Play Nikita Kobeleva based on the work of an American neuropsychologist Oliver Sachs, the author of the famous book " The man who mistook his wife for a hat". This is a production about our brain and how complicated everything is in a person's head!

In the play, as in the book, there is no single plot. There are only different brain diseases on the example of the life of real people. This is a production about people who live with their illnesses for years and create their own worlds. Someone does not recognize their relatives, someone is going through a divorce day after day, someone has music in their head, someone involuntarily shouts out foul language, someone maniacally tries to find an ideal life companion, and someone he does not recognize his wife. At first glance, it seems that these are just strange people. And then the doctor clearly explains the reasons for a specific pathology occurring in the head of his patient, about neural connections, and about the fact that in most cases these diseases are incurable.

The performance resembles a lecture, where the viewer is told about the complex in an incomprehensible language of scientific terms from medical reports and in an understandable language of theatrical techniques. Most likely, at least once in your life, you have met people with such diseases. Amnesia, strokes, music in the head, nervous tics, reminiscences of various kinds and other disorders of the brain. The most difficult and poorly studied area of ​​medicine. This performance was included in the list of performances at the 2017 Biennial of Theater Arts and was nominated for a Golden Mask in 2018.

With the help of media technologies and exotic musical instruments, the creators of the performance immerse the viewer in an unusual atmosphere. I especially want to note video materials to case histories... Each case is accompanied by a video sequence that helps the viewer to understand at least approximately what is happening in the thoughts of a person with mental disabilities. Young actors very brightly and boldly convey the character and personality of their hero. In each new scene, the roles of the actors are measured. And the patient can become a doctor, and vice versa.

It is especially important in this performance that each character who talks about his illness is a person with his own talents. Yes, this person has problems with some ordinary human functions. It is difficult for him to do what others do with ease. But at the same time, his brain gives him some kind of talent or its own characteristic and exceptional qualities. For example, the ability to dance beautifully, write poetry or masterfully play the drums. This brings the viewer to a very important topic - helping such people. The production touches upon the nuances of consciousness of people with mental disabilities, autists and so-called "learned idiots", geniuses in science or art, but people who are almost incapable of ordinary life.

It is worth noting that some of the stories from the book by Oliver Sachs were included in the scripts of the most famous feature films. For example, the story of "Natasha K." was almost literally included as a secondary plot in one of the series "House", and observations of autistic twins were used in the film "Rain Man".

This performance is suitable for anyone interested in psychology. And for those who at least once in their life experienced deja vu or forgot where they put the keys to the apartment or the TV remote control. This very soulful, sad and funny at the same time, the production leaves a strong impression. It is amazing how a performance on a serious and difficult topic turned out to be so sincere and rich in the range of feelings and emotions that the viewer is experiencing.

Costume Designer / Marina Busygina,
Video artist / Elizaveta Keshisheva,
Choreographer / Alexander Andriyashkin,
Lighting Designer / Andrey Abramov,
Authors of the translation / Grigory Khasin, Yulia Chislenko,

Musical director / Tatiana Pykhonina
Cast: Yulia Silaeva, Roman Fomin, Pavel Parkhomenko, Alexandra Rovensky, Alexey Zolotovitsky, Natalia Palagushkina, Nina Shchegoleva

Place: Theater. Mayakovsky, stage on Sretenka
Duration: 2 h 20 min

Director on stage at Sretenka Nikita Kobelev staged a play based on the well-known book of a neuropsychologist, neurologist and popularizer of medicine Oliver Sachs "The man who mistook his wife for a hat"... Only half of the book was used, and twelve stories are shown on the stage in the wrong sequence, as Sachs put them, but "Man" in general could have been a transforming performance: an arbitrary neighborhood of episodes would carve out new meanings each time. It is quite an experiment for the STUDIO-OFF project specializing in them, within the framework of which verbatims appeared earlier “ Decalogue on Sretenka" and " Nine ten».

First collected under one cover in 1985, Sachs' stories from his own practice describe the amazing cases of how brain diseases affect the way people think about the world. A patient with astrocytoma (brain tumor) living in the United States, during treatment, inexplicably began to have documentary dreams about India, where she was born (as a rule, patients under the influence of therapy repeat one audio or visual "vision"). The man who killed his girlfriend while intoxicated completely forgot about it ("total eclipse of memory"), but cycling reminded him - it turned out that his repression mechanism did not work, and memories literally drove him crazy, destroying him with a sense of guilt. Due to the tumor, the professor of the music conservatory began to perceive the world more and more through abstract categories than concrete ones: giving precise characteristics of the surrounding objects, he could not call a glove a glove, but he really took his wife for a hat.

Finally, the central episode for the play (and the second chapter of the book) - "The Lost Sailor" - describes an intricate form of Korsakov's syndrome (a type of amnesia that often occurs, for example, due to alcohol abuse), when an elderly ex-submarine employee has forgotten everything that happened to him after 1945 (that is, over three decades).

The staging of "Man" in "Mayakovka" is almost the first in Russia, while in the world, for example, a great one was taken for the same text, and Sachs's memoirs formed the basis of the film "". A certain memoir is inherent in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" - Sachs suggests not just looking at the history of diseases, but at the people who are hiding behind them. Such an approach, according to Alexander Luria, a Soviet scientist and founder of neuropsychology, could be called "romantic science."

At this junction, cold research and interest in the patient's personality, Kobelev's performance is naturally born - an observation theater, previously shown on the stage on Sretenka in the format of verbatim. The set of "Man" is like a photo studio: lighting fixtures, a white backdrop, musical instruments at the edges of the stage (artists not involved in the episode create the soundtrack). The text is played out with often insignificant bills. The actors seem to be illustrating the words, existing in the format of an ironic radio play with an accentuated performance for the audience: all the directions are given to the audience, patients often seem to justify themselves with these remarks. Professor P. () has a green hat (for which he took his wife). The patient (), who dreamed about India, speaks with some kind of conditional accent. In The Lost Sailor, Pavel Parkhomin generally plays both a doctor and a patient at the same time.

This detachment reveals the connection between theater and healing, "romantic science": deep humanity, the search for the best traits in a person that can compensate for his shortcomings (this is most clearly manifested in the chapter "Rebecca", where a girl with special needs is playing very touchingly and delicately , which is transformed in dance, poetry, reading the Bible). When a white screen falls, showing a much larger space behind a small stage, this describes the experience of the performance in the best possible way: a person is much more complex than we can imagine, much in him is still inexplicable and is hardly compacted into numerous schemes and rating systems. Finally, the concepts of "doctor" and "patient" are also just roles, so their artists play alternately - yesterday's doctor in another area may be sick, just like vice versa.

... "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" at the Mayakovsky Theater ( Kommersant, 21.12.2016).

The man who mistook his wife for a hat. Theater them. Mayakovsky. Press about the performance

Teatral, November 30, 2016

Olga Egoshina

"And you could play a nocturne"

Mayakovka turned to the cult book of the American neuropsychologist

Together with a team of like-minded people, the young director Nikita Kobelev for the first time in Russia turned to the book by the popular American neuropsychologist Oliver Sachs. A successful practitioner and an authoritative theorist, Oliver Sachs was able to present his theories and observations of many years in the form of popular books. His works are on the shelves of scientists and attract people who are far from science. On the basis of the book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" Michael Nyman wrote an opera, Peter Brook staged a dramatic performance.

In this work, Nikita Kobelev invited only like-minded people. There was no preliminary assignment of roles, a number of people tried themselves in the new proposed circumstances. All together bravely dived into the world of clinic patients, regulars in the offices of neurologists, psychologists and psychiatrists. To the world of people suffering from tics and hearing music and voices, losing their orientation in space and time, juggling numbers, losing control over their bodies, not recognizing their relatives and hearing God.

Almost all performers involved in the performance take turns trying on a white doctor's coat. The props are changing - in the center of the stage there is a gurney, then a chair, then a racing bike. That is a drum kit. On the sides of the stage, five musicians replace each other, whose improvisations accompany and lead the action.

In each episode - a new patient with his own individual history, with his own unique problem. Sachs worked on a variety of brain injuries - the brain hook, amygdala, limbic system, and temporal lobe. Injuries that lead to the loss of the ability to distinguish between faces and recognize objects, cause auditory, visual hallucinations, polydipsia, satiriasis, bulimia, aphasia, confabulation, etc. From the doctor's comments, we learn that a small glioma in the brain can lead to hallucinations so colorful that a person will lose contact with the outside world. And narcotic substances can suddenly awaken the sense of smell, giving it a "dog" spice.

The Mayakovka actors are happy to portray their incredible characters with their tics, dysfunctions, phobias and psychosis.

Natalia Palagushina easily and dashingly shows 89-year-old Natasha K., in which suddenly awakened syphilis spirochetes awakened "amorous disease." Because of these invisible pathogens, the venerable widow one day suddenly felt youthful enthusiasm and a surge of playfulness. Having put on sneakers with large rhinestones, Natasha K. carelessly flirts with the audience, and addresses the spectators in a friendly way: "Well, girls, do you understand what I mean?"

Pavel Parkhomenko, with pleasure and extraordinary mimicry, shows all the "tics" of his hero, drummer Ray: a change of grimaces, a fallen out tongue, furious volleys of curses. And then, sitting behind a drum kit, he knocks out inspired rhythmic improvisations from the drums. Ray's temperament, intolerable in everyday life, here stimulates inspiration and fascinates listeners.

"What a perfect creation - man!" sighed Prince Hamlet.

But how vulnerable!

One grain of sand caught in the mechanism is enough for it to go all out. Do you think that your old friend just went crazy and turned into an evil bitch hating the world? It was from a disease that eats her up that her hormonal background changed. Do you think that this impudent person getting on the bus and pushing everyone around is drunk? It is he who has lost proprioception.

A small blood clot that briefly clogs the blood supply to a part of your head is enough to completely erase an entire part of your personality. Alcohol can destroy memory. Turn the drug into a cruel killer. Finally, the mysterious reasons for the interaction that doctors will not be able to establish will overnight deprive you of the sense of your own body, so you will have to rebuild your relationship with walking, sitting, motor skills.

So one fine morning Christina lost her "joint-muscle" feeling. Actress Yulia Silaeva assumes an absolutely impossible pose on the chair, trying to convey the attempts of her heroine to maintain the position of her body in space, when the “feeling” of this body has completely disappeared. And you look at your hands as if they were foreign objects. And you don't feel the skin, joints, muscles. And you have to learn to sit for months, walk, relying only on visual control ... And still you cannot calculate the efforts with which you need to hold a fork or spoon so that the joints do not turn white from tension.

Life in society is a thing that requires constant effort, even from perfectly healthy people. Oliver Sachs' patients have to exert tenfold, hundreds of times more effort to compensate for the opportunities taken away by the disease.

The carpenter McGregor (Roman Fomin) invents a device for himself that attaches to glasses, which replaces the internal spirit level - a sense of balance.

Professor P., suffering from agnosia and not distinguishing either the faces of people or the shapes of objects, develops a whole system of musical melodies that help him perform the simplest everyday actions: wash himself, dress, eat. And Alexey Zolotovitsky miraculously shows these endless melodies that lead his hero through the impersonal world.

The heroes of the play are people who are waging a constant and exhausting war with their illness. And thus they polish will and reason, learn humility and kindness.

Not completely built logically (only premieres were shown) and rhythmically Mayakovka's performance, the main theme of Oliver Sachs - the theme of surprise at the miracle of the human person - leads surprisingly clearly.

Perhaps the most poignant moment is the episode with Rebecca.

A disabled person since childhood, clumsy, awkward, hours trying to pull her left glove on her right hand, she knows how to enjoy the wind and the sun, the blossoming leaves. Knows how to hear music and poetry. Knows how to love and grieve. When the beautiful Olga Ergina, caught up in a melody, suddenly becomes weightless, plastic, luminous, this moment of transformation becomes the highest point of a journey into a world so far from our everyday experience and so close to a spiritual experience, a world full of miracles, secrets, discoveries and adventures.

Summing up his life, Oliver Sachs wrote: “I have loved and have been loved; much has been given to me and I have given something in return; I read a lot, traveled, meditated, wrote. I communicated with the world in the special way that writers communicate with readers. Most importantly, on this beautiful planet, I felt and thought, which in itself was a great privilege and adventure. " Perhaps many of the heroes of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" could repeat his words.

Kommersant, December 21, 2016

The mentally ill

"The man who mistook his wife for a hat" at the Mayakovsky Theater

The premiere of the play by director Nikita Kobelev based on the famous book by American doctor Oliver Sachs "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" was played at the branch of the Moscow Mayakovsky Theater. By ROMAN DOLZHANSKY.

The book by the American neuropsychologist Oliver Sachs, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," literally shocked the world at one time, and after being translated into Russian - and many who read it in Russia. Not only a practicing physician, but also a popularizer of medicine, Sachs collected in this book stories from his practice - various cases of severe neurological disorders, combined into a kind of encyclopedia of diseases. Of course, incomplete: the more cases the doctor describes, the more unpredictable and unknowable the world of the human brain appears, the more variable is the very concept of illness - what is called abnormality in common, everyday language.

Nikita Kobelev put together several chapters of the book on stage; The name of the performance, like the book, was given by one of the stories - about a professor of music whose vision refused to recognize objects (the same chapter from Oliver Sachs's book was at one time the basis of the famous opera by Michael Nyman). The performance is made up of separate episodes played in a small space - the hall on Sretenka is already small, but here the audience is sitting right on the stage, and the chamber playground, fenced off by two white surfaces, is somewhat similar to a photographic studio. To the right and to the left of it are musical instruments, most of those who sit down at them are the actors themselves, which makes the performance even more confidential.

One could say that this is a performance-concert - if such a definition did not tune the audience's perception to some frivolity. But there seems to be no place for frivolity: we are talking about gloomy things. Nikita Kobelev's performance can easily be included in a number of social projects that have appeared on many Moscow stages in recent seasons - the theater has finally ceased to be afraid to look into those areas of real life that were previously considered alien to high art. Today, no one will dare to say that our viewer does not want problems.

However, the performance of the Mayakovsky Theater was made and played so contagiously that there is no need to feed one's interest with the exclusively importance of the declared topic. Of course, a strict connoisseur can say that a person is nothing more than a collection of high-quality acting sketches. After all, each of the situations is like a small gift for an educational task: to play a woman who does not feel her body, or a former sailor whose consciousness is stuck in his youth, or an awkward, ugly Jewish girl who is unable to concentrate on anything, or a musician struck by a nervous tic , or a comic old woman trying to seduce every man she sees ... And the doctors of both sexes, who are present in all stories, are often interesting characters, albeit captured by only a couple of phrases. And not a single actor will miss the opportunity to reincarnate, having played several roles in one performance. When there is talent to transform like Alexei Zolotovitsky, Pavel Parkhomenko or Yulia Silaeva, then the audience's joy is added to the insatiable actor's joy.

And yet, the purely theatrical tasks that actors and the director have to solve are not at all as simple as it might seem. For example, how to portray a sick person so as not to cross the invisible line beyond which art ends and awkwardness begins? How to select the very pair of details that are necessary for this particular story: either an expressive costume, or a pair of candles, or a video camera, or powder that turns a fresh actor's hair into gray hair? What plastic to choose for the hero? In most cases, these tasks were solved by the director and his team reasonably and reasonably, and yet the most important result is not that the performance deserves a credit rating. And the fact that the aftertaste of it remains the main humanistic thought of Oliver Sachs - on the one hand, neurological ailments deprive patients of philistine happiness, but on the other hand, they single out in them some one, their own, unique corridor of abilities and capabilities. Perhaps they bring them their own, unique, unknowable happiness. After all, the passion for the theater can also be explained in this way.

I somehow lost sight of and only now noticed that in the theater. Mayakovsky, there is a studio-off - rather informal education, whose activity within the general repertoire policy differs, as far as I understand, primarily in a greater degree of self-organization (that is, it is not actors who are assigned to roles, but a "group of like-minded people" gathers and proposes something), but although “off” does not stick out itself as a kind of “brand”, it is thanks to the studio that such iconic names as “The Decalogue” or now “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” appear on the theater poster.

Oliver Sachs's book is not a novel or even a collection of stories, but a description of cases from medical practice, for example, excellent from a literary point of view (I once read fragments in the first, journal publication), but still not fiction, and even more so, it would seem, not material for theatrical performance. Nikita Kobelev builds the composition of the "play" and proposes a stage solution, at first glance, unpretentious. The structure of the "short stories" is preserved, although, of course, a selection of stories has been made. The design of the space (Olga Nevolina) is stylish and minimalistic: a white wall associated with the interior of a psychiatric clinic, here serves as a cinema screen, as if inside a studio pavilion - since Dr. not yet invented), allowing patients to see themselves from the outside and compare the "objective" picture with their "subjective" self-perception. The costumes (from the debutante Marina Busygina) are very smart, smart and fashionable. And musicians on both sides of the venue are a common thing today, but here the role of music turns out to be special, deserving special attention.

The most difficult thing, of course, is with the actors - and when the theater turns to Sachs's book, the main problem, it seems to me, is that the overkill of colors will turn the patient characters into funny freaks, and the actors into clowns; but playing with restraint, pale, firstly, it is impossible to convey the specifics of the "disorder" of patients, and secondly, it is not long to lose that humor, which, despite the seriousness of most clinical cases, is still embedded in the text. Kobelev's approach is free from sly philosophizing - in fact, the actors work by the "etude method", using the entire traditional set of expressive means, both performing and external attributes: from plastic and facial expressions, a little bit, but to the best of caricature, to make-up, wigs, accessories and auxiliary props. Combined with video projection, the result is a spectacle that is both modern and unpretentious. But the success of "Man ..." is not only in the fact that the director and actors managed to make a non-boring performance for three hours with memorable characters and their sentimental stories.

Oliver Sachs studied the brain and consciousness, that is, the biological, physiological basis of human mental activity and the degree of conditioning of thinking by physiology - but paradoxically came to the conclusion that personality self-identification is not reduced to a physiological factor. In Nikita Kobelev, the characters of the patient's characters are exaggerated a little, due to which the degree of comic of certain types increases, as well as the degree of sentimentality in relation to them from the outside. The format, somewhat close to a youth, student performance, when the performers get several roles, when the roles change along the way, in "Man ..." also acquires a meaningful aspect. An artist who plays a doctor in one episode becomes a patient in the next, and vice versa; and a doctor, therefore, can also be a woman - here it is to a greater extent than Sachs (who nevertheless writes about specific examples from personal experience) is an abstract figure, as conventionally and the opposition of a doctor to a patient.

Another important feature of Kobelev's stage composition is that with the narrative self-sufficiency of the stories, most of them turn out to be permeated with a leitmotif that reveals a connection between, let's say, the “features” of the character's worldview and his creative interests, in particular, in music. Hence the role of the musical accompaniment in the performance, and the specifics of the seating of the musicians (except for one guitarist, they are also the actors of the theater troupe) on both sides of the stage, these are like two "ears" in which the "imaginary" music sounds from the heroines of the novel "Reminiscence" Mrs OM (that has a filling in the tooth, supposedly receiving radio signals with church chants) and Mrs OS (this one hears Irish dance rhythms at high volume), or Tourette's "tic witty" Ray, who can resonate with jazz percussion; not to mention the "title character" - the professor of music P., who distinguished objects only by abstract outlines, and could function in everyday life only by singing this or that melody. By the way, it is hardly accidental that Sachs's documentary book served as the basis for one of the most popular modern operas - the eponymous work by Michael Nyman, whose fragments, however, are not used in the play, but in the short story about the murderer Donald with amnesia, who at first forgot the circumstances of his crime , and then, after a head injury, I began to remember him, a fragment from Philip Glass (of the same minimalist direction, close to Nyman in style) sounds.

The central theme of the performance, arising from the proposed selection of stories, is the loss of self-identification, or rather, the inability to understand this loss: "If a person loses his personality, there is no one to realize the loss." But despite the disturbances of consciousness and some comicity, the characters of the play do not look ugly - at least not bigger than the spectators sitting in the hall (I would even notice that here you feel yourself on the bench, anyone from the hall can be pulled onto the stage - and it will be found out that his head is worse than that of the heroes of the performance, and it is not necessary to pull it out, it is enough to look around - and so it is clear that the "second cast" is ready, only less elegant than the actors in the costumes of Marina Busygina). Such a humanistic view of the director on the patient characters is, let’s say, somewhat simple-minded (in my personal opinion), but it allows the director to talk about narrowly medical cases in a universal, universal way.

"Why did you treat me ?!" - the hero of Chekhov's "Black Monk" asks desperately, especially shrilly - performed by Sergei Makovetsky from the play by Kama Ginkas. "You feel too good ... you must be sick!" - the wicked and amorous 89-year-old Natasha K. thinks to herself in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. "And" madness ", which also determines the ability of the individual to original, creative thinking (which is also" abnormal "in its own way), is touched upon at its level here as well. Some of Sachs' characters are very pleased to have been relieved of the music in their ears with haloperidol and psychotherapy. Others, on the contrary, “miss” the lost “features”. And still others are looking for a compromise, want to combine “normality”, socialization skills with “peculiarities”, often excluding socialization - like the aforementioned “tic witty”, jazz drummer Ray, who tries to keep “normal” on weekdays, but “breaks away” on weekends. Or 89-year-old Natasha K., a former prostitute with "amorous disease."

Roman Fomin, Pavel Parkhomenko, Alexandra Rovenskikh, Yulia Silaeva, Alexey Zolotovitsky, Anastasia Tsvetanovich take on the role of "doctor" in turn. But each of them and the rest also gets one patient, but not one. Mrs. OS and Natasha K. in Natalya Palagushkina's are two completely different samples of people who hear differently from others and feel differently than those around them, and most importantly, they see themselves differently. Indian-born American Bhagavandi (Anastasia Tsvetanovich) and autistic Jewish orphan girl Rebecca (Olga Ergina) are unusually touching characters, their stories are dramatic and heartwarming, straight to tears; and some of the characters are more humorous figures - like the carpenter McGregor, who fights Parkinson by means of his own invention of the “spirit level” for the eye, or Mrs. S. performed by Alexandra Rovensky, who stubbornly “does not want” to notice what is located to the left of her, she it is easier to spin in a swivel chair, making full turns from left to right, than to move your eyes to the left. But even in these cases, laughter is harmless, harmless.

For the director, even more so than for the writer, the “features” of the heroes are not cases of clinical pathology, but a kind of “possibility” of an alternative outlook on life, on society, and above all on themselves. For many of them, to be deprived of the “music in their heads” would be a problem, if not a fatal disaster: so, you see, it’s not a long time to live — and everyone has their own and one. The external, formal simplicity of individual "studies" enhances this feeling. Despite the fact that some of the actors' characters are built very sophisticatedly - just brilliantly, masterly, for example, Yulia Silaeva, before reincarnating as a "doctor", denotes a series of parodies-cartoons with which a completely nameless, off-stage heroine with Tourette's syndrome, met by a doctor, reacts to passers-by. the narrator on the street: with the same good old etude method, the actress, as they say, "in real time", running along an impromptu proscenium, shows with facial expressions and gestures "caricatures" at the spectators sitting in the first rows. And Alexei Zolotovitsky sharply, but neatly embodies Professor P., whose syndrome gave the name to the book and the play - leaving no doubt that we are not sick, not crazy and not a freak, but still, first of all, a man, even if he accepts a wife for the hat. (At the same time, I confess, I am still convinced that among those who mistake a wife for a wife, and a hat for a hat, full of monsters and non-humans - such is the specificity of my perception of reality, medicine is powerless here, art is even more so).

However, in addition to the humanistic, tolerant (in the best sense of this concept, strongly discredited from different angles) attitude towards those who see the world “differently”, the demonstration of not only inferiority, but also the advantages of being able to perceive reality subjectively, in its own way, in the play by Nikita Kobelev, in my opinion, there is another meaningful plan. It is not immediately revealed, but starting with the story of a Hindu girl who, through "reminiscences", plunges into the memories of the world of her ancestors, eventually dying, as if returning from him - and I think, for the director, unlike the author, this is not just a figure of speech, like the “incorporeal region of nothingness,” is more than a metaphor. So the physiological aspect through the study of the problem of the brain and thinking merges with the metaphysical. With special theatrical clarity, the same motive manifests itself in the finale, when the screen falls, the pavilion-cabinet white space expands into the vastness and darkness of the “black office” of the entire hall on Sretenka Street, in which the “lost sailor” wanders, the character of Pavel Parkhomenko, who has been stuck in 1945, imagining himself a 19-year-old sailor, not recognizing his own sister - but still managed, cultivating the monastery garden, to find a comfortable place in the world for himself to live.