[Xmca-l] Re: asking for information

[David Kellogg]

Nacho:

I think the last days of most dying people are quite sleepy and
uninteresting affairs. According to his letters (the Puzyrei collection
excerpted in 2007 in the Journal of Russian and Eastern European Psychology
and the more recent collection in German edited by Ruckreim), he died in a
sanatorium. But the last months of Vygotsky were full of events, including
a wonderful lecture on thinking in the school child, delivered in
Leningrad, at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, a little over a month
before he died. He describes riding the train between Moscow and Leningrad
as a way of discriminating between the immediate and ultimate goal of an
action; he must have spent a lot of time on that train.

Mike once speculated that Vygotsky worked himself to death deliberately,
i.e. "Thinking and Speech" is not simply the world's most
interesting suicide note, it is the actual weapon that was used in the
crime. I am not so sure about Vygotsky's motivation: one of the last things
he wrote was "amor fati", which he wrongly ascribed to Nietzsche rather
than Boethius. LSV was taking on new assignments right up to the very end,
you know (e.g. being appointed to head the All Union Institute of
Experimental Psychology, taking on research with chimpanzees, and preparing
a conference paper for Kharkhov). But Mike is surely right about one thing:
the work hastened his death, and, of course, his immortality, in a way that
the sanatorium could not.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article;

 David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE: VYGOTSKY’S ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’,
THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT AND ‘INGROWING’ IN THE WEEKEND STORIES OF
KOREAN CHILDREN, British Journal of Educational Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
<https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>


Some e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200




On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 5:48 PM Nacho Montero <nacho.montero@uam.es> wrote:

> Hi you all, dear Xmca members,
>
> I’m trying to write some reconstruction of last days of L.S. Vygotsky’s
> life (just for literary purposes). Are there any documentation on the house
> and neighborhood he was living in Moscow, by 1934?
>
> Thank you in advance!
>
> Nacho
>
>
>
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