Anton Yasnitsky

Vygotsky in English: What Still Needs to Be Done

At present readers of English have still limited access to Vygotsky’s writings. Existing translations are marred by mistakes and outright falsifications. Analyses of Vygotsky’s work tend to downplay the collaborative and experimental nature of his research. Several suggestions are made to improve this situation. New translations are certainly needed and new analyses should pay attention to the contextual nature of Vygotsky’s thinking and research practice.

Vygotsky Circle as a Personal Network of Scholars: Restoring Connections Between People and Ideas

The name of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) is well-known among contemporary psychologists and educators. The cult of Vygotsky, also known as “Vygotsky boom”, is probably conducive to continuous reinterpretation and wide dissemination of his ideas, but hardly beneficial for their understanding as an integrative theory of human cultural and biosocial development. Two problems are particularly notable. These are, first, numerous gaps and age-old biases and misconceptions in the historiography of Soviet psychology, and, second, the tendency to overly focus on the figure of Vygotsky to the neglect of the scientific activities of a number of other protagonists of the history of cultural-historical psychology. This study addresses these two problems and reconstructs the history and group dynamics within the dense network of Vygotsky’s collaborators and associates, and overviews their research, which is instrumental in understanding Vygotsky’s integrative theory in its entirety as a complex of interdependent ideas, methods, and practices.

Revisionist Revolution in Vygotskian Science: Toward Cultural-Historical Gestalt Psychology

Lev Vygotsky is presumably the best-known and the most-cited Russian psychologist today. At least this seems to be true of contemporary Russia and North America (Aleksandrova-Howell, Abramson, and Craig, 2012). The popularity of Vygotsky in certain circles in Anglophone North America is truly enormous and is often described in terms of a “Vygotsky boom” (Cole, 2004; Garai and Kocski, 1995) or, somewhat critically, as the “cult of Vygotsky” (Yasnitsky, 2010, 2011b, 2011c). The beginning of this “Vygotsky boom” dates back to the end of the 1970s, and it was already a decade later, at the end of the 1980s, that a contemporary scholar astutely observed:

Wundt, Vygotsky and Bandura: A cultural-historical science of consciousness in three acts

This article looks at three historical efforts to coordinate the scientific study of biological and cultural aspects of human consciousness into a single comprehensive theory of human development that includes the evolution of the human body, cultural evolution and personal development: specifically, the research programs of Wilhelm Wundt, Lev Vygotsky and Albert Bandura. The lack of historical relations between these similar efforts is striking, and suggests that the effort to promote cultural and personal sources of consciousness arises as a natural foil to an overemphasis on the biological basis of consciousness, sometimes associated with biological determinism.

From Vygotsky to Vygotskian psychology: Introduction to the history of the Kharkov School

Around the end of the 1920s, Vygotsky introduced his integrative framework for psycho-logical research to the Soviet Union. This framework was not abandoned and forgotten until its rediscovery in Russia and America in the 1950s, as some claim. In fact, even after his untimely death in 1934, Vygotsky remained the spiritual leader of a group of his for-mer students and collaborators, who became known as the Kharkov School. This paper reconstructs the early intellectual history of Vygotskian psychology, as it emerged, around the time of Vygotskys death, in the research program of the Kharkov School.

RETHINKING THE EARLY HISTORY OF POST-VYGOTSKIAN PSYCHOLOGY : The Case of the Kharkov School

Between the death of Vygotsky in 1934 and the discovery of Vygotskys work in the West in 1962, Vygotskian psychology was developed through research done by the first generation of Vygotskys students and their followers, primarily associated with the Kharkov School. Surprisingly, these studies carried out in the 1930s, of great importance for the development of virtually all subsequent Vygotskian psychology, still remain largely unknown; this represents a significant gap in understanding the history of Vygotskian psychology as an empirical study of consciousness. This paper provides a systematic overview of the research agenda of the Kharkov group between 1931 and 1941 and provides new insights into the early development of Vygotskian psychology.

Deconstructing Vygotsky’s victimization narrative A re-examination of the ‘Stalinist suppression’ of Vygotskian theory

Although many facets of Lev Vygotsky’s life have drawn considerable attention from historians of science, perhaps the most popular feature of his personal narrative was that his work was actively chastised by the Stalinist government. Almost all contemporary references to Vygotsky’s personal history emphasize that from 1936 to 1956, it was forbidden to either discuss or disseminate any of Vygotsky’s works within the Soviet Union. Although this ‘Vygotsky ban’ is both widely acknowledged and frequently cited by a variety of scholars, the exact nature of this alleged Communist party censure has received far less historical attention. Through focusing on the logistics of Soviet ‘bans,’ this article attempts to shed light on this historical mystery and augment the growing body of revisionist literature that serves to deconstruct the mythologized persona of Lev Vygotsky.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Piotr Zinchenko's Psychology of Memory: A Brief History of Ideas

Unlike many Soviet psychologists, Piotr Zinchenko [1930–1969] is well known in the West, and his studies—along with those of Z.M. Istomina and, to a somewhat lesser extent, of A.A. Smirnov—are considered classics, thus appearing to constitute the main contribution of Soviet psychology to international psychological research on memory to date. Indeed, the first of Zinchenko’s publications in English came out in 1969—and it also turned out to be one of his last publications: the same year Piotr Zinchenko passed away. Smirnov and Zinchenko’s (1969) broad overview of psychological studies on memory in the Soviet Union over several decades, which includes many of Zinchenko’s pioneering works, became the standard reference for anyone interested in the Soviet development of this field up to the end of the 1960s. Another source is a book chapter by T.V. Yendovitskaya (1964/1971), which is a noted secondhand account of Soviet studies on memory available in English. English translations of the actual studies done by Zinchenko did not appear until the beginning of the 1980s. To date, only three of Zinchenko’s papers have been published in English: