The following information is taken from the Foreword (2012) and essay ‘Vygotsky in Context’ both by Alex Kozulin, editor and translator (together with Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar) of the revised and expanded edition of Thought and Language by Lev Vygotsky, published 2012 by MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
An important aspect of Lev Vygotsky is that despite his place as a, or maybe, the, formative figure in Soviet/Russian psychology he was not a formally trained psychologist but came to psychology through other areas of interests. He brought the perspective of an ‘outsider’ to theoretically address the ‘crisis’ of early twentieth century (p. xxxii) -a crisis between competing methods and methodologies seeking to define psychology as a unified science when in fact psychology is not this singular field, but ‘a collection of studies having absolutely different theoretical foundations and methodologies’ which is the position of Vygotsky restated in the work Sigmund Koch in the 1980s, fifty years after Vygotsky and one hundred years after psychology had been recognized as a science. (p. xxxiii)
This lapse of time between Koch and Vygotsky points to an interesting points in Vygotsky’s biography related to his research. The first, and perhaps most significant point is the recognition of Vygotsky’s ideas and research. Lev Vygotsky was active in the field of psychology for a very short time, a period of approximately ten years (1924-1934) before he died at the age of 38 from tuberculosis. Already by the time of his death the ideas he was putting forth were in conflict to those which would be viewed acceptable by Stalinism. By 1936 Vygotsky and his research , with concepts deemed too bourgeois, had become a footnote in Soviet psychology. However, by the 1950s Vygotsky’s methods and ideas were brought back first within the Soviet Union, and slowly through translations (first in the late 1950s). However, it would be another twenty-plus years, until the 1980s and 1990s, when the pace of translation of not just a few seminal works, but all of Vygotsky’s writings would be published (in Russian) and translated into English and other languages.
Kozulin on the first page of his Foreward to this most recent, revised and expanded edition of Thought and Language asks a very important question to the growing popularity of Vygotsky’s ideas in the late twentieth -early twenty-first century: ‘Why is it that a theory developed in Russia almost a century ago continues to capture the imagination of the present generation of American and Western European researchers and practitioners?’ Kozulin answers himself, “One possible explanation of this puzzling phenomenon is that Vygotsky’s theory offered some tentative answers to the questions we are only now finally ready to ask.’ When I consider the recent (last twenty years) discoveries made in the fields of neuro- and cognitive science which have been made possible by technological advancements in brain imaging -the ability to see how communication occurs physically within the brain- Kozulin statement seems valid. Perhaps the period spent away from Vygotsky’s ideas, exploring parallel paths and dead ends, was necessary in order to allow the technology which these other, related, fields are dependent upon to catch up. Interestingly, hours after I had read Kozulin foreword and introductory essay on Vygotsky I came across an article about research published in the current issue of Science on short and long term memory, research that disproves the ideas held by scientists for the last fifty years as to how short and long term memory function. Although Vygotsky, his ideas, were not mentioned directly in this article it is difficult to imagine that without them these recent findings in a different, yet related field about concepts and functions Vygotsky addressed -memory, higher function and consciousness- via psychology would not have been possible without the paradigm shift that Vygotsky’s research brought about.