVERSITY

p “When Maxim Gorky learned about the early successes of Olga Skorokhodova, then a very young girl, he hailed 239 them as an event comparable with the greatest achievements of human reason in this century, as a serious step in solving that which was the central concern of Gorky’s own life—the task of asserting socialist humanism on earth. No more and no less.

p “Should one regard this view as the poetic hyperbole of an artist moved by the girl’s dramatic life story? Of course not. It is the insight of a man who, due to his many years of communication with Lenin, was well aware that the true wealth of a society depends not on the number of material objects it possesses but on the level of development of the people creating those objects.

“That is why he always looked to education with the sharp eyes of a Leninist humanist, regarding it as the key sphere of social life. He understood that it was this sphere in which the main productive force of society is created— namely, man himself—and that this concept makes the difference between the socialist and bourgeois outlooks. That is why to him the phenomenon of Olga Skorokhodova assumed historic significance. His clear-cut world-view provided Gorky with an amazing theoretical insight: he saw behind all this a perspective which Ivan Sokolyansky himself was unable to see at the time.”

p When introducing Meshcheryakov, who was to report to the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Chemist Academician Semyonov, a Nobel Prize Laureate, described the work of the Sokolyansky-Meshcheryakov school as very underrated and a far from exhausted contribution to science. “I hope,” he said, “that the experiment will attract more serious attention than it has hitherto.”

p That major scientist saw the true implications of the work with deaf, dumb, and blind children even though psychology was far from his field. Meshcheryakov’s achievement had resolved a long-standing argument. All those who wrote about the instruction of the deaf, dumb, and blind—and there were dozens of them, not only teachers and doctors but also historians, writers, public figures, and, of course, theologians—believed that the 240 capacity for communication and speech is inborn and that it must merely be awakened. It never occurred to them, it seemed, that a child who was born blind and deaf and, consequently, dumb, is unaware of the existence of words denoting objects and, moreover, of the existence of the objects themselves and the external world to boot. If such a child failed to develop speech, he was proclaimed feebleminded or an idiot, and in the rare cases when it was possible to teach the child to speak, he was regarded as a genius, a divine phenomenon. They put speech first. Once there is language,.any idea can be put across to the child and it can be told about any object. A great and mystical capacity to influence the “soul” directly was imputed to the word. (In modern terminology one should substitute the word “psyche” for “soul”. Yet the point is that the psyche does not exist and must first be created.)

p So prevalent was this point of view that any facts contradicting it were simply dismissed. Nobody bothered to analyse the history of Helen Keller which she had written herself and which had been reprinted many times.

p The little girl who did not see or hear clung to her mother’s skirt. Kate Keller did not minfl: of course her daughter was a nuisance, but at least she could keep an eye on her that way. Helen touched every object handled by the mother and learned to handle them herself. She knew how to cut bread, stir sugar in a cup and pour water into a kettle. The imitations of these simple actions were her first gestures, to which nobody paid any attention—in fact, the members of retired captain Arthur Keller’s family were annoyed by them: instead of speaking the child was making strange signs. But it was the signs that emerged from the handling of objects which provided the beginnings of language. They would never have developed if there had not been another person in the same household who was three years Helen’s senior.

p “In those days a little coloured girl, Martha Washington, the child of our cook, and Belle, an old setter and a great hunter in her day, were my constant companions. ...I tried hard to teach her my sign language, but she was dull and inattentive. Belle would get up, stretch herself lazily, give one or two contemptuous sniffs, go to the opposite side of the hearth and lie down again, and I, wearied and 241 disappointed, went off in search of Martha.”

p Helen Keller always preserved grateful memories of these two creatures who played an immense role in her life. While the loyal dog was unable to learn what Helen described as “my sign language”, the black girl understood its meaning instantly. And the emerging consciousness of the blind and deaf child arrived at an important conclusion: humans differ from a cat or a dog, although both are “warm and can move".

p “Martha Washington understood my signs, and I seldom had any difficulty in making her do just as I wished. It pleased me to domineer over her, and she generally submitted to my tyranny rather than risk a hand-to-hand encounter. I was strong, active, indifferent to consequences. I knew my own mind well enough and always had my own way, even if I had to fight tooth and nail for it. We spent a great deal of time in the kitchen, kneading dough balls, helping make ice-cream, grinding coffee, quarrelling over the cake-bowl, and feeding the hens and turkeys that swarmed about the kitchen steps.”

p Thus, every day the deaf, dumb, and blind Helen was getting used to the world of objects at the kitchen steps. And the long-suffering and kindly poor soul, a black girl with the sonorous name of Washington, helped Helen Keller in her desperate attempts to turn the imitation of actions with these objects into gestures understandable at least to one person among all those around her.

p It was much later that her mother, having read The American Notes by Dickens, wrote to Doctor Howe in Perkins near Boston pleading for help. Samuel Howe had been dead four years but the school’s new principal, Michael Anagnos, responded to the desperate plea and sent a 20-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan, herself blind, and a graduate of the Perkins School. Doctors had managed to restore her eyesight partially. For six years, Anne had lived at Perkins with the famous Laura Bridgman, and she had spent six months studying the notes of the late Doctor Howe. That was all she knew of the science of the education of the deaf, dumb, and blind. Not that there was any science at that time; one can say with confidence that if Anne Sullivan had had a pupil in worse condition, she would hardly have achieved anything, for all her talent and dedication.

