Lev Vygotsky - Criticisms of Available Vygotsky's Texts

Criticisms of Available Vygotsky's Texts

A relatively recent trend in Vygotskian science emerged in 1990s. This trend is typically associated with growing dissatisfaction with the quality and scholarly integrity of available English translations of the texts of Vygotsky and members of Vygotsky Circle made from largely mistaken, distorted, and even in a few instances falsified Soviet editions, which raises serious concerns about the reliability of Vygotsky's texts available in English. However, unlike critical literature that discusses Western interpretations of Vygotsky's legacy, the target of criticism and the primary object of research in the studies of the revisionist strand are Vygotsky's texts proper: the manuscripts, original lifetime publications, and Vygotsky's posthumous Soviet editions that most often were subsequently uncritically translated into other languages. The revisionist strand is solidly grounded in a series of studies in Vygotsky's archives that uncovered the previously unknown and unpublished Vygotsky's materials.

Thus, some studies of the revisionist strand show that certain phrases, terms, and expressions typically associated with Vygotskian legacy as its core notions and concepts—such as "cultural-historical psychology", "cultural-historical theory", "cultural-historical school", "higher psychical/mental functions", "internalization", "zone of proximal development", etc., -- in fact, either occupy not more than just a few dozen pages within the six-volume collection of Vygotsky’s works or even never occur in Vygotsky's own writings. Another series of studies revealed the questionable quality of Vygotsky's published texts that, in fact, were never finished and intended for publication by their author, but were nevertheless posthumously published without giving proper editorial acknowledgement of their unfinished, transitory nature and with numerous editorial interventions and distortions of Vygotsky's text. Another series of publications reveals that another well-known Vygotsky's text that is often presented as the foundational work was back-translated into Russian from an English translation of a lost original and passed for the original Vygotsky's writing. This episode was referred to as "benign forgery".

Scholars associated with revisionist strand in Vygotskian science propose returning back to original Vygotsky's uncensored works, critically revise the available discourse, and republish them in the original and in translation alike and, in addition, with rigorous scholarly commentary. Therefore, an essential part of this revisionist strand is the ongoing work on "PsyAnima Complete Vygotsky" project that for the first time ever exposes full collections of Vygotsky's texts, uncensored and cleared from numerous mistakes, omissions, insertions, and blatant distortions and falsifications of the author's text made in Soviet editions and uncritically transferred in virtually all foreign translated editions of Vygotsky's works. This project is affiliated with PsyAnima, Dubna Psychological Journal and is carried out by a number of members of the journal's editorial board in collaboration with an international team of enthusiasts—researchers, archival workers, and library staff—from Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and Switzerland, who joined their efforts and put together a collection of L.S. Vygotsky’s texts. This publication work is supported by a stream of critical scholarly studies and publications on textology, history, theory and methodology of Vygotskian research.