It's good to have your textological eagle eye back, Anton. By the way, I wrote an article about your defense of Chukovsky which I never managed to get published. Are you interested?
Yes, I picked up some of the points you made by reading van der Veer's review of the Kozulin translation. Other people on this list have supported the criticisms that he made. As you know, I am not a Russophone (I'm working on it!) so I really have no independent way of judging.
Kozulin does say that his translation is "based on the 1934 edition" (p. lvi) and he even has the title page of the 1934 edition as the title page of his book. Curiously, he also adds that the 1934 edition is prepared imperfectly by Vygotsky. How does he know, I wonder? (There! THAT'S a rhetorical question!)
I see you are also right on Kolbanovsky not disappearing; I THINK I got that from Levitin's "One is Not Born a Personality" but I don't have it here in Seoul so I can't check. However, there is a similar and very sympathetic account of Kolbanovsky's role in getting Thinking and Speech into print in 1934 and defending it against the inevitable backlash given in van der Veer and Valsiner's own book, "Understanding Vygotsky", pp. 383-384.
About Piaget and Vygotsky, I'm afraid we are in almost complete agreement; I know this will come as a terrible disappointment to you, since you like to put our disagreements in the sharpest possible light! I too found Susan Pass's double hagiography completely unhelpful. However, the evidence you cite from Piaget's letters to Luria certainly suggests a correspondence in French and consequently unfamiliarity with Vygotsky's writings in Russian on the part of Piaget, which is what I was trying to argue.
Do you happen to know anything about this article by Richard Prawat in American Educational Research Journal (Fall 2000) about Vygotsky's dinner with Dewey? Did you read Gredler's and Shield's criticism of it in American Education Research Journal 2003, 40: 177-187?
In some ways, it seems relevant to Chukovsky-Vygotsky, because Prawat's main argument is that Vygotsky was essentially the protege of Lunacharsky and Krupskaya, both of whom were quite hostile to Chukovsky (according to Chukovsky).
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
PS: Sorry to rattle on like this, but you are the list's authoritative textologist (I'm still trying to do something with the stuff you uncovered about Belyayev).
Do YOU happen to know where this bit from Mind in Society p. 65 comes from?
"The search for method becomes one of the most important problems of the entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological activity. In this case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of the study. (ALL of this is in italics in Mind in Society)"
I'm quite SURE it doesn't come from Chapter Two of the History of the Development of the Higher Psychological Functions (Vol. 4 of the English Collected Works).
The "tool and result" part becomes very important in Holzman and Newman's book "Revolutionary Scientist" of course. But it's also the epigraph of a recent article in Applied Linguistics, and I'd really like to know the context.
dk
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Received on Fri May 30 17:18 PDT 2008
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