Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  Some of the speeches are taken from scientific literature. Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time provided the material for Bekhterev’s reflections on Breteuil. Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Advice for a Young Investigator, Nikolai Krementsov’s A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science, Alexandr Luria’s The Nature of Human Conflicts, and Vladimir Bekhterev’s General Principles of Human Reflexology were important sources for both characters and setting, and in the case of Bekhterev’s speech at Congress, some of it is taken directly from his book on Reflexology.

  For general knowledge about scientific thinking of the period and how it played out in the Soviet context, I relied on a variety of books, including Nikolai Krementsov’s Stalinist Science and A.B. Kozhevnikov’s Stalin’s Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists. For general knowledge about the period, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Svetlana Boym’s Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, and various books by Richard Stites were instrumental. Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary provided much visual detail. The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, and interviews contained therein, was an incredible resource. Innumerable academic articles provided me with historical and neurological detail, but two were especially important: Alla A. Vein and Marion L.C. Maat-Schieman’s “Famous Russian Brains: Historical Attempts to Understand Intelli­gence” (2008), and Jochen Richter’s “Pantheon of Brains: The Moscow Brain Research Institute 1925-1936.” The novel began with my reading Michael Hagner’s brief chapter, “Pantheon of Brains,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’s Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy.

  Acknowledgements

  I’ve had the support of institutions where I’ve studied and institutions where I’ve worked. I am especially grateful to the Creative Writing program at Concordia University where Terry Byrnes, Andre Furlani, and Stephanie Bolster gave serious critical attention to the manuscript at its nascent stages and to Dawson College, which has been as flexible as any employer could. Susan Gillis, in conjunction with the Jeunes Volontaires program and Greg Hollingshead, Daphne Marlatt, and Dick Hebdige at Banff’s Writing Studio all encouraged it forward at key points. In Moscow, Anush Mikaelian and her family revealed a city I’d never have encountered on my own. In New York, the members of NeuWrite workshopped several sections about microtoming the brain, and Rebecca Brachman was kind enough to take me into her lab to see a twenty-first-century microtome in action. Molly Atlas at ICM was one of the book’s most faithful champions. In Tübingen, Germany, where I ought to have been writing my dissertation full time, I found a kitchen table of friends and a supportive supervisor in Ingrid Hotz-Davies, all of whom helped me go further with the project. Thank you to Jutta Kling, Shawn Huelle, Rebecca Hahn, and Susanne Jung. Elisabeth Stewart read the book for its history. My editor, Bethany Gibson, gave careful and challenging feedback, and the time to respond, and Goose Lane Editions has been wonderful to work with from start to finish.

  As for my friends, this book is because of you and so it is dedicated to you. Even after all these years, I am still so awed at the mysterious alchemy that brings us together and binds us through all the vicissitudes: the heartbreaks, the long distances, the change, all the change. It’s customary in such passages to identify one person as the bearer of one specific gift, but I feel incapable of singling you out as if you bore only one, when each of you have come into my life bearing more gifts than I could possibly describe. So, to all of you, thank you for your encouragement, your curiosity, your love and your rage, your wisdom, your energy, your wit, and all the ways you care so deeply. We’ve traded books, shared cigarettes, stayed out all night. We’ve gone away and we’ve come back, we’ve been vulnerable, kind, angry and our most alive: all of this together. At various points, many of you read part or all of this book or talked about it with me or around it, making it deeper and richer, and so much more true. Beyond that, you inspired me with your art, your words and your thought. Brent Arnold, Darren Bifford, Patricia Boushel, Richard Cassidy, Lindsay Cuff, Fiona Foster, Katia Grubisic, Lesley Johnson, Yana Kehrlein, Nika Khanjani, Brian Lander, Jessica Moore, Carlos Oyanedel Salmerón, Stephen Parr, Leila Peacock, Pablo Rodriguez, Johanna Skibsrud, Jonathan Stewart, Megan Switzer, Marko Teodorski: I am so grateful for your presence in my life and in this work. To M.K. Carr, Catherine Cooper, Sarah Faber, Susan Paddon, and Rebecca Silver Slayter: thank you for reflections on the earliest versions of this manuscript. All those thanks plus more to Samara Chadwick, who has heard more iterations of this than maybe anyone, over kitchen tables in Bergamo and Montreal. And to Heather Jessup, who thought I could do this long before I did: thank you for this and for so much more, your friendship means the world to me. To my family, thank you for your ongoing support, and to Mark Mann, my one and only, thank you for seeing me and loving me as you do.

  Author photo: Mark Mann

  Jocelyn Parr was born in New Zealand but grew up on Canada’s West Coast. Her writing has been published in France, Germany, and Canada and in magazines such as Matrix, Grain, and Brick. She now lives in Montreal, where she teaches history at Dawson College.