The world no longer seemed “stable” to him, it had disintegrated. But his problems did not end here. As the excerpts from his journals indicate, although he had been a fourth-year student at a polytechnic institute, he was now illiterate. This sudden revelation occurred just as he became ambulatory and could leave his room.
I went into the hall to look for a bathroom I’d been told was next door. I went up to the room and looked at the sign on the door. But no matter how long I stared at it and examined the letters, I couldn’t read a thing. Some peculiar, foreign letters were printed there—what bothered me most was that they weren’t Russian. When a patient passed by, I pointed to the sign and asked him what it was. “It’s the men’s room,” he replied. “What’s the matter with you, can’t you read?”
I stood there as though rooted to the spot simply unable to understand why I couldn’t read that sign. After all, I could see, I wasn’t blind. But why was it written in a foreign alphabet? Wasn’t someone playing a joke on me—a sick man?
I tried to figure it out again . . . and . . . the same thing happened! I went up to another door and looked at the sign there. Something was written there but it wasn’t in Russian either. I looked at the sign and thought: It must be the ladies’ room, it’s got to be. But then I went up to the sign on the first door again, and it seemed just as foreign and incomprehensible to me. For a long while I stared at the two signs, which obviously designated the men’s and ladies’ rooms I’d been told were there. But how was I to tell which was which?
The shock of this revelation was reinforced when he went to an oculist to have his eyes examined.
The eye doctor had me take a seat, turned on a small light, and asked me to look at a chart containing letters of various sizes. With a pointer she indicated a letter midway down the chart. I saw some letter there but didn’t know what it was, and so I just didn’t answer. I said nothing, because I didn’t know what letter it was. The doctor was impatient: “Why don’t you say anything?” she asked. Finally it dawned on me to tell her I didn’t know the letter. Irritated but, it seemed, astonished she said: “Can someone your age still be illiterate?”
When I just look at a letter, it seems unfamiliar and foreign to me. But if I strain my memory and recite the alphabet out loud, I definitely can remember what the letter is.
He was read a newspaper and enjoyed listening, for it put him into touch with life again. But when he picked up the paper to have a look at it, he was in for a shock:
What on earth was this? The letters looked foreign to me and I figured it probably wasn’t a Russian newspaper. But when I looked at the name of the newspaper on the first page, the type was very large and seemed familiar to me. So I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t printed in Russian. I thought it might be a newspaper from one of the Soviet republics. Still, the company commander was reading it to us in Russian. I interrupted him and asked: “This paper . . . what’s the name of it? Is it . . . is it Russian?” He was on the verge of laughing, but when he noticed the bandages on my head, he replied: “Naturally, it’s Pravda. You can see, can’t you, that it’s printed in Russian?”
I looked at the first page again but couldn’t read the name of the paper, even though I could see the print was enormous and resembled the word Pravda. But why couldn’t I read it? To console myself I thought I must still be asleep and dreaming all this. Certainly, I couldn’t be so badly off that I wasn’t able to read any longer. Impossible!
Suddenly I got up, looked at the newspaper, and immediately saw a photograph of Lenin and was overjoyed to recognize that familiar face. Still, I couldn’t read any of the print, not even the largest type in the word Pravda—I just couldn’t recognize this. Something’s very peculiar, I thought. At that time the idea that my head injury had made me ignorant and illiterate just wouldn’t register. Was it possible I couldn’t read Russian any more—not even worlds like Lenin and Pravda? Something was wrong. It was ridiculous.
He was perplexed, and for a long time he refused to believe he no longer could read.
How awful it is not to be able to read. Only by reading does a person learn and understand things, begin to have some ideas about the world he lives in, and see things he was never aware of before. Learning to read means having some magic power, and suddenly I’d lost this. I was miserable, terribly upset by it.
But he refused to remain incapacitated. He would simply have to begin from the beginning and learn to read. It seemed peculiar to have to study to become literate again, but this is precisely what he did.