Mechanisms of Understanding: Nikolay A. Rubakin’s Mnema Theory

Abstract

The study provides a brief overview of the Mnema Theory, a bibliopsychological theory based on the achievements in physiology and evolutionary biology formulated by Russian bibliographer, book critic, popularizer of science and writer Nikolai Alexandrovich Rubakin (Nicholas Rubakin), and the one which allows consistently and vividly reveal the structure of the human psyche, and show the mechanisms associated with understanding in general and understanding words and text, in particular. The Theory of Mnema, although presented to the scientific community at the beginning of the 20th century, is nevertheless highly relevant after a hundred years, and there continues to be more and more evidence pointing to the veracity and credibility of its provisions from modern humanitarian and natural sciences. Nikolay A. Rubakin’s Theory of Mnema is formulated on the basis of three laws of bibliopsychology: Zemon’s Law, Humboldt-Potebnya’s Law and Teng’s Law, and shows the structure of the human psyche in the form of mnema, which is a system of records received from external stimuli. According to Nikolay A. Rubakin’s theory, the mnema are a complex open system that is in a state of permanent development, and is always being added to and is continually changing. The complex composition of the reader’s mnema determines the perception and interpretation of a text, which is also understood as the external stimulus that generates a set of engrams and their activation leading to their subsequent ecphorias, as well as the projections that a reader receives when understanding texts. The validity of Nikolay A. Rubakin’s Theory of Mnema is confirmed by psychophysiological experiments aimed at measuring the semantic proximity of words (experiments of A.R. Luria and O.S. Vinogradova), psychological and psycholinguistic experiments (for example, Rorschach tests and various kinds of associative experiments), as well as the achievements of the philological science itself with regard to the study of the space of artistic and non-artistic text, the actual images of the author and the characteristics of the interpretations of the text by readers and researchers.

Keywords

• mnema theory
• bibliopsychology
• mechanisms of understanding
• text
• associative research