Vygotsky’s psychological views — страница 3

1917 with a degree in law. Although he received no official degree from Shanyavskii Uni­versity, he profited greatly from his studies in psychology, philosophy, and literature. He returned to Gomel after his graduation to teach literature and psychology. Very little information is available about the impact of the 1917 Revolution on Lev Semenovich. Lev Semenovich continued living in Gomel's relatively peaceful set­ting for seven years after his return in 1917. With his cousin David Vygodsky he taught literature at a school in Gomel. He also conducted classes on aesthetics and the history of art in a conservatory and gave many lectures on literature and science. Furthermore, he organized a psychology laboratory at the Gomel Teacher's College, where he de­livered a series of

lectures that provided the groundwork for his 1926 volume, Pedagogical Psychology. In 1920 Vygotsky was in poor health. The disease that was eventually to kill him, tuberculosis, had begun to take its toll. It was already a serious enough threat to Vy­gotsky’s life in 1920 that he spent a brief period in a sanatorium and asked one of his former professors from Shanyavskii University to publish his collected manuscripts in the event of his death. He recovered from this bout of tuberculosis, however, and continued his projects in Gomel. In 1924 he married Roza Smekhova. They had two daugh­ters. In retrospect all this work seems to have been preparation for an event in 1924 that was to change Vygotsky’s life irrevocably. This turning point, which separates the two major

periods of Vygotsky’s biography, was his appearance on January 6, 1924, at the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Leningrad. There he made a presentation, "Methods of Reflexological and Psychological Investi­gations." Vygotsky’s brilliant, performance so impressed the director of the Psychological Institute in Moscow, K. N. Kornilov, that he immedi­ately invited this "Mozart of psychology" to join himself and others in restructuring the institution. Lev Semenovich accepted and later that year left Gomel to begin his new career. In 1925 Lev Semenovich completed his dissertation, “The Psy­chology of Art.” During the fall of that year he received permission to have a public defense, but a renewed and serious bout of tuberculosis made

that impossible. Recognizing this fact, the qualifying commission excused him from a public defense, and he was passed. The years between 1924 and 1934 were extremely busy and pro­ductive for Vygotsky. Soon after his arrival in Moscow, Aleksandr Romanovich Luria (1902-1977) and Aleksei Nikolaevich Leont’ev (1904-1979) joined him as students and colleagues. Together these three became known as the "troika" of the Vygotskian School. Several other students and followers eventually joined the school, but it was Luria and Leont’ev who were destined to be the major developers of Vygotsky’s ideas after his death. The excitement that Vygotsky generated among his students and colleagues is perhaps impossible to appreciate in today’s setting. In 1925 he produced the

written version of his 1924 presentation at the Second All-Russian Psychoneurology Congress; between Novem­ber of 1925 and the spring of 1926, while in the hospital with another attack of tuberculosis, he wrote a major philosophical critique of the theoretical foundations of psychology, “The Historical Significance of the Crisis in Psychology”. Between 1931 and 1934 Vygotsky produced manuscripts for re­views, articles, and books at an ever accelerating pace. He edited and wrote a long introduction for the 1932 Russian translation of Piaget's volume Le langage et la pensée chez l’enfant (1923). His introduction was later to serve as the second chapter of his posthumous volume Thinking and Speech (1934). During Vygotsky’s last few years of life, he lectured and

wrote at an almost frenetic pace. Throughout this period Vygotsky’s bouts of tuberculosis became increasingly frequent and severe. His protracted, terrifying spells of coughing led to exhaustion for several days, but instead of resting, he tried to reach as many of his goals as possible. In the spring of 1934 his health grew much worse. His doctors insisted that he enter the hospital, but he refused because of work he needed to complete by the end of the school year. One May 9 he had a very severe attack at work and was brought home. At the end of May his bleeding began again, and on June 2 he was hospitalized in Serebryanii Bor Sanatorium. Shortly after midnight on June 11 he died. He was buried in Novodevechii Cemetery in Moscow. In all, Vygotsky produced approximately 180