Vygotsky

An Intellectual Biography

Anton Yasnitsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138806733
• eBook ISBN: 9781317615347
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

– The most famous Russian psychologist, whose life and ideas are least known?

– A pioneer of psychology who said virtually nothing new?

– A simple man who became a genius after he died?

This fundamentally novel intellectual biography offers a 21st-century account of the life and times of Lev Vygotsky, who has long been considered a pioneer in the field of learning and human development. The diverse Vygotskian literature has created many distinct images of this influential scientist, which has led many researchers to attempt to unearth 'the real Vygotsky'. Rather than join this quest to over-simplify Vygotsky's legacy, this book attempts to understand the development of 'the multiple Vygotskies' by exploring a number of personae that Vygotsky assumed at different periods of his life. Based on the most recent archival, textological and historical investigations in original, uncensored Russian, the author presents a ground-breaking account that is far from the shiny success story that is typically associated with 'the cult of Vygotsky'.

This book will be an essential contribution to Vygotskian scholarship and of interest to advanced students and researchers in history of psychology, history of science, Soviet/Russian history, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of science.

1

Prophet

The Gomel years (1896–1913)

In the beginning there lived the Vygodskii family in the western province of Russian Empire that is nowadays known as Belarus.¹ Yet, back then, at the end of 19th century this was all Russia. Furthermore, these territories would not become part of Belarus – more precisely, Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic – until the mid-1920s, which means that the Vygodskiis virtually always lived in Russia.²

The Vygodskiis were Jewish, by nationality and religion. They were, first and foremost, Simkha Leibovich (1869–1931) – alternative, Russified, name Semen L’vovich – and Tsetsilia (Tsilia) Moiseevna (1874–1935). The Vygodskiis were a wealthy family, a bank manager and his wife, who moved to Gomel in 1897 with their two small children – their daughter Anna-Haia (born in 1895) and son Lev (born in 1896) – and occupied the whole two-floor building with a five-room apartment on the second floor. The father’s office – a private insurance company – was on the ground floor. The Vygodskii family quickly grew in numbers and eventually another six children were born, which was, according to the memoirs of their contemporary, quite unusual and impressive even by the standards of their time.³

Gomel, a relatively small town with a population of about 40,000 people (as of 1897), was located within the borders of the so-called Jewish Pale of Settlement. This was the western and south-western part of the territory (roughly four percent of the country) where officially discriminated Jewish populations of the Russian Empire were allowed to settle without any limitations. Major restrictions on Jewish residency were imposed in the rest of Imperial Russia, including its capital St. Petersburg and major cities, such as Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, or Kazan. Gomel was very densely populated by Jews: according to the Russian Imperial Census of 1897, more than one-half of the population of the town was Jewish. The Vygodskiis were among them.⁴

Russia, the largest country in the world (then and now), in the Imperial times occupied most of the territory of the contemporary Russian Federation (and well above that) and in many ways resembled the Russia of the 21st century. Yet, there were also a few features that made it very different from contemporary Russia and the industrially developed countries of our days.

First, Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was a monarchy: the Greek word meaning the “power of one”. The one was the Emperor (from the early 18th century Russia was an Empire), more commonly known as the Tsar. Furthermore, the regime of the Russian Empire was an autocracy, from the Greek word meaning “ruling by himself”. This means that not only was the Tsar the supreme ruler of the state, but also that he (or she, as occurred in a number of instances during the long history of Russia) was the sole and virtually unrestricted ruler of the country. The autocratic rule was carried out through the whole class of state bureaucrats, the topmost of which were appointed personally by the Tsar. Unlike other European monarchies of our time, the Russian Empire had no Constitution or a Parliament even in the early 20th century. No other democratically elected body of power existed that could counterbalance the power of the Tsar and his chief appointees in the Imperial Ministries, Councils, and other administrative bodies of power. The concentration of so much power in the hands of one person (and, indirectly, members of his family and their formal and informal advisors) created numerous acute problems.

Second, the Imperial power and the Church (as a social institute) were not separated in Russia, and the slogan of unity – “Autocracy, Russian Orthodox Church, and the People” – was the core of the official, conservative ideology of the state.

Third, the Russian Empire, despite its proclaimed ideology – faith, culture, language, people, etc. – was in fact a multi-nation state. Only half of the country’s population was composed of Russian nationals. It included over a dozen contemporary independent states such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, a part of Poland, and semi-autonomous Finland in the West; the countries of the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas – Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia; and the whole of Central Asia with its contemporary independent republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Fourth, despite rapid industrial development and increasing modernization of Imperial Russia, the country remained mostly agrarian. This means that the overwhelming majority of its population – four in five of its citizens – were peasants who lived in village communes, the peasants’ villages with collective ownership over the land. The main items of the country’s export were grown in the field, mainly grains. The Russian village commune was very traditional and conservative. Despite a few reforms and efforts to break down economically backward communes and establish a class of independent land-owners (individual farmers), the modernization of the early 20th century virtually never reached the Russian countryside.

The early 20th century was the era of the Silver Age, the economic and cultural “Renaissance” of Russia. However, this was also the time of major social and political unrest with frequent violent campaigns against the Jewish population (the so-called pogroms), a range of social movements, and intense illegal political activity. These tensions within national politics, the economy, demographics, culture, and ideology eventually led to the First Russian Revolution of 1905–1907. The revolution triggered the release of the Tsar’s Manifesto of October 1905 that for the first time officially gave the green light to the legal establishment of political parties in Russia, the first ever national elections, and first Russian Parliament (called the Duma).

It is hard to say how the combination of these multiple social and cultural events, forces, and processes impacted the personal and intellectual formation of the Vygodskii family children and their peer friends in Gomel. For instance, some of them might have witnessed the famous Gomel pogrom of 1903 that was followed by another one, in 1906. No doubt, that would have been a traumatic experience. What we do know, though, is that the oldest boy, nicknamed among his friends and family members as “Beba” Vygodskii, was a child of his time and can be described as a somewhat dreamy, art-minded, and ethnically aware youth with interests in literature and poetry, languages, history, and Jewish cultural tradition. For unclear reasons he did not attend elementary school and received elementary education with a private tutor at home. Yet, the diploma of a secondary school, a gymnasium, was a prerequisite for university admission. In early 1911 he was admitted at a private Jewish gymnasium, passed through the sixth, seventh and eighth years of studies, and successfully graduated with excellent grades and a gymnasium gold medal, awarded to him in 1913.⁵

A Jew admitted to the Imperial Moscow University

Graduation records of the applicant virtually guaranteed him admission to the famous Imperial Moscow University. The main problem for Vygodskii – as with any other university applicant of Jewish origin – was the so-called “Jewish quota” that had been introduced in the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century. The Jewish population constituted roughly four percent of the total population of the Empire, but their representation in universities in the second half of 19th century considerably exceeded this figure. The quota was imposed under the pretext of providing equal opportunities for the representatives of different ethnicities, according to the proportion of specific minority within the make-up of the entire population of the country. In effect, it limited primarily the number of Jewish students accepted to the state universities and other state educational establishments of higher learning. Thus, for instance, in 1886, just a year before the ruling on the Jewish quota was issued by the Imperial Ministry of Education, Jewish students constituted twenty-eight percent of all students of one of the most prestigious universities outside the Jewish Pale of Settlement, the Imperial Kharkov University. Moreover, their numbers at the Medical Department of this university remarkably exceeded forty percent of all students. As a general rule, for the Imperial capital St. Petersburg and the second largest city (and the old capital of the country before the 18th century) Moscow, the quota constituted three percent of the total number of those admitted. For a few large cities outside the Jewish Pale like Kharkov or Kazan this was five percent. Finally, for the educational establishments within the borders of the Pale the quota was established at ten percent. Yet, the rules of the game would be different and kept changing all the time, depending on the specific institution, concrete circumstances and the historical moment. Needless to say, the introduction of the quota was a major blow to Russian Jews’ hopes and aspirations, significantly cut their numbers in Russian universities and, thus, curtailed their career opportunities in the Russian Empire.

For the teenager Lev “Beba” Vygodskii his gymnasium gold medal meant quite a lot. It meant that young Beba would fit the discriminatory “Jewish quota” of three percent and allowed him admission to one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious universities. This was the Imperial Moscow University, established in the middle of the 18th century by its founder Mikhail Lomonosov. Yet, to his utter disappointment, the basic principle and the entire logic of future students’ selection had changed right before his planned entrance to the university. The merit-based system of selection that took into consideration academic excellence was substituted with a blind ballot, in other words, mere chance. This made his gold medal irrelevant and considerably undermined the reality of his admission. And yet, as the fate would have it, Lev Vygodskii did apply and, to his enormous surprise and excitement, was one of those randomly picked for admission to the University.

In Imperial Russia Jews were discriminated in a number of ways. They had no legal right to join the ranks of state bureaucracy or occupy other administrative positions without having first denounced the faith of their fathers and converting to Russian Orthodox Christianity. This meant that only a few middle-class vocations were available to them. These jobs would entail a private practice. Typically, these were the professions of a university-trained medical doctor or a lawyer that were – after the jobs in finance and business that did not necessarily require prior university training – perhaps the two most profitable occupations in Russia accessible to Russian Jews.

In the fall of 1913, following his father’s expectations of his older son eventually getting a decent and well-paid job, Lev Simkhovich Vygodskii⁶ started his studies at the age of seventeen in Moscow as a student of the Faculty of Medicine. Yet, the future vocation of a medical doctor did not appear very fitting to the humanities-minded teenage Vygodskii. Within just a few months of his admission, he transferred to the Faculty of Jurisprudence. And yet, something was apparently missing. This explains his next major life choice. From 1914, in parallel with his full-time course of studies at the Imperial Moscow University as a future lawyer, Vygodskii started attending courses at the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of the first Russian private (non-degree-granting) Moscow City People’s University, named after its chief sponsor and founder, an industrialist A. L. Shaniavskii (1837–1905).

The University was founded in 1908 as one of a great many other privately funded educational establishments of higher learning in Imperial Russia. These private educational institutions flourished in the country from the end of the 19th century – frequently despite considerable resistance of the Imperial bureaucracy. They would eventually allow these new educational projects due to immense pressure of the middle-class representatives of the rapidly developing civil society in Russia. Shaniavskii Moscow City People’s University was the first university (as opposed to various societies, stations, museums, courses, or institutes) that was established in Russia as a private – although necessarily state-endorsed – enterprise. The Shaniavskii University was well known for its democratic admission policy that gave access to education to the many, regardless of the applicants’ social origin and status, gender, ethnicity and religion, in the spirit of freedom of thought, conscience and faith. It was popularly considered as a “progressive” undertaking that attracted numerous students from diverse strata of society. By the time Vygodskii started his studies at the Shaniavskii Moscow City People’s University its history was extremely short. Yet, in 1911, following a major conflict between the politically conservative Imperial Minister of Education, Lev Kasso, and the elite of the Imperial Moscow University (the so-called “Kasso case”) over one hundred of the University’s professors and privat docents resigned.⁷. Subsequently, many of these academically prominent and politically liberal Russian scholars of the time found employment and taught at the “progressive” Shaniavskii Moscow City People’s University.

In the summer of 1914 the First World War broke out, and, in August Imperial Russia entered the War on the side of the United Kingdom, France and their numerous allies and against Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their allies, such as the Ottoman Empire. Subsequently, the Imperial Russian Army got deeply involved in the military action in Europe. These developments had no direct impact on Vygodskii, who was not drafted, but continued his university studies without any interruption until the fall of 1917.

Literary criticism (1914–1916)

As a student at the Department of Jurisprudence of the Imperial Moscow University, Vygodskii studied for a future career in Law and Legal Studies, but was apparently considerably more interested in literature, history and related disciplines that he was taught at the Shaniavskii University. His earliest surviving completed written work – unlike other drafts or even book projects – was a study that Vygodskii the student produced in 1915–1916 as a research paper for some of his courses at Shaniavskii University. Quite possibly this paper was prepared as an assignment for a course taught by his teacher at this university Yulii Aikhenval’d (1872–1928). This was a major critical essay on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that constituted his largest known work on literary criticism.

In this essay Vygodskii followed Aikhenval’d and contemporary Russian literary scholar Arkadii Gornfel’d (1867–1941), who were strong advocates of a highly subjectivist approach to art and literature. According to these scholars, depending on the genre (theatre, music, or literature) the individual observer, the member of the audience, and the reader are co-creators of the piece of art. Obviously, the reader is not entirely free to interpret art in any way they wish: they are restricted by the plot, the characters’ development, the style, etc. And yet, the act of personal interpretation of a written story equals the act of individual creation of the story anew, but within certain limitations that are imposed on the reader by the author. From this perspective a life story of the author or the social context of artistic creativity are irrelevant and unimportant to a literary scholar. What matters for research, as such, is text. The method is a close reading of a literary text and the meticulous analysis of its style, vocabulary, and structure. When we read fiction, the text provokes the individual reader’s feelings and associations, and leads the reader’s interpretations. Therefore, the goal of a literary analysis is the search for those cues and unique characteristics of a particular book – a novel, short story, fable, or poem – that trigger the subjective reactions within the reader and cue his or her individual interpretations. Vygodskii analysed Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” using this method that he referred to as “the reader’s critique” (chitatel’skaia kritika). In his essay on “Hamlet” the young Vygodskii advocated for the individual reader’s freedom of interpretation and enthusiastically supported symbolist mysticism and irrationalism that were characteristic of a number of literary and artistic movements of the so-called “Russian Silver Age”.

Vygodskii’s student essay on “Hamlet” was never published during his life time. His first publications were brief notes, book reviews and short essays that came out in 1916–1917 in a few newspapers and journals in Moscow and Petrograd. A couple of his book reviews appeared in late 1916 in “Letopis’” (Chronicle), a Petrograd leftist and pacifist monthly journal of Russian intellectuals interested in the topics of culture, science, and contemporary society. Several other reviews came out in this publication in early 1917.⁸ The last, the fifth, paper that the novice literary scholar submitted for publication in this journal was scheduled to come out at the end of February 1917. This would be his first experience of a theatrical review, but the publication did not happen. Only the proofs of the paper survived.⁹ An event of an enormous magnitude in terms of its role in the history of the entire Russian Empire prevented this journal issue from being released – the Russian Revolution of 1917–1918.

Beba Vygodskii: the “young Jewish prophet”

The interests of the teenage Vygodskii (1909–1915) were diverse and, in addition to the arts, literature and history, included collecting stamps, playing ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Cover legend
• Ouverture
• 1. Prophet
• 2. Bolshevik
• 3. Reflexologist
• 4. Psychologist
• 5. Revisionist
• 6. Holist
• Epilogue. Genius
• Timeline of landmark events
• Glossary
• Conventions and acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index