The Economist - USA (2022-03-12)

The Economist March 12th 2022 Culture 73

ReflectionsfromUkraine

Tapestries of war

T

heheroesof“LuckyBreaks”,a beguil­
ingbookaboutwarinUkrainebyYev­
geniaBelorusets,donotconformtoideals
ofmartialheroism.Theydonotengagein
battle, except againstthe fear,displace­
mentandlossthatbattlesbring.Almostall
arewomen,doingjobsgenerallyseenas
feminine: theyare florists,manicurists,
cosmetologists.Theyskirttheedgesofhis­
toricalevents,ratherthanstandingattheir
centres.Theauthorexplainsthisfocus:

Theinsignificantandthesmall,theacci­

dental,thesuperfluous,therepressed—all

of thesethingsattractmyattentionbecause

theywillneverturnintothetrophiesthat

...winnerscarryfromthepresentintothe

futuresothattheymightlaydowntheir

booty,likebricks,toconstructthedominant

historicalnarrative.

Ms Belorusets isaphotographer and
artistwithlongexperiencedocumenting
under­represented communities in Uk­
raine,fromcoalminersto queer people.
AfterVladimirPutinannexedCrimeaand
sparkeda warintheDonbasin2014,she
turned her cameratowards theregion’s
women.Shebegan recordinginterviews
anddevelopeda haunting,lyricalwriting
style.In“LuckyBreaks”,sheweavestogeth­
er words and images, photographs and
proseportraitsofrealandimaginaryfig­
ures.PublishedinUkrainein 2018 andnow

in English, it has acquired a fresh poignan­

cy  amid  the  renewed  assault  by  Russia’s

president—determined, as he seems to be,

to  come  away  with  historic  booty,  regard­

less of how much blood he spills.

The short chapters are discrete but fea­

ture repeating elements, the same narrator

and  one  recurring  character,  a  spectral

presence called Andrea, a writer for news­

papers  that  no  one  reads.  The  women’s

voices echo and collide; realism bleeds in­

to  dreams  and  fantasies.  The  images  and

texts  are  not  illustrations  or  descriptions

of  each  other,  but  rather  subtle  mutual

commentaries, recalling the work of writ­

ers such as W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole. 

The  book  is  held  together  by  invisible

threads  and  recurring  motifs—including

the act of sewing. In Eugene Ostashevsky’s

deft  translation  of  the  author’s  Russian,  a

woman with “a snow­white face and snow­

white arms, with a golden head of hair and

a  soft  smile  on  her  cherry  lips”  forgets  a

needle in her nightshirt after sewing up a

hole.  Another  decides  to  leave  her  home­

town  and  her  mother,  a  legendary  weaver

of ribbons at the local factory. Embroidery,

rather than sculpture, is the author’s tech­

nique, too; she offers the document, how­

ever unreliable, in place of the monument.

Along the way, the categories of “fact” and

“fiction” crumble.

War has now come to all of Ukraine, in­

cluding  Kyiv,  where  Ms  Belorusets  lives.

Since  the  latest  invasion  began  she  has

posted a poignant online diary on isolarii, a

publishing project. In it, she turns her gaze

on herself, at once the documentarian and

the  documented.  Her  phantasmagoric

flourishes  return:  in  her  shelter,  under

Kyiv’s Golden Gate (which also features in

“Lucky Breaks”), shadows converse. On the

streets, jumpy soldiers see her camera as a

threat.  Despite  the  bombs,  she  carries  on

writing. “The catastrophe needsto be rep­

resented:  only  as  part  of  astorycan  it  be

recognised as a catastrophe.”n

Lucky Breaks.By Yevgenia Belorusets.
Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky.
New Directions; 112 pages; $14.95.
Pushkin Press; £9.99

Some heroes sew capes

Aneurosciencepioneer

Nerves of steel

I

n 1906 theNobelprizeinphysiologyor

medicine  was  shared  by  two  scientists

with  irreconcilable  views  of  the  brain.  At

the  ceremony,  Camillo  Golgi,  an  Italian

anatomist and the elder of the pair, spoke

first—and  shocked  the  audience  by  slam­

ming his rival’s theory. When the other lau­

reate  spoke,  he  described  his  scientific

results,  building  a  convincing  case  on

facts. But Santiago Ramón y Cajal conclud­

ed with barbed sympathy for “this scientist

who,  in  the  last  years  of  a  life  so  well­

filled”, had seen “his most elegant and orig­

inal discoveries [treated] as errors”.

This was one of the founding events of

modern  neuroscience  and  is  the  central

drama  in  Benjamin  Ehrlich’s  new  biogra­

phy  of  Cajal.  Golgi  had  devised  a  staining

technique,  using  silver  nitrate,  which  al­

lowed  nervous  tissue  to  be  visualised  in

more detail than ever before. Cajal perfect­

ed the technique and claimed, on the basis

of his observations through a microscope,

that  the  nervous  system—including  the

brain—was  comprised  of  individual  cells,

or neurons. This went against the prevail­

ing theory, supported by Golgi, which held

that it consisted of a reticulum or continu­

ous sheet of fibres. Cajal was right.

The “peasant genius”, as his friend and

fellow  histologist  Charles  Sherrington

called  him,  lived  out  a  scientific  rags­to­

riches story. He was born to a modest fam­

ily  in  the  remote  Pyrenees  of  Aragon,  at  a

time  when  Spain  was  a  scientific  back­

water. By the time he died in 1934—having

obliged British, French and German scien­

tists  to  learn  Spanish  just  to  read  his  pa­

pers—he  had  almost  single­handedly

placed  the  country  on  the  scientific  map,

in the process ensuring his own status as a

national  hero.  Not  bad  for  a  delinquent

who was forced to steal bones from grave­

yards to study anatomy in his youth.

What made that possible was a rare mix

of  scientific  curiosity  and  artistic  flair—

and  a  wife,  aptly  named  Silveria,  whose

faith in him never wavered. “Half of Cajal is

his  wife,”  he  liked  to  say.  “The  Texture  of

the Nervous System of Man and the Verte­

brates”, his masterpiece of 1904, is a scien­

tific classic; his drawings of neurons were

prized  as  works  of  art.  Cajal  was  blessed

The Brain in Search of Itself:

Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story

of the Neuron. By Benjamin Ehrlich. Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; 464 pages; $35. To be

published in Britain in April; £27.99