Somewhere not far from our furthest position on the front lines, in a tent blazing with light, I finally came to again. . . .
For some reason, I couldn’t remember anything, couldn’t say anything. My head seemed completely empty, flat, hadn’t the suggestion of a thought or memory, just a dull ache and buzz, a dizzy feeling.
But as I lay on the operating table, every once in a while I’d catch the faint outlines of a man with a broad, thick-set face, whose angry eyes peered at me through glasses, as he told the doctors and aides what they were to do with me.
People in bright white coats, caps on their heads and gauze masks drawn up to their eyes, were bending over me. I vaguely remember lying on the operating table while several people held me by the hands, feet, and head so tightly I couldn’t move a muscle.
All I can remember is that the doctors and aides were holding me down . . . remember that I was screaming, gasping for breath . . . that warm sticky blood was running down my ears and neck, that my mouth and lips had a salty taste. . . .
I remember that my skull was bursting, and I had a sharp, rending pain in my head. . . . But I had no strength left, couldn’t scream any more, just gasped. My breathing stopped—any minute now and I was going to die. . . .
Recalling the days right after his operation, he wrote:
My head was a complete blank then. I just slept, woke, but simply couldn’t think, concentrate, or remember a thing. My memory—like my life—hardly seemed to exist.
At first I couldn’t even recognize myself, or what, had happened to me, and for a long time (days on end) didn’t even know where I’d been hit. My head wound seemed to have transformed me into some terrible baby.
I’d hear a doctor talking to someone. But since I couldn’t see him, I’d pay no attention to him. Suddenly he’d approach me, reach out and touch me, and ask: “How goes it, Comrade Zasetsky?” I wouldn’t answer, just begin to wonder why he was asking me that. After he’d repeated my name several times, I’d finally remember that “Zasetsky” was my name. Only then would it occur to me to say: “Okay.”
Right after I was wounded, I seemed to be some newborn creature that just looked, listened, observed, repeated, but still had no mind of its own. That’s what I was like in the beginning. Afterwards, when I’d had a chance to hear words that people use again and again in conversation or thinking, various clusters of “memory fragments” developed, and from these I began to make some sense out of the life around me and remember what words meant.
By the end of the second month I recalled who Lenin was, understood words like sun, moon, cloud, rain, and remembered my first and last name and patronymic. At times I even remembered that somewhere I had a mother and two sisters, a brother too before the war, who’d been missing since the first year of fighting (he was stationed with the troops in Lithuania).
Later on, the fellow in the next bed took an interest in me and even promised to write home for me if I could remember my address. But how was I to remember it? It was awfully hard. Was I likely to remember that when I couldn’t even think of my mother’s and sisters’ names? . . .
Because of my injury I’d forgotten everything I ever learned or knew . . . everything . . . and had to start from scratch to develop again—at least up to a certain point. After that, my development suddenly stopped, and I’ve been that way ever since. Mostly, it’s because of my memory that I have so much trouble understanding things. You see, I’d forgotten absolutely everything and had to start all over trying to identify, recall, and understand things with the kind of memory a child has.
Because of that head wound I’d become an abnormal person—except that I wasn’t insane. Not at all. I was abnormal because I had a huge amount of amnesia and for a long time didn’t even have any trace of memories.
My mind was a complete muddle and confusion all the time, my brain seemed so limited and feeble. Before, I used to operate so differently.
[Translator’s note: Many of the entries quoted from this point on were written in the present tense, appropriate enough considering that the man’s problems persisted, despite the passage of time. Professor Luria has scrupulously preserved the repetitions and inconsistencies which are symptoms of the patient’s condition.]
I’m in a kind of fog all the time, like a heavy half-sleep. My memory’s a blank. I can’t think of a single word. All that flashes through my mind are some images, hazy visions that suddenly appear and just as suddenly disappear, giving way to fresh images. But I simply can’t understand or remember what these mean.
Whatever I do remember is scattered, broken down into disconnected bits and pieces. That’s why I react so abnormally to every word and idea, every attempt to understand the meaning of words.
He was not alone in realizing this. Moreover, he not only felt but was convinced that other people noticed this, that everyone was aware he had become a totally different person, fit for nothing, the mere semblance of a man who for all practical purposes had died. In short, a man who had been killed in the war.
Now people finally realize the damage a brain injury can do. They know what I was like before the war, before I was wounded, and can see how different I am now—good for nothing, incapable of any kind of work, anything at all.
Again and again I tell people I’ve become a totally different person since my injury, that I was killed March 2, 1943, but because of some vital power of my organism, I miraculously remained alive. Still, even though I seem to be alive, the burden of this head wound gives me no peace. I always feel as if I’m living out a dream—a hideous, fiendish nightmare—that I’m not a man but a shadow, some creature that’s fit for nothing. . . .
He had been “killed” March 2 and was living a senseless existence, a kind of half-sleep that made it difficult for him to believe he really was alive:
It’s hard to believe this is really life, but if it is a dream (and is it?) I can’t just wait until I wake up. Also, my new therapist tells me we’ve already been at war for three years and that I’ve become ill and illiterate because of a serious brain injury.
So that means I haven’t been dreaming all this time—of course not. A dream can’t last this long or be so monotonous. That means I’ve actually been experiencing this all these years. How horrible this illness is! I still can’t get a grip on myself, can’t figure out what I was like before, what’s happened to me. ...
But once in a while, when I consider what my mind is like now, I wonder: Is this really me? Am I dreaming or is this for real? It’s lasted too long now to be a dream, that sort of thing doesn’t happen, particularly when you know time is passing so quickly. But if this is life, and not a dream, why am I still sick? Why hasn’t my head stopped aching and buzzing, why do I always feel so dizzy?
I have just as much hope as ever of doing something with my life, and so I don’t want people to think I’m a hopeless case. I’m doing everything I can to accomplish this, and little by little use what possibilities I have.
Time passes, but not the agony of this man whose awareness had been so devastated by injury. By this time the front lines were far behind him, they had been followed by a whole chain of hospitals—first in Moscow (then a front-line city), later in small provincial towns. In one of these he was actually quartered in a building where he had once gone to school. He remembered those large, clean rooms that formerly had been classrooms, and the many people who came up to ask how he felt. Following this, there were numerous other trips, then a long train trip where at each station new patients were taken aboard the hospital train. Finally he reached the rehabilitation hospital in the Urals.