Reading :: Vygotsky: An Intellectual Biography

Vygotsky: An Intellectual Biography
By Anton Yasnitsky

I was privileged to read this book in manuscript form a while back. Yasnitsky has done some exciting work in revisionist Vygotsky studies: work that involves questioning many of the statements that have been taken at face value about the Vygotsky Circle. Some of these statements have emerged from Soviet-era airbrushing; some from self-interested camps (I'm looking at you, Leontiev); and some from Western uptakes of Vygotsky. Yasnitsky has drawn on Zavershneva's recent archival work examining Vygotsky's personal papers; comparative work examining different translations of Vygotsky's publications and claims about those publications (such as the "Vygotsky ban"); and even some anonymous rumors in a wild but believable story about "Tool and Sign." So when he told me he was working on a short biography of Vygotsky, of course I was interested.

Dear reader, I think you will be interested too. Yasnitsky takes a deliberately provocative stance, attempting to break through the conventional story of Vygotsky's genius to help us better understand Vygotsky as an intellectual with his own frustrations and doubts. The first words of the book are:

Each great man's life story is simple unless one wants to make it great.

Each simple man's life story is great unless one wants to make it simple.

This story is about a genius. So they say. But the person did not become genius until after his death. So the story is simple and great at the same time. (p.xi). 

With this shot across the bow, Yasnitsky draws on published sources as well as previously unpublished archives to examine the chapters of Vygotsky's life: "Prophet" (his early life as the devout son of a prominent Jewish banker in the pale); "Bolshevik" (his life in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution); "Reflexologist" (his journey from schoolteacher in Gomel to his debut at the Second Neuropsychological Congress in 1924); "Psychologist" (his hiring at Moscow's Institute for Experimental Psychology, his partnership with Luria, his interest in the Soviet Man described by Trotsky, and his shift to instrumental psychology); "Revisionist" (his realization that a new psychological system was needed; his work with higher psychological functions, followed by his denunciation of this work and his 1930 shift to systems of functions; his and Luria's denunciation of their reactological and instrumental periods in 1931; his 1932 criticism of the core of his own theory); "Holist" (his interest in Gestalt as imported by Luria, leading to reconstructing his theory as holistic; the split with A.N. Leontiev, who wanted to continue work in the instrumentalist vein; and Vygotsky's death); and "Genius" (an epilogue, discussing Vygotsky's uptake and why his readers were motivated to characterize him this way). The book concludes with a helpful timeline.

Although this biography is slim—just 126 pages, not counting the timeline—it seems calculated to maximally disrupt the reverential narrative of Vygotsky the genius. Parts of the book were genuinely shocking. For instance, Yasnitsky casually notes in a footnote that one of my favorite books by Vygotsky—The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions—was not actually his book at all. The manuscript was taken up after his death and altered, with "psychological functions" being replaced by "psychical" (i.e., mental), and then published in 5 chapters under his name in 1960. (Note that this manuscript was from Vygotsky's instrumental period, on which Leontiev's scholarship was based, and it forms the basis for about half of 1978's Mind in Society.) In 1983, this manuscript was published in Vol.4 of the Collected Works with "an extra ten chapters" that "were taken from a completely different, but also unfinished, somewhat earlier Vygotsky manuscript on children's normal and pathological development" but were represented by the editors as newly discovered chapters of the same treatise (p.103)! I was so startled by this claim that I emailed Yasnitsky directly to follow up and he confirmed that this was the case, along with additional proof.

Other revelations were not as shocking for me, since I have been reading Yasnitsky's other works, but seeing them all in one place is striking. Whereas others have alleged that Vygotsky's Cultural and Historical Crisis in Psychology remained unpublished because it threatened the prevailing dogma of psychology, Yasnitsky draws from Zavershneva's archive work to demonstrate that it was likely abandoned due to theoretical problems (pp.56-57).

This manuscript, like the other two book manuscripts Vygotsky produced in the mid-1920s, ends with a discussion of a superman—the Nietzschean superman, which had been taken up by Trotsky and others as the New Soviet Man. Although this superman was expected to emerge as the result of communism, as Yasnitsky wryly notes, he had not yet appeared—so Vygotsky and Luria decided to study supernormal abilities such as memory and mental calculation (p.62; Luria eventually wrote up their findings). In his work with "defectology," Vygotsky followed this thread from Nietzsche's superman to Adler's discussion of overcompensation (in which an individual overcomes a defect through excess) to his own notion of psychological tools—including culturally transmitted tools such as "the alphabet, mnemonics, graphic charts, visual learning aids, and systems of counting" as well as "very complex systems: language, literature, and art" (p.67). To better explore such psychological tools, Vygotsky, Luria, and their research team used Vygotsky's double stimulation method (p.67) to examine how problems could be solved through the mediation of auxiliary instruments (p.68). The most important work in this vein was Leontiev's doctoral research, conducted in 1927-1929 and published in 1931 as The Development of Memory (p.68). As Yasnitsky adds, this book is the main source on instrumental psychology—Vygotsky never wrote such a book himself (p.68)!

Vygotsky and Luria did write a book that heavily borrowed from Leontiev's dissertation and that was intended to be about psychology and the Superman. But that book, which Vygotsky had intended to become his major work, turned into a popular science book: 1930's Studies on the history of behavior: Ape, primitive, child. The book was disappointing to Vygotsky partly because he realized that he needed a new psychological system, which he tried to develop in the aforementioned manuscript on higher psychological functions (p.84). But by October 1930, he denounced the notion of higher psychological functions, arguing that the functions do not change, the links among functions do (pp.86-87). By March 1931, Stalin's denunciation of right and left deviations led Luria and Vygotsky to denounce reactology and their instrumental period as mechanistic (pp.88-89). Vygotsky continued to criticize himself into the early 1930s: he "appeared distressed, frustrated, and disoriented. Stalin's Great Break and the social turmoil resulting from the introduction and realization of the First Five-Year Plan caught him unprepared for change" (p.94). He repeatedly criticized his own instrumental phase (p.94) and eagerly sought a breakthrough in Luria's Uzbek expeditions of 1931-1932. Vygotsky still sought evidence that collectivization would yield a qualitative leap for humanity (p.98). Yet this dream was punctured by Kurt Koffka, who had accompanied Luria on one of these expeditions and who attributed differences to "the attitude of the testees towards the experimenter" (quoted on p.100).

At this point, according to Yasnitsky, "Vygotsky was eager and desparate, but he had lost his way" (p.102). Thus, Yasnitsky avers, Vygotsky turned to the holism of Lewin (p.108). "Under the influence of gestaltism Vygotsky migrated from the idea of analysis by elements that he defended in the 1920s to the method of analysis by units in the early 1930s" (p.110). Lewin's German vocabulary makes its way into Vygotsky's writings in 1931-1934 (p.111), and in the last chapter of Thinking and Speech, written just months before his death, Vygotsky characterizes Gestalt theory as the "most progressive" (quoted on p.113). Yasnitsky also notes that Vygotsky's famous zone of proximal development was developed by Western scholars such as the American Dorothea McCarthy, inspired by Lewin's "field theory" (p.115), and was used to integrate the social situation of a child's development into Vygotsky's theory. In December 1932, at an internal conference, Vygotsky announced a new research program, understanding consciousness as a semantic structure, and specifically focused on "peak psychology": "on human performance in the highest, brightest, and extraordinary episodes of life, above the average, outside the everyday routine, beyond the confines of the usual" (p.116). Yet "from a personal standpoint... this meeting bordered on disastrous" (p.117). It was a complete non-starter for Leontiev's Kharkov group, which had focused on practical intelligence involving "instruments and physical objects" (p.117). Although Vygotsky made a desultory attempt at a manuscript, it was never truly started (p.117). His productive clinical work at the time was conducted in collaboration with Lewin's former students Birenbaum and Zeigarnik, who drew from gestaltist scholarship (p.117). In his last chapter of his last book, Thinking and Speech, he confesses failure, pointing to consciousness as a vast problem ready to be explored (p.119).

After Vygotsky's death, Yasnitsky says, he posthumously became a genius. Twenty years later, the mid-1950s Soviet thaw gave Luria and Leontiev (and many, many other Soviets) the room to publish more. Leontiev became a fantastically successful administrator while Luria became an internationally revered scholar. Both promoted Vygotsky as an important figure. "Their motives were not clear and might have differed considerably," Yasnitsky adds (p.124). Acidly, he notes, "The aura and charisma of the late 'genius' provided Vygotsky's followers with the authority they needed" (p.125).

This book, in sum, is riveting. For me, it's the equivalent of exciting beach reading, full of colorful characters, shocking twists, and gossip. It's irreverent, not toward Vygotsky as a person, but toward Vygotsky as a genius and legend. And it made me rethink much of what I thought I knew—even though I've already read Yasnitsky's previous revisionist works.

On the other hand, I suggest a degree of caution as well. For instance, Yasnitsky argues that Vygotsky-the-genius provided authority to his followers. But Vygotsky was promoted in the West only because his followers had already climbed to the top of the heap: Luria was internationally known as a foundational figure in neuropsychology, while Leontiev had climbed to the top of the administrative heap and won the Lenin Prize in 1963, the same year Thought and Language was published in the West. These figures were already established, and that is what allowed them to promote Vygotsky in the West in the first place. Yasnitsky is on safer ground when he declares that "their motives were not clear."

That being said, Yasnitsky has done an exceptional job of combing through what we know about Vygotsky and developing a fascinating, riveting, and above all valuable counterstory. If you have any interest in Vygotsky or his Circle, yes, read this book.