To Moscow with Love: Partial Reconstruction of Vygotsky’s Trip to London

The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) left the Soviet Union only once to attend a conference on the education of the deaf in London. So far almost nothing was known about this trip, which took place in a period when Vygotsky was still completely unknown as a psychologist, both inside his own country and abroad. Making use of a newly discovered notebook, it proved possible to partially reconstruct Vygotsky’s journey and stay in London. Vygotsky’s very personal remarks show him to have been a very sensitive and spirited man, who was prey to strong emotions during the conference and afterwards. Rather surprisingly, Vygotsky’s own paper about the education of the deaf was never presented during the conference and the stay in London appears to have had a limited value for his own scientific development

Freedom as a Pursuit in Human Development: P. Y. Galperin on the Historical Psychology of L. S. Vygotsky

In this article, we present and discuss Piotr Galperin’s speech, The System of Historical Psychology of L. S. Vygotsky: Analytical Considerations (1935). This document was stored in the archives for many years. In 2009, it was published for the first time in the Russian language in the Journal of Cultural-Historical Psychology (Stepanova, 2009). In a period when Vygotsky’s legacy was neglected, Galperin discussed the significance of his theory and outlined perspectives on its further development. At the risk of being superficial in the attempt to convey Galperin’s meaning, this article presents the first English translation of Galperin’s speech, followed by a discussion of the continuity of the contributions of these scholars and of Galperin’s profound understanding of Vygotsky’s theory. However, to provide a background of the discussion that follows, we present the historical context of Soviet cultural-historical psychology in the 1930s