Generational Restoration: Oleg Igorevich Zhurin, Petr Dmitrievich Baranovskii and a resurrection on Red Square

This paper examines a remarkable episode in Russian cultural history: the intergenerational collaboration of Petr Dmitrievich Baranovskii, the most accomplished restorer in the annals of Russian cultural preservation, and Oleg Igorevich Zhurin, a prominent Moscow architect and Baranovskii mentee. In the 1920s, Baranovskii began a restoration of the storied Kazan’ Mother of God Cathedral on Red Square, a memorial to Russians’ great victory over foreign invaders in the Time of Troubles, hoping to reveal and restore its 17th century essence. Stalinist city planners halted his work and razed the cathedral, the nearby Resurrection Gates and Iverskaia Mother of God chapel. Through the difficult succeeding decades, Baranovskii kept alive the hope that the Kazan’ Cathedral might be brought back in some fashion. A young colleague, Oleg Igorevich Zhurin, picked up Baranovskii’s fallen standard just a few months before Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev came to power. He and like-minded cultural preservationists took advantage of rapidly changing attitudes towards history and culture in the late 1980s to bring about a remarkable resurrection of the 17th century on Red Square. Working from Baranovskii’s 1920s research, Zhurin brought both the Kazan’ Cathedral and the neighboring Resurrection Gates back to life. This was a true “generational restoration.”

Cameron

This chapter is about another young colleague who had had a very different life before he became a salesman at the electronics store. He drives the author in his flashy Cadillac and tells him his story about the car.

Paleontology as a component of development of synthetic theory of evolution

The idea of evolution in natural history, which formed the basis for radical change not only in science but also in the thinking of modern humanity, was formulated and perceived in its integrity and perspective only in the ХІХ century. In the Earth sciences, this idea was first presented by the prominent English geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) in 1830-1833, and in the life sciences evolutionism won after the 1859 publication of the book by a young colleague and student of Ch. Lyell - Charles Darwin (1809-1882) - «On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection».

The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding

This chapter examines the kind of cognitive style that hinders, or promotes, understanding. The topic is introduced with a critical look at two books that exemplify opposite styles—one a study of the Mexican revolution by Hirschman's young colleague at Harvard, John Womack, and the other a study of violence in Colombia by the political scientist James L. Payne. Hirschman has little sympathy for the latter and reserves some unflattering words for what he had seen as a disease in the social sciences—the search for models and paradigms that aim to prove theories rather than understand realities; among other things, the tendency had collapsed into old failurist nostrums Hirschman was combating in Latin America, and that were now infecting North American social science.

Osler and the “medico-chirurgical neurologists”: Horsley, Cushing, and Penfield

✓ Sir Victor Horsley's lecture “On the Technique of Operations on the Central Nervous System,” delivered in Toronto in 1906, set the stage for an appraisal of Sir William Osler as a protagonist for the emerging specialty of neurosurgery. During his time at McGill University from 1871 to 1884, Osler performed more than 1000 autopsies. His pathological reports covered the topics of cerebral aneurysm, apoplectic hemorrhage, vascular infarction, subdural hematoma, meningitis, multiple sclerosis, cerebral abscess, and brain tumor. He wrote about cerebral localization and anatomy and the relationships between the morphological characteristics of the brain and intelligence and criminality. During his continuing career at Philadelphia and Baltimore, Osler published widely on problems in clinical neurology, including monographs on cerebral palsies and chorea as well as chapters on disorders of the nervous system in the first five editions of his popular textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine. He became familiar with many of the outstanding figures in medical neurology of his time. Regarding neurosurgery, Osler commended the pioneer operation for a brain tumor in 1884 by Rickman Godlee and the surgery for epilepsy in 1886 by Horsley. In 1907, in discussing the state of brain surgery as reviewed by Horsley, William Macewen, and others, Osler made a plea for “medico-chirurgical neurologists, properly trained in the anatomical, physiological, clinical and surgical aspects of the subject.” He played a significant role as a referring physician, mentor, and friend to his young colleague Harvey Cushing (later to become Osler's Boswell), who was breaking new ground in neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Beyond that Osler became an inspiring hero figure for his Oxford student Wilder Penfield, who a few decades later would establish a neurological institute at McGill University where medico-chirurgical neurology would flourish.