242

“There are some grounds for saying that Helen Keller’s first teacher was the little black girl, Martha Washington.” The sentence is couched in rather guarded tones but that, one feels, is only because Meshcheryakov thought it fit to conform to scholarly style in his Doctoral dissertation.

p Alan Heis left the Zagorsk boarding-school carrying a puppy in his arms. Long-eared, with glittering eyes, it was almost alive—you couldn’t buy such a puppy in a shop. It was made by children who were deprived of sight and hearing. The same children also make clothes, furniture, and other objects. The hammer, the screw-driver, the planejack, the sewing-machine and the pressing iron—they can handle all these as well as normal children in an ordinary school. But the workshops here are not just a place where they learn “skills”. They are places where human personalities are moulded. The hail and the saw, needle and scissors, just like the spoon and fork and other great inventions made by people—and which made them people—humanise the deaf, dumb, and blind child. Guided by its teacher, it covers the long road trodden by humanity and masters the human wisdom concentrated in utensils and tools. By learning to handle a comb or a chisel it learns the human behaviour and that forms its consciousness.

The boarding-school—still the only one in the countrywas founded in 1963. Until that time parents of deaf, dumb, and blind children applied for help to the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped. They were directed to the laboratory headed by Meshcheryakov and before him by Professor Sokolyansky, the founder of Soviet education of the handicapped. There was no in-patient department at the laboratory and all it could do was offer consultations—tips to the parents on how to educate their children. They were told that the first thing to do was to train the child to care for itself—to eat, drink, dress, put personal objects in their proper places, set the table—and a lot of other household chores. This more often than not came as a surprise to mothers and fathers who were prepared to sacrifice anything to make their children intelligent creatures. “We don’t mind taking care of them,” they said, 243 “we’ll feed them and clothe them all right, they are our children, after all. You should tell us how to teach them to talk, how to make them understand speech instead.” And it was very hard to convince the parents that unless the child acquired these simple habits there was not the remotest chance of teaching it to think, because it could not have images of objects. And unless there were some urgent need the deaf, dumb, and blind child would never have anything to do with objects—it is interested only in objects linked with its primary needs.

p Alvin Apraushev, the director of the Zagorsk boardingschool, let fall a remarkable phrase: “It is much harder to teach speech to a child who sees but doesn’t hear than one who is deaf and blind.”

p How is that again? But Heis, after hearing my word- for-word translation, nods his agreement. I was acting as an interpreter and it would have been improper to ask for an explanation but as soon as we were back in Moscow I brought that up.

p “There is nothing to be surprised at,” replied Ilyenkov, “a deaf person with eyesight usually cannot learn to speak and even the written world is beyond his reach. Such people make excellent machine operators and fitters, but they could never write the simplest paper. Why? Because they are not forced to by circumstance. Why learn words and grammar if one can get by with gestures? Of course the teachers at school insist on having them learn the finger spelling and even try to make them talk. But as soon as the teacher turns away they can revert to the simple language of gestures to talk to their friends.”

...As always, necessity dictates our behaviour, and having realised that teachers of the deaf, dumb, and blind make conscious use of it in their work. That necessity became part of the paraphernalia, along with the instruments such as the teletactor.

p The teletactor is an instrument with the help of which a normal person can talk with a blind and deaf one. But 244 it is more than an instrument: it prevents the normal person from remaining blind and deaf to human misery and human courage.

p With the help of the teletactor I communicate with three boys and a girl. They cannot hear nor see, and yet there are their faces—expressive, responsive, inspired.

p I can hear their voices. Sasha’s clear, flawless enunciation, Natasha’s quiet, high-pitched treble, Yura’s unusually loud talk and Sergei’s flat, monotonous voice. I sit in front of an ordinary typewriter and each of the four has his or her index finger on a small plastic circle with six raised dots—arranged by threes in two vertical columns. There is a combination of six dots corresponding to every letter,  [244•*  figure or punctuation mark—it is the Braille alphabet used in books for the blind.

p Accustomed as I am to the typewriter, I do not find communicating with its help strange. But I have an odd feeling when I think that my fingers touching the keyboard actuate little metal dots that press into living flesh. This sensation of communion, physical link with my interlocutor so confused me that I couldn’t talk to them as I would have liked to. “No, it’s not very difficult to study at the Psychology Department.” “Yes, it’s examination time and you have to work hard.” “Of course this happens because we sometimes goof off during the term. We know we should study all the time during the semester, but sometimes we haven’t enough will-power. You pick up a novel instead of your textbook and spend half a day reading it.” “Yes, it’s a different book every time. Right now we are all crazy about Yuri Gherman’s Answerable for Everything." That’s the kind of conversation I had with them.

p At that moment, Ilyenkov joined us. They met him gladly and literally dragged him to the teletactor in eager anticipation of an interesting talk. “Evald Vasilievich,” said Sasha in his staccato way. “Tell us something philosophical. For example, about appearance and essence.”

We talked a little on that subject but then our interest flagged. Suddenly Natasha popped a question: “What do 245 you think, can a noble, heroic death atone for a worthless life?" As she was saying that she simultaneously communicated her message to Sasha, Sergei and Yura through the six dots on the Braille device. “No,” Yura chipped in immediately as he sent his fingers flying over the keyboard. “It is better to live a good life than to die a good death.” “If you think that Gherman’s book says something different, you are mistaken,” Sasha came down on Yura’s side.