[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
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
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca