Skorokhodova Olga Ivanovna is a famous writer who, by the will of fate, finds herself in a difficult life situation. Deprived of childhood vision and hearing, with the help of indifferent noble people, she was able to adequately realize herself, leaving a huge literary heritage to her descendants. The texts of her works contain interesting material about the peculiarities of imagination and the specifics of perception of the surrounding world by a deaf-blind person.
Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova, whose verses help to penetrate the inner world of a person without hearing and sight, managed to maintain sincere interest and joy in life and convincingly conveyed this to the young generation in soulful literary lines. These records, relevant today, will be in demand in the future. Thanks to Professor I. A. Sokolyansky, colleagues and friends, Olga Skorokhodova’s own biography took place: creative and scientific.
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 the father, drafted into the army during the First World War, did not return to the family. At the age of 8, the girl suffered from 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 relatives for a short period, then she was enrolled in a school for the blind (Odessa city).
It was in this institution that Olga managed to survive the hungry years, but no one wanted to engage individually with a hearing-and-seeing-girl. 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 lack of technical personnel, due to which blind children were forced to take care of themselves.
Under the tutelage of I. A. Sokolyansky
Ultimate hearing loss was supplemented by impaired vestibular apparatus: Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova began to have difficulty walking, she often experienced dizziness. The deaf-blind girl was informed by Professor Ivan Afanasyevich Sokolyansky, who practiced in Kharkov and organized the School-Clinic for the deaf-deaf. Olga, who was transferred there in 1925, was given time to get used to the new situation, after which the professor began to restore her speech, which was disturbed after hearing loss.
The institution in which Olga was brought up was very well-maintained and had a small number of students: from 5 to 9 people, each of whom had an individual approach, had her own personal place for classes with a teacher. The facility was also equipped with a common room for exercise, joint games and other recreational activities. The garden was landscaped with paths, fenced beds, lawns and playgrounds for sports. In the summer, swings were installed on its territory, tables were made for table games, hammocks were hung.
Understand, feel, write down
Sokolyansky in working with deaf-blind children was aimed at receiving from them in any, even the simplest form, self-observation, and also taught them to talk about themselves and their own experiences.
Together with Olga, without waiting until she fully mastered the technique of writing, they began to daily describe the events and regularly return to previous records, re-registering each up to 20 times. While studying written and literary speech, Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova edited the described observations, leaving the facts unchanged. The girl kept notes on her own, without any outside interference and outside stories. For the purpose of acquaintance (not editing), the teachers were shown completely ready-made material, which over 17 years of painstaking work had accumulated enough to publish a debut book. By the way, the manuscripts of Olga Skorokhodova were never subjected to editorial corrections upon publication.
Having received secondary education on an individual program, Olga Skorokhodova decided to enter a pedagogical university. At the same time, she began to actively correspond with the writer Maxim Gorky. The girl’s rainbow plans, as well as all Soviet citizens, were destroyed by the Great Patriotic War, during which Olga Skorokhodova 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 presented to readers in 1947. In it, the author very subtly described the various types of sensitivity characteristic of people without hearing and vision: touch, temperature and taste sensations, vibrational feeling, and sense of smell.
Of particular interest are the recordings in which Olga, analyzing her feelings, simultaneously seeks to understand and describe the impressions of people who are able to see and hear the world around them. Self-observation of the writer clearly showed that the knowledge that a person is saturated with 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. The year 1954 was marked by the publication of the second part of the book: “As I Perceive, Imagine and Understand the World,” the introduction to which was the system described by I. Sokolyansky of his painstaking and long-term work on self-observation.
Olga Skorokhodova: creative heritage
The works of Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova became widely known throughout the world, were translated into several languages. The life experience of a person who could not see and hear becomes an example for people in a difficult situation, and the development history is an invaluable material for science and a teaching aid 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 the last days worked as a researcher at the Metropolitan Institute of Defectology. The purposeful strong person who managed to live in pitch darkness and silence all her life in 1982 did not become.