Skorokhodova Olga Ivanovna: life in silence and darkness

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Skorokhodova Olga Ivanovna is a famous writer who, by the will of fate, found herself in a difficult life situation. Having lost sight and hearing in childhood, with the help of caring noble people, she managed to adequately realize herself, leaving a huge literary heritage to her descendants. The texts of her works contain the most interesting material about the peculiarities of the imagination and the specifics of the perception of the surrounding world by a deaf-blind person.

Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova, whose poems help to penetrate the inner world of a person deprived of hearing and sight, managed to maintain a sincere interest and joy in life and convincingly conveyed this to the younger generation in penetrating literary lines. These records, relevant today, will be in demand in the future. Thanks to Professor I. A. Sokolyansky, work colleagues and friends, Olga Skorokhodova’s own biography took place: creative andscientific.

Skorokhodova Olga Ivanovna: biography

Olga Skorokhodova was born in 1911 in the small village of Belozerka (now smt) near Kherson. Mom worked part-time in the family of a clergyman, and his father, drafted into the army during the First World War, did not return to the family. At the age of 8, the girl had been ill with meningitis, the complications of which were the complete deprivation of the ability to hear and see by the age of 14. After the death of her mother in 1922, she lived with her relatives for a short period, then she was registered in a school for the blind (the city of Odessa).

It was in this institution that Olga managed to survive the hungry years, but no one wanted to work individually with a girl who could not hear or see anything. Her presence in the classroom with blind children was useless, since Olga did not hear the teacher at all. In addition, the school was often transferred from one place to another, there was a shortage of technical staff, which is why blind children were forced to serve themselves.

Under the tutelage of I. A. Sokolyansky

The final loss of hearing was supplemented by disorders of the vestibular apparatus: Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova began to have difficulty walking, she often had dizziness. The deaf-blind girl was reported to Professor Ivan Afanasyevich Sokolyansky, who practiced in Kharkov and organized the School-Clinic for the Deaf-Blind. Olga, who was transferred there in 1925, was given time to get used to the new environment, after which the professor began to restore her oral speech, which was impaired after hearing loss.

The institution in which Olga was brought up was very comfortable and had a small number of students: from 5 to 9 people, each of whom had an individual approach, there was a personal place for classes with a teacher. Also, the institution was equipped with a common room for physical exercises, joint games and other recreational activities. The garden was landscaped with paths, fenced flower beds, lawns and playgrounds for sports games. In the summer, swings were installed on its territory, tables were taken out for board games, and hammocks were hung.

Understand, feel, write down

Sokolyansky, in his work with deaf-blind children, was aimed at getting from them in any, even the simplest form, introspection, and also taught them to talk about themselves and their own experiences.

Together with Olga, without waiting for her to fully master the technique of writing, they began to describe daily events and regularly return to their previous entries, rewriting each up to 20 times. As she studied written and literary speech, Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova edited the described observations, leaving the facts unchanged. The girl kept records on her own, without any outside interference and stories from outside. For the purpose of familiarization (not editing), I showed the teachers the already completely finished material, which over 17 years of painstaking work has accumulated enough to publish the debut book. By the way, when going to pressOlga Skorokhodova's manuscripts have never been subjected to editorial corrections.

Having received a secondary education on an individual program, Skorokhodova Olga Ivanovna decided to enter the Pedagogical University. At the same time, she began to actively correspond with the writer Maxim Gorky. The bright plans of the girl, as well as all Soviet citizens, were destroyed by the Great Patriotic War, during which Skorokhodova Olga Ivanovna lived in Kharkov. In 1944 she moved to Moscow, where she got a job at the Institute of Defectology under the guidance of I. A. Sokolyansky.

First publications

Her debut book, How I Perceive the World, was introduced to the reader's attention in 1947. In it, the author very subtly described the various types of sensitivity inherent in people without hearing and vision: touch, temperature and taste sensations, vibrational sense, smell.

Of particular interest are the recordings in which Olga, analyzing her feelings, at the same time seeks to understand and describe the impressions of people who are able to see and hear the world around them. The self-observations of the writer clearly showed that the knowledge with which a person is saturated can significantly expand the boundaries of the world he experiences. The published book fully demonstrated to the reader the process of spiritual growth of a person forced to live in absolute darkness and overwhelming silence. 1954 was marked by the publication of the second part of the book: "How I perceive, represent and understand the world around us", a preface towhich was the system of his painstaking and long-term work on self-observation described by I. Sokolyansky.

Olga Skorokhodova: creative legacy

Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova's works have become widely known all over the world and have been translated into several languages. The life experience of a person who did not have the opportunity to see and hear becomes an example for people who find themselves in a difficult situation, and the history of development is an invaluable material for science and a methodological guide in the field of psychiatry, psychology and pedagogy.

Skorokhodova Olga Ivanovna, who is the author of a large number of poems and popular science articles, until her last days worked as a researcher at the Moscow Institute of Defectology. The purposeful strong personality, who managed to live in pitch darkness and silence all his life, died in 1982.