The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Another fortochka was Alexander Luria, who lectured in the clinical psychology specialty. Luria had served as chairman of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in the 1920s,19 had survived by going into neurology, and had become a great storyteller of the mind. Across a generation, an ocean, and the Iron Curtain, he managed to inspire Oliver Sacks, who considered Luria his teacher in the art of the “neurological novel.”20 The most important fortochka of all was found in the university library, which contained the spetskhran, a restricted-access collection to which a resourceful student or researcher could gain access. The spetskhran contained Freud’s case studies. It was the most compelling, most engrossing, most mind-shattering thing Arutyunyan had ever read. Only years later, long after the last of the old Russian psychoanalysts had died, did she realize that what tied all the fortochkas together was not just that they gave her new knowledge and that they contrasted markedly with the mind-numbing recitations that filled the university, but that they all saw and described human beings the way she wanted to understand them.