Recent Archival Discoveries and New Perspectives in Vygotsky Studies Guest Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

It was as early as during the 1960s that Anglo-American readers first discovered Vygotsky, although he did not rise to real fame until 1978, when a thin collection of his works, Mind in Society, triggered a powerful wave of admiration. Michael Cole described the state of affairs using a vivid metaphor: “Recently, within a very few years, Vygotsky has become a fad, and, as with all fads, the greater notoriety brought with it both genuine evolution and dimestore knockoffs.” Such Vygotsky’s terms and topics as zona blizhayshego razvitiya (“the zone of proximal development”), vzrashchivanie vysshikh psikhologicheskikh funktsiy (“the ‘ingrowing’ of higher psychological functions”), and znakovoye oposredstvovanie (“sign mediation”) are especially in demand at the market of Western psychology. The “instrumental psychology” of the early Vygotsky is much closer and clearer to the Western reader, especially the English-speaking one, than his theory of the mind as the “dynamic meaningful system” and the “height psychology” of his final years. By now, most of Vygotsky’s heritage has been translated into English and other languages. The quality of those translations, as well as the degree to which the original texts have been understood, often leaves much to be desired, though. This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that Vygotsky’s thought flourished in an entirely different historical and cultural milieu. The mainstream of Vygotsky studies in the West is a far-reaching hybridization of his views with local currents in psychology, like social constructivism, enactivism, neo-Piagetian approaches, and so on. Also, such key notions as smysl (sense, significance, purpose, essence—all in one) and perezhivanie (emotional experience), which have no exact counterparts in English, are usually interpreted in terms of British empiricism.