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RE: [xmca] vygotsky and the revolution



Reviewed at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3386

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Leif Strandberg
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2012 1:55 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] vygotsky and the revolution

Yes, and now I found the English title: Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia


Leif

25 dec 2012 kl. 12.02 skrev Peter Smagorinsky:

> http://www.project-syndicate.org/contributor/alexander-etkind
> I assume that this is the same Etkind?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca- 
> bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Leif Strandberg
> Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2012 5:21 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] vygotsky and the revolution
>
> Hi,
>
> I learned a lot of the intellectual context in USSR, 1920-1936 when 
> reading Nadezjda Mandelsjtam's Stalins Miracle (where she mentions 
> Vygotskij!), and Aleksandr Etkind's An Impossible Passion (I don not 
> know the correct English title), where you can read how the
> Pedalogy- Movement was interrelated to the political life (e.g.  
> Krupskaja, Kalinin, Vysinskij)... very interesting (and scary).
> Boris Pasternak's (a friend of LSV) Doctor Zjivago also provides a 
> feeling of the context and the situation for the intellectuals during 
> those years.
>
> Yes, USSR/Russia was/is an Ocean... and what happens in Moscow can be 
> very different from what takes place in Samarkand (and that was 
> problematic in Luria's Uzbeki-journey)
>
> Leif
> Sweden
> 24 dec 2012 kl. 20.05 skrev Peter Smagorinsky:
>
>> Well, it took me about 6 months, but I finally finished reading 
>> Figes'
>> 824-page tour de force, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution
>> 1991-1924 (ending with Lenin's death and Stalin's ascendance). I am 
>> glad I read it, even though I was actively discouraged from doing so 
>> by some xmca subscribers, both on and off list. I would say that his 
>> general perspective does not favor the Bolsheviks, which may account 
>> for the efforts to dissuade my reading. I hope that I do have some 
>> powers of discernment that enable me to identify and read through a 
>> historian's perspective, however. (n.b. I am also aware that the US 
>> has its own history that is amenable to multiple perspectives, many 
>> of them unfavorable, so I hope I do not appear chauvinistic in 
>> finding the USSR
>> problematic.) (full disclosure: my Jewish grandparents and two of my 
>> uncles fled Gomel in 1913 and 1916 to escape pogroms, leaving from 
>> Finland and landing in New York.)
>>
>> Figes does provide, in at times numbing detail, the complexities of 
>> the transition from Tsar to USSR, which took place more or less 
>> between 1905 and the early 1920s after the two Russian revolutions 
>> (1905, 1917) brought down the Tsar; and after the civil war that 
>> followed and produced an internecine military battle for control of 
>> the Russian territories in the power vacuum. I must say that the 
>> whole affair is far more complex than I'd ever imagined, which no 
>> doubt speaks to my ignorance about most everything that's happened on 
>> this earth, in spite of my ongoing efforts to learn it. I imagine 
>> that there are many and contradictory points of view on the period 
>> and its winners and losers; and I've read but one, at least in 
>> detail. It's a history worth learning about, I'd say.
>>
>> My purpose here is not to debate the merits of Lenin, Stalin, and 
>> Trotsky, or Marx and Engels, or any of the many lesser-known figures 
>> from the revolutions (and there were several). I partly undertook 
>> this reading to get a better understanding of the context of 
>> Vygotsky's life and how his experiences mediated his construction of 
>> a theory of human development. I've read a lot of brief summaries of 
>> his life, but now must wonder how the incredible period of death and 
>> destruction that surrounded his life contributed to his beliefs about 
>> cultural difference and mediation (a major issue in his writing about 
>> defectology). He was born in
>> 1896 in the Pale of Settlement, the Byelorussian territory to which 
>> Tsarist Russia restricted Jews, leaving them subject to death via 
>> pogroms. In 1905, with LSV at age 9, Russia lost a war to Japan, 
>> bringing about the first revolution, which was quelled. Then in
>> 1914 World War 1 broke out, although hardly in a vacuum; it embodied 
>> many extant conflicts. At about this time Vygotsky began the work 
>> that resulted in The Psychology of Art, which he wrote mostly from a 
>> sickbed during a lengthy bout with tuberculosis over a period of 
>> about
>> 6 years, a time that encompassed the whole of WWI and then in 1917 
>> the Russian Revolution that brought down the Tsar- according to 
>> Figes, the Tsar's haughty lifestyle in conjunction with the people's 
>> dissatisfaction with Russia's involvement with the war (particularly 
>> their struggles against Germany) served as the tipping point in their 
>> willingness to live as his subjects.
>>
>> It's quite striking that as the world raged and burned around him, 
>> LSV focused intensely on trying to figure out the role of art, 
>> particularly drama and literature, in the development of human 
>> consciousness; and in the version I read (MIT Press translation), 
>> there's no mention of revolution or politics. By the time he was done 
>> the Tsar was overthrown but the civil war between Reds and White (an 
>> affiliation of various anti-Bolsheviks, often loyal to the Tsar) was 
>> in full stride, with the two sides contending to replace him and 
>> thousands being killed in the process. Yet LSV biographies have him 
>> teaching during this time, and ultimately landing in Moscow as a 
>> psychologist, as if there were no disturbances in the environment.
>> His
>> career in Moscow is often described as beginning in about 1924, the 
>> year of Lenin's death and Stalin's rise, and according to documents 
>> recently unearthed, LSV was a devoted communist, even as Jews 
>> continued to be suppressed in the new regime (as testified to by no 
>> less a Bolshevik than Trotsky). So, Vygotsky's career as a Moscow 
>> psychologist took place in the 10 years between Stalin's ascendance 
>> to power and Hitler's rise in Germany-two extraordinary rulerships of 
>> modern history, both highly repressive, parochial, nationalistic, 
>> violent, and anti- Semitic-that get elided in accounts of his career, 
>> at least those I've read.
>>
>> One thing I learned from Figes is that Stalin's crackdowns included 
>> repression of the arts; and Vygotsky never returned to his early 
>> considerations of the theater with nearly the focus that produced The 
>> Psychology of Art. I imagine that the repressive environment had 
>> something to do with that, but I'm only guessing from my historical 
>> vantage point. I have to believe that LSV was not doing psychology in 
>> a vacuum. So how did the tumult surrounding his career contribute to 
>> his thinking? If mediation is central to development, it seems to me 
>> that it has to matter.
>>
>> One thing about the revolutions that I have yet to figure out is how 
>> extensive they were. Most of the action seems centered in the east, 
>> where Moscow and St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad/ Stalingrad are 
>> located, and thus the locus of power and resources.
>> But Russia spans 13 time zones, stretches to the Pacific and Bering 
>> Straits, and includes 17,075,200 sq km (6,592,800 sq mi), giving it 
>> more than one-ninth of the world's land area. Luria's Uzbekistan 
>> study suggests that the revolutions barely touched remote areas, even 
>> in the western region. So I can't figure out how the whole of the 
>> nation was affected by the revolutions, except perhaps for Siberia's 
>> service as place of exile.
>>
>> Well, too much perhaps, but those are some thoughts following my 
>> reading of this interesting history. Any help with contextualizing 
>> LSV's career in light of these events is greatly appreciated. Thx,p 
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