Lev Vygotsky - Biography

Biography

Lev Vygotsky was born in Orsha, Byelorussia, in the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus) into a non-religious middle class Jewish family. His father was a banker. He was raised in the city of Gomel, where he obtained both public and private education. In 1913 Vygotsky was admitted to the Moscow State University through a "Jewish Lottery" to meet a three percent Jewish student quota for entry in Moscow and Saint Petersberg universities. There he studied law and, in parallel, he attended lectures at fully official, but privately funded and non degree granting "Shanyavskii People’s University". His early interests were in the arts and he might have aspired to be a literary critic, fascinated with the formalism of his time.

Upon graduation in 1917, Vygotsky returned to Gomel, where he lived after the October Socialist Revolution of 1917 happened. There is virtually no information about his life during the years of the German occupation and the Civil War until the Bolsheviks overtook the town in 1919. Since then Vygotsky was an active participant of major social transformation under the Bolshevik rule and a fairly prominent representative of the Bolshevik government in Gomel in 1919-1923. For unclear reasons, around early 1920s, he changed his birth name from Vygodskii (with "d") into Vygotskii (with middle "t") and his patronymic from original Jewish "Simkhovich" to Slavic "Semenovich".

In January 1924, Vygotsky took part in the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Leningrad. Soon thereafter, Vygotsky received an invitation to become a research fellow at the Psychological Institute in Moscow. Vygotsky moved to Moscow with new wife Roza Smekhova. He began his career at the Psychological Institute as a "staff scientist, second class". By the end of 1925, Vygotsky completed his dissertation in 1925 on "The Psychology of Art" (not published until 1960s) and a book "Pedagogical Psychology" that was apparently created on the basis of lecture notes that he prepared back in Gomel as a psychology instructor at local educational establishments. In summer 1925 he made his first and only trip abroad to a London congress on the education of the deaf. Upon return to the Soviet Union, he was hospitalized due to relapse of tuberculosis and, having miraculously survived, remained an invalid and out of job until the end of 1926. His dissertation was accepted as the prerequisite of scholarly degree, which was awarded to Vygotsky in fall 1925 in absentia.

After his release from hospital Vygotsky did theoretical and methodological work on the crisis in psychology, but never finished the draft of the manuscript and interrupted his work on it around mid-1927. The manuscript was later published with notable editorial interventions and distortions in 1982 and presented by the editors as one of the most important Vygotsky's works. In this early manuscript, Vygotsky argued for the formation of a general psychology that could unite the naturalist objectivist strands of psychological science with the more philosophical approaches of Marxist orientation. However, he also harshly criticized those of his colleagues who attempted to build a "Marxist Psychology" as an alternative to the naturalist and philosophical schools. Arguing that if one wanted to build a truly Marxist Psychology, there were no shortcuts to be found by merely looking for applicable quotes in Marx' writings, rather one should look for a methodology that was in accordance with the Marxian spirit.

In 1926-30 Vygotsky worked on a research programme investigating the development of higher cognitive functions of logical memory, selective attention, decision making and language comprehension, from early forms of primal psychological functions. During this period he gathered a group of students including Luria, Alexei Leontiev and several others. Vygotsky guided his students in researching this phenomenon from three different angles: The instrumental angle, which tried to understand the ways in which humans use objects as aides of mediation in memory and reasoning. A developmental approach, focusing on how children acquire the higher cognitive functions during development. And a culture-historical approach, studying the ways in which forms of mediation and developmental trajectories are shaped by different social and cultural patterns of interaction.

In 1930s Vygotsky was engaged in massive reconstruction of his theory of his "instrumental" period of 1920s. Around 1929-1930 he realized numerous deficiencies and imperfections of the earlier work of the Vygotsky Circle and criticized it on a number of occasions. Specifically, Vygotsky criticized his earlier idea of radical separation between the "lower" and "higher" psychological functions and, around 1932, appears to abandon it. During this period Vygotsky was under particularly strong influece of holistic theories of German-American group of proponents of Gestalt psychology, most notably, the peripheral participants of the Gestalt movement Kurt Goldstein and Kurt Lewin. However, Vygotsky's work of this period remained largely fragmentary and unfinished and, therefore, unpublished.

Vygotsky died of tuberculosis on June 11, 1934, at the age of 37, in Moscow.