Is this a photo of Solomon Shereshevsky? (the mnemonist also known as “S”)
The photo appears on several websites, including this page.
No, I don’t think it is. According to this page, the photo is of Lazarus Shereshevsky, a Russian poet. Just another guy with a similar name.
Information on Solomon Shereshevsky is extremely hard to find, and I’ve never seen a photo of him.
Thanks for clearing that up.
There are at least five out six websites out there calling it a photo of S…
No, those pictures are of Alexander Luria, the psychologist who studied S.
There’s a lot of unreliable information about Shereshevsky on the net. The website also quotes S’s birth year as 1886. This is almost certainly wrong. Luria states that he started studying S when S was in his late 20’s (i.e. before 1916). Given that Luria was born in 1902, that would mean that Luria started studying S before he was 14 years old. Seems a bit unlikely!
I believe the 1886 figure has no reliable source. I can find no record of it before it was added to Wikipedia by an anonymous editor a few years ago. Since then it’s found its way into a number of books by a number of authors, without proper fact checking (I’ve written to a couple of those authors to ask where they got their information from, and got evasive replies - I suspect they didn’t want to admit getting their information straight from Wikipedia!).
The website says that “The gifts of both Shereshevsky and Tammet are strongly questioned by skeptics on the net… I am inclined to doubt the doubters.” I guess I’m one of those doubters. I would find it a whole lot more convincing if the author quoted some actual reliable facts about S, rather than incorrect information from an anonymous Wikipedia editor, accompanied by a photo of someone completely different.
Exciting news – photos of Shereshevsky do exist.
This page was updated:
This photo is a frame grab from a 2007 documentary film produced for Russian television, Zagadky pamyati [Memory mysteries]. For the filmmakers, Lyudmila Malkhozova and Dmitry Grachevthe, the Shereshevsky family made available photos and new biographical details about the celebrated mnemonist. A biographical sketch of Shereshevsky was published in 2013, in English, in a journal article in Cortex by Luciano Mecacci.
Click here for the video, (Загадки памяти). It would be great if anyone who knows Russian could update everyone about what it contains.
Below are a couple of screenshots from the video.
Here is a related article about Shereshevsky by Luciano Mecacci who is mentioned above:
Solomon V. Shereshevsky: the great Russian mnemonist.
A biographical sketch is given of Solomon V. Shereshevsky, a man gifted with exceptional memory skills who became famous after the publication of Aleksandr R. Luria's book The Mind of a Mnemonist, in 1968.
He also published something on Aleksandr Luria:
Luria: a unitary view of human brain and mind.
Special questions the eminent Russian psychologist and neuropsychologist Aleksandr R. Luria (1902-1977) dealt with in his research regarded the relationship between animal and human brain, child and adult mind, normal and pathological, theory and rehabilitation, clinical and experimental investigation. These issues were integrated in a unitary theory of cerebral and psychological processes, under the influence of both different perspectives active in the first half of the Nineteenth century (psychoanalysis and historical-cultural school, first of all) and the growing contribution of neuropsychological research on brain-injured patients.
I don’t have access to the articles, but if someone reads them, please post an update here. 
Apparently the photo from the Russian show has been online since at least June 2014, but I haven’t seen in Google Search until now:
http://www.daysyn.com/Other-Synesthetes.html
Solomon Shereshevsky was an object of scientific scrutiny in the 1930s - 1950s, especially by L.S.Vygotsky, A. N. Leontiev and A. R. Luria.
(“This site last updated: 20.June.2014”)
I also came across something called Color-sound metaphor RUSSIAN and English (cabinet STUDY).
(ЦВЕТО-ЗВУКОВЫЕ МЕТАФОРЫ РУССКОГО И АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКОВ (КОРПУСНОЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ))
[Google Translate] The question of the relevance of the problem of synaesthesia and synesthetic metaphors on the current stage of development of human knowledge, is grounded in the body fruitful approach to the study of synesthetic metaphors, offers a comparison of the color-sound metaphor in Russian and English, collected from the Russian National Corpus and the British National Corpus.
I didn’t read it yet, but the PDF is in English here.
Thanks for the information Josh!
I’ve had a look at the article by Mecacci. It doesn’t include any significant information about his memorisation abilities beyond what we already know, but it does include some biographical information and photos. In particular:
- It solves the mystery of his year of birth, which should be 1896, which makes sense. The figure of 1886, given in many recent books is almost certainly false, as it doesn’t fit with his age when he met Luria.
- He married and had one son, and died in 1958.
- There is a picture of a billboard advertising his memory show - “The master of memorization art - the vaudeville artist - S V Shereshvsky - immediate memorisation at audience request of family names, letters, numbers, book texts, verses - word and phrase salads in the languages of all the people of the world”.
- There’s an interesting hint that Luria’s own papers on S still exist on file at an archive in his dacha near Moscow, but they haven’t been studied. So more information could come out.
I would like to see that. I need to find a way to get access to all these online studies. 
That sounds promising. I hope someone researches it.