Moses on his way to the promised land: On Vygotsky’s Notebooks

Abstract

The publication of a voluminous selection of notebooks from the Vygotsky Family Archive represents a major event for the Vygotsky studies. The material provided in the book turns out to be truly novel; it reaches far beyond mere compilations of existing texts, reprints, and (re-)translations. The key question we address in our contribution is: does this newly made available material have a significant impact on our understanding of Vygotsky’s life and work? We first offer a rough summary of the book’s content, then indicate what readers may expect from the Notebooks and what they will not find there; and finally, we focus on Vygotsky’s early quest for his own Jewishness and on the shift toward systemic and semiotic thinking that marks the last years of his life.

Klaus Holzkamp smiled: Soviet psychology in the Federal Republic of Germany in the Cold War era.

“…Vygotsky was a great admirer of Pasternak and owned a copy of one of his books that had been inscribed by the author (cf. his Notebooks : Zavershneva & van der Veer, 2018, p. 268; for a discussion of Vygotsky’s Notebooks see Kölbl & Métraux, 2021). Vygotsky’s great interest in literature and the arts in general also affected his and his near colleagues’ work in psychology in important ways and probably was significant in leading him to call his projected form of psychology “acmeist psychology” (Kölbl, 2021a).…”

Vygotsky’s Legacy: Understanding and Beyond

“…The potential of this volume remains yet to be explored (cf. Kölbl & Métraux, 2021 ; Maidansky, 2020 ), but it seems clear that the published notes substantially enrich our picture of Vygotsky the scientist and the man. The early notes are particularly interesting, because they show the young Vygotsky (i.e., around 1916–1917, when the nation was already falling apart) to be very much involved with the issue of Jewish identity (see Zavershneva and Veer, 2018 ; chapters 1 to 4).…”