Lev Vygotsky

René van der Veer, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781472504920
• eBook ISBN: 9781441181275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, had a profound influence on educational thought. His work on the perception of art, cultural-historical theory of the mind and the zone of proximal development all had an impact on modern education.

This text provides a succinct critical account of Vygotsky's life and work against the background of the political events and social turmoil of that time and analyses his cross-cultural research and the application of his ideas to contemporary education. René van der Veer offers his own interpretation of Vygotsky as both the man and anti-man of educational philosophy, concluding that the strength of Vygotsky's legacy lies in its unfinished, open nature.

Part 1

Intellectual Biography

Chapter 1

Lev Vygotsky

Childhood and Youth

Lev Semyonovich Vygodsky1 was born in Tsarist Russia in the town of Orsha in 1896. In his childhood, the Vygodsky family moved to the city of Gomel which is located in between Minsk and Kiev in White Russia. Nowadays it is a rather unhealthy place to be – the catastrophe at the nearby nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in 1986 contaminated the whole area and thyroid cancer incidence, for example, is about 100 times higher than before the accident – but at the time life could still be pleasant in Gomel and its surroundings. Swimming and boating in the local river and horseback riding belonged to the young Lev Vygotsky’s pastimes. Vygotsky’s parents were middle-class secular Jews who played a rather prominent role in the cultural life of Gomel. His father, Semyon L’vovich Vygodsky, was a bank employee and a representative of an insurance company who finished his career as the branch manager of the Industrial Bank in Moscow. Semyon Vygodsky was socially active and, among other things, helped create the local public library. Vygotsky’s mother, Cecilia Moiseyevna Vygodskaya, was a teacher by training but devoted all her time to the household and the upbringing of her eight children. It was she who seems to have largely determined the emotional and intellectual climate in the family. The reading of books and the attendance of theater performances were actively encouraged and every night parents and children would gather to drink tea, to read aloud and discuss poetry and prose, to discuss recent plays, and to talk about anything else that came up (Vygodskaya and Lifanova 1996).

These meetings and the general family atmosphere instilled a lifelong fascination for literature and theater in the young Vygotsky. Throughout his life he would remain fascinated with poetry, prose and play. The adult Vygotsky’s knowledge of the Russian and international literature was outstanding and in private conversation, during lectures and in his scientific writings Vygotsky would often quote fragments from poems, novels and plays. As an adolescent he became infatuated with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and his wide reading of the relevant literature eventually led to his master’s thesis at Shanyavsky University (see below). The problem that eventually came to fascinate him was by what means Shakespeare and his colleagues created artistic effects in the reader (see Chapter 2). While still a student, Vygotsky began writing literary reviews for various journals and during his university years he never missed an opportunity to attend the newest performances by the famous Moscow theater groups. One may wonder whether this informal literary education may not have been at least as edifying as Vygotsky’s formal training. Not only did his literary interests determine the subject of his master’s thesis and his doctoral dissertation, they also must have made him sensitive to the complexities of the human mind and aversive to premature reductionist endeavors in the style of Pavlov, Bekhterev and Watson.

The young Lev (Beba to his friends) – and presumably his siblings as well – received the first part of his education at home from a private tutor, a mathematician who had been expelled from the university because of his participation in the student democratic movement. This tutor, a certain Ashpiz, had the gift of asking questions that revealed the weak points in his pupils’ accounts but at the same time stimulated their further thinking (Feigenberg 1996). After five years of study with the tutor, Vygotsky entered the private local Jewish gymnasium for boys to go through the last two years of the curriculum and to receive his diploma. By all accounts, he seems to have been a very bright student who excelled in every subject, from physics and mathematics to Latin and French. With his mother, Lev Vygotsky seems to have shared a gift for languages – although he avoided conversations with native speakers claiming that his foreign accent was unbearable – and he read and understood Latin, Greek, German, French, English, Hebrew, Esperanto and Yiddish (Vygodskaya and Lifanova 1996).

Being a Jew in Tsarist Russia

Above I have said that Vygotsky’s parents were secular Jews and one might well ask whether this fact is of any help in understanding Vygotsky’s personality or worldview and whether it was actually important to him. In my understanding, his religious-ethnic background and the way society reacted to that background was indeed important in shaping his moral and intellectual development. Here several factors must be taken into account.

First, we must realize that feelings of anti-Semitism have always been relatively strong in Russia and that they were rather often actively encouraged and sanctioned by the authorities. These feelings regularly culminated in actual pogroms (of the Russian verb: gromit = to destroy, to ransack). During Vygotsky’s lifetime, his native city Gomel witnessed pogroms in 1903 and 1906 (when Vygotsky was, respectively, seven and ten years old), and it is said that his father played an active role in the Jewish defense against these attacks (Feigenberg 1996; Gilbert 1979; Kozulin 1990; Pinkus 1988). Thus, it is likely that Lev Vygotsky himself experienced or at least heard about the sad results of these pogroms.

Second, the Tsarist authorities had devised all sorts of legislations to regulate (read ‘restrict’) the Jewish participation in social life. For example, Jewish citizens were not allowed to live outside a certain area (called the Pale of Settlement),2 positions as a civil servant were not open to Jews (which also excluded the possibility of being a teacher at a state school or college) and universities used quotas for Jewish students.3

Third, although the Vygodskys were not religious in any deep sense of the word, they held on to traditional Jewish customs. Thus, Lev Vygotsky was taught to read the Torah in Hebrew, he delivered a speech at his Bar Mitsva, and so on. Also, he grew up in a typical Jewish intellectual milieu (with its emphasis on bookish learning and intellectual debate) ; he had a Jewish private tutor, and attended the Jewish gymnasium. Taken together, these factors must have stimulated an interest in Jewish identity and history and they undoubtedly created sensitivity to all sorts of anti-Semitism in particular and prejudice at large. We can, at any rate, understand certain of Vygotsky’s later interests and publications against this background. For example, when Vygotsky was about 15 years old, he studied the history of the Jewish people for some time with a group of friends, using the Bible and history books as their sources. Several years later, while a university student, Vygotsky began writing reviews of books and plays for Jewish journals and local newspapers. Sometimes these reviews dealt with plays presented by Jewish groups in Yiddish (Vygotsky 1923a; 1923b; 1923c). At other times Vygotsky addressed typical Jewish issues. He discussed, for example, the image of the Yid in Russian literature and pointed out the anti-Semitic traits in Andrey Belyy’s astonishing novel Peterburg (Vygotsky 1916a; 1916b). After the October Revolution, Vygotsky (1917) published an essay in which he welcomed liberation from the oppressive power but argued that the Jewish people were not fully ready for their new freedom (cf. Valsiner and Van der Veer 2000; Van der Veer and Valsiner 1991). Much later, we find Vygotsky writing about ‘peoples developing under the influence of religious prejudices, for example the Jews’ (Vygotsky 1931/1983, p. 163).

Taken together, these facts suggest that Vygotsky combined an intense interest in and identification with the Jewish identity and history with a non-religious worldview. As so often happens in the case of Jews and others who suffer discrimination, the outside hostility and harassments would almost have forced him to take an interest in his ethnic background had this interest not been there in the first place. Fortunately, the early Soviet era was one of the few periods in Russian history where outspoken anti-Semitism was less palpable. However, by that time already 20 years of Vygotsky’s life had passed, years in which he had witnessed and experienced various forms of discrimination that may have shaped his view of life (Van der Veer and Valsiner 1991).

Student Years

After he finished the gymnasium, Vygotsky wished to continue his education at the university. Once again, his Jewish background threatened to play a negative role. The quota for Jewish students at Moscow University was only 3 per cent and a lottery decided who was to belong to this number. Fortunately, Vygotsky was among the lucky few. Now he had to make up his mind about his study and future profession. Given that positions in the civil service were excluded, it seemed best to prepare for one of the liberal professions. His parents wished him to become a medical doctor and for one month in 1913 Vygotsky actually studied medicine. However, he then switched to law, which offered the opportunity to become an attorney and to live outside the Pale. Presumably, neither medicine nor law were studies that held any particular attraction to Vygotsky. In practice he seems to have used his time as a student to take as many courses as possible of his own liking at both Moscow State University and the unofficial Shanyavsky University and to attend the local theaters.

Both Moscow State University and Shanyavsky University offered courses that were particularly interesting to Vygotsky. At Moscow University, he may have taken the psychologist Georgiy Chelpanov’s (1862–1936) classes and he certainly attended a course by the Humboldtian scholar Gustav Shpet (1897–1937) (see below). At Shanyavsky University, Vygotsky attended the classes given by Chelpanov’s student, Pavel Blonsky (1884–1941), who would later become one of the leading figures in the creation of a Marxist psychology. The fact that Vygotsky took these courses suggests that his interest in the study of law or medicine was minimal or, at least, that his interests were much wider. His literary fascination seems to have led him to the psychology of art and creativity and, finally, to psychology in general. However, the full switch to psychology would take place somewhat later, after Vygotsky’s university years, and he graduated in other disciplines. At Shanyavsky University, Vygotsky presumably studied a broad curriculum of courses in the humanities plus psychology (Vygodskaya and Lifanova 1996). He graduated with a master’s thesis on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the play that had fascinated him from his adolescent years. The topic of his master’s thesis at Moscow University remains unknown but Vygotsky’s daughter claims he graduated at both universities, which suggests that Vygotsky finished his law studies as well (Vygodskaya and Lifanova 1996).

Be that as it may, any plans that Vygotsky may have had for his future profession as a lawyer changed radically in the year he finished his studies. It was the annus terribilis of 1917, the year that shook Russia and the world, and that still casts its shadows over large parts of Eastern Europe.

Social Turmoil and Cultural Revolution

The October Revolution and the events that followed caused a social havoc that was unprecedented in recent Russian history. Years of both civil and international war plus brutal political repression and ‘social reforms’ caused a devastation that it will still take Russia many years to recover from. Although we cannot discuss these events in any detail, it would be meaningless to discuss Vygotsky’s life and his theories without this background. One result of the upheavals was, for instance, that millions of children lost their parents and homes (the so-called bezprizorniki) and roamed the streets causing social inconvenience in the form of begging, theft and prostitution (Stevens 1982). Vygotsky would be one of those involved in finding a solution to this major social problem. Another problem was that as a result of the October Revolution and the civil war about two million Russians fled their country while others were expelled, arrested or killed. Naturally, this created vacancies in all layers of the society that could not always be filled by competent candidates. The result was often chaos and improvisation. Again, Vygotsky participated in the solution of this social problem by giving many courses at various schools and institutions.

But all social revolutions, even the most appalling ones, bring some benefits for most people or many benefits for some. And sometimes it may be difficult to draw the balance. This holds for the October Revolution and its role in Vygotsky’s life as well. In Tsarist Russia, he might have become an excellent lawyer or a beloved general practitioner but no academic career would have been possible. In Soviet Russia, academic positions were open to Jews but academic life itself became highly precarious due to the totalitarian aspirations of the communist regime. That raises the question of what Vygotsky himself thought of the October Revolution. In my view, he welcomed several of the social reforms that the new communist regime carried through. Being a Jew, Vygotsky must have been delighted that the regulations against the Jews were abolished and that now the future was open to him. In addition, it seems clear that he believed that the new system of free education would lead to the emancipation of the hitherto oppressed farmers, workers, and ethnic minorities.4 After the Revolution, Vygotsky – like many other intellectuals – became immensely active as a teacher of evening courses to uneducated adults. He also seems to have accepted the Marxist worldview (more than its ‘application’ in Russia, perhaps). In his writings, we find the standard phrases of Marx, Engels and Lenin that were required from intellectuals at the time, but there is also an attempt at genuine theorizing from Marxist premises. Through his work, Vygotsky was also well acquainted with high-ranking Party officials such as the minister of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. Meanwhile, (Party) politics in the more narrow sense of the word was not what interested Vygotsky most, or so it seems. A close friend of Vygotsky has even claimed that after the October Revolution Vygotsky wrote several brochures in each of which he objectively set forth the basic views of different political parties (Valsiner and Van der Veer 2000). This suggests a detached view that is difficult to reconcile with the passionate support for one or the other party. In fine, it seems safe to presume that Vygotsky at least initially combined an active interest in Marxist theory with a belief in the new Soviet society. Whether and to what extent he became disillusioned by the events to...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 Intellectual Biography
• Part 2 Critical Exposition of Vygotsky’s Work
• Part 3 The Reception, Influence and Relevance of Vygotsky’s Work Today
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright