Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (November 5, 1896 - June 11, 1934)

Soviet psychologist and founder of the research tradition that became known from the 1930s as the cultural–historical theory of higher psychological functions. Author of more than 270 scholarly works, as well as publications in literary theory, pedology, and child cognitive development. The group of researchers inspired by his ideas became known as the “Vygotsky–Luria Circle” (or “Vygotsky Circle”). From 1929 to 1931, Vygotsky headed the Psychological Laboratory at the Clinic of Nervous Diseases of the First Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov.

Vygotsky was born on November 17 (November 5, Old Style), 1896, in the Belarusian city of Orsha, to a family of civil servants. He was educated by a private tutor, Solomon Ashpits, known for his use of the so-called Socratic dialogue method. In 1917, he graduated from the Law Faculty of Moscow University and simultaneously from the History and Philosophy Faculty of Shanyavsky University. He taught in Gomel. From 1924, he worked at the Moscow State Institute of Experimental Psychology, then at the Experimental Defectological Institute, which he founded. He later lectured at several universities in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov.

In the last years of his life, Vygotsky focused primarily on the study of the structure of consciousness (his work "Thinking and Speech" (1934) is fundamental to Russian psycholinguistics). In his study of verbal thinking, Vygotsky provided a new approach to the problem of localizing higher mental functions as structural units of brain activity. Studying the development and decay of higher mental functions using child psychology, defectology, and psychiatry, Vygotsky concluded that the structure of consciousness is a dynamic semantic system of affective, volitional, and intellectual processes that are in unity.

Vygotsky died on June 11, 1934, in Moscow from tuberculosis. The reassessment of views on science and culture that followed in the USSR in the mid-1930s resulted in Vygotsky's work being forgotten until the second half of the 1950s, when his works began to be published again.