Efrussi, Polina Osipovna

Pearl (Polina Osipovna) Efrussi was born in Chisinau in the family of a banker and grain merchant, merchant of the first guild Joseph Isaakovich Efrusi (in other documents Aron-Yosif Itsikovich Efrusi) and his wife Rivka (Revecca) Abramovna Blanck, who entered into marriage there in 1856. Together with his brother-in-law, his father owned a bank office in Chisinau, as well as a grain export company located in Odessa at the intersection of Pochtovaya and Elizavetinsky streets. In 1885-1893 she studied at the city gymnasium for girls, until 1897 she worked as a teacher of arithmetic at the Chisinau Jewish Women's Vocational School (Jewish Colonization Society). ^[3] In 1897-1900 she studied at the University of Berlin , in 1901 - at the University of Breslau , in 1902-1904 - at the University of Gottingen , where she worked in the laboratory of experimental psychology under the guidance of G. E. Müller and defended her thesis “Experimental Approach” to the doctrine of memory ”with a description of the classical experiment on the role of repetition in the processes of memorization (“ Experimental Beiträge zur Lehre vom Gedächtnis ”, 1904, published as a separate book) ^[4] .

Upon returning to Russia, she settled in Petersburg . In 1912, she translated from German the book of Wilhelm Grube (1855-1908) “The spiritual culture of China : literature, religion, cult” (St. Petersburg: Brockhaus - Efron ). She was also involved in the translation of psychological literature (including the work of Karl Stumpf “Phenomena and Psychic Functions”).

In 1918, together with N. N. Bakhtin , A. V. Lunacharsky , M. V. Bogdanov-Berezovsky and others, she became one of the founders of the courses of the word of art (later the Institute of the Living Word), taught a course in the psychology of speech and thinking. She headed the psychological laboratory of the Pedagogical Museum. He is the author of numerous works in the field of experimental psychology , child pathopsychology, psychology of school education, defectology (deviations of behavior and mental retardation), forensic and genetic psychology, eidetic . In 1912-1925, together with E. I. Tikheeva and L. I. Chulitskaya-Tikheeva, she was the editor of collections of the series “New Ideas in Pedagogy”.

In the 1930s, she lived with her sister - a pediatrician Z. O. Michnik - in the new "house of specialists" on Lesnoy Avenue. In 1942, with her sister, Lensovet was evacuated from the besieged Leningrad to the North Caucasus , where both were captured by the Germans and, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, were shot at a glass factory in Mineralnye Vody.

• Brother - Russian economist and journalist Boris Osipovich (Bentsion Ioselevich) Efrusi (1865-1897).
• Sister - Sofya Osipovna (Sura Iosifovna) Efrusi (married to Lazarkevich), a teacher of arithmetic at the Chisinau Jewish Jewish Professional School of the Jewish Colonization Society, wife of journalist and chemist Nikifor Aleksandrovich Lazarkevich (Fore).
• Nephew - Yakov Isaakovich Efrussi ( Efrusi ; 1900-1996), an inventive engineer in the field of radio engineering and television, the author of memories of the years spent in the Gulag ^[5] . Another nephew (the son of his brother, a Moscow chemist and industrialist Samuil Osipovich Efrussi) is a French geneticist and molecular biologist Boris Samoilovich Efrussi . ^[6]
• Nieces (daughters of sister Beyla (Betty) Iosifovna Zaks, 1867-1931) - Anna Borisovna Zaks , museum historian, and Sarah Borisovna Zaks (1898-1981), philologist and methodologist.
• Cousins ​​(on the mother’s side) - writer and journalist Julius (Yoel) Aronovich Kligman , published in the Soviet era under the pseudonym “Yuri Kalugin”; chemist, public figure and publicist Reuben Markovich Blank .

• Experimental Beiträge zur Lehre vom Gedächtnis. Inaugural-Disseration zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde einer hohen philosophischen Fakultät der Georg-Augusts-Universität vorgelegt von Perla Ephrussi aus Kischinew. Leipzig : Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1904. ^[7] Reissue in two parts - in the journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 37: 56-103, 161-234, Berlin , 1904/1905.
• Perseveration as a factor in normal mental life. A report read in the Russian Society of Normal and Pathological Psychology on May 12, 1909. SPb: Printing house of P.P. Soikin, 1910. - 19 p.
• The success of psychology in Russia. The results of the congress on psychoneurology in Moscow on January 10-15, 1923, Petrograd , 1923.
• Hooliganism Prevention and School. Moscow : State Publishing House of the RSFSR , 1928.
• Essays on the psychology of a school-age child. 2nd edition. Moscow: Education Worker, 1928.
• The psychology of early childhood. Moscow — Leningrad, 1931.
• School failure and repetition. Moscow — Leningrad, 1932; Moscow: Education, 1998.

• P.O. Efrussi, Essay on The Fates of Modern Psychology in the journal Russian Thought, 1914