Lev Vygotsky died at 37, and Stalin's Soviet Union then banned his books
A young psychologist from Gomel argued that minds are built, not born: language, tools and other people shape how a child learns to think. He coined the zone of proximal development, fought tuberculosis for years, and died in 1934. His work stayed forbidden in the Soviet Union until after Stalin died.
Vygotsky was born in Orsha, in the Mogilev Governorate of the Russian Empire, in November 1896, to a secular Jewish family; his father was a banker. He grew up in Gomel, was taught at home until 1911, and won a place at Moscow University in 1913 through a lottery, because Jewish entry to the universities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg was capped at three percent. His parents pushed him toward medicine, but he switched to law within his first semester.
His break came in January 1924 at a psychoneurological congress in Petrograd, where he met Alexander Luria. Luria helped him win a research post at the Psychological Institute in Moscow, run by Konstantin Kornilov. Vygotsky started there on a humble rank and also taught in a secondary school. In 1925 he finished a dissertation on the psychology of art, which did not reach print until 1965, then spent months in hospital with tuberculosis.
The central idea of his thinking is that higher mental abilities such as deliberate attention, selective memory and decision making grow out of social life. Children learn through mediation, using cultural tools like words and signs, which they gradually take inside themselves. The zone of proximal development names the distance between what a child can manage alone and what the same child can reach with help from someone who knows more. Play, in his view, was the leading activity of preschoolers, uniting feeling, will and thought.
He never met Jean Piaget and disagreed with him about egocentric speech. Piaget expected it to fade away as children matured; Vygotsky argued it turns inward and becomes thought. Tuberculosis returned and killed him in Moscow on 11 June 1934. A first collection of his major texts appeared in 1956, and a 2002 survey placed him 83rd among the most cited psychologists of the twentieth century.
Source: Lev Vygotsky
