BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Alex Kozulin. Vygotsky's Psychology
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BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Alex Kozulin. Vygotsky's Psychology: A Biography of Ideas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. 286 pp. $29.95. The ideas of Lev Vygotsky, the early twentieth-century Jewish/Russian scholar, are catching on in present-day Western institutional psychology. Alex Kozulin's book places these ideas in a broader context of theory and events, reminding us of the fact (in the Vygotskyan spirit) that ideas cannot be divorced from the people that have produced them, from the people who transmit them, from the entire flow of the history of ideas, and from social ideology, formal and informal. The book is not really about Vygotsky, and its title seems to indicate this quite plainly. It is not even really about Vygotsky's ideas. Rather, this book takes Vygotsky's psychology as a starting point, or more exactly, a pivotal point, for weaving a rich texture of representations of historical tableaux, processes and ideas. In the best sense, Kozulin is telling a story of his own. In the dialectical fashion, in order to relate the best communicationally possible approximation of the Vygotskyan world-view, he formulates it in a clearly personal way. It is difficult to tell where Vygotsky stops and Kozulin begins, one might say. But that is exactly what one cannot say, for the facts brought forward are loud and clear, whiIe the interpretation is simply and openly what it always is, one man's reconstruction of what another really did say. These were the two most important characteristics of Kozulin's book: first, it presents a meta-Vygotskyan perspective, i.e., a Vygotskyan self-reflection; secondly, this self-reflection is reconstructed by Kozulin in a very personal way. The personal- ization, however, is not to be taken as an incorrect rendering of Vygotsky's ideas. On the contrary, both the setting of these ideas on a broader stage and the creation of a personal system for the understanding of Vygotsky's ideas enhance our collective understanding of this thematic complex and after all, affirm Vygotsky's legacy itself. In Kozulin's words, this book distinguishes three different planes of Vygotsky's theory. These three planes, identified as the understanding of Vygotsky's theory by his contemporaries (corresponding to the 20's and 30's), the discovery of Vygotsky by Western psychology (corresponding to the 60's), and the projection of cultural- psychological ideas on the future of psychological theory itself (taking place in the present), beside representing the various synchronic and diachronic linkages of Vygotsky's ideas with their context and presenting the issues of reception of these ideas, constitute, in effect, a cultural-historical theory of the psychological science as the partial expression of a more general science of man's subjective and objective existence. Vygotsky's case becomes a case study for a Vygotskyan theory of science. The book is written in a succinct story-telling style, misleading in that every smooth sentence is packed with ideas which are not necessarily obvious to the partly informed reader. This is not your "Vygotsky in ten easy lessons." Its reading requires a certain degree of theoretical sophistication and an ear for a type of discourse which is distinctively non-mainstream. Reading is enriched, but also slowed down by seemingly long digressions into the history of ideas, both pre- and post-Vygotskyan, 84 and non-psychological fields. The book effectively, in the structure of its own discourse, illustrates a salient characteristic of Vygotsky's ideas: they are extremely difficult to categorize in terms of disciplinary and theoretical affiliation. However, the persistent student will be rewarded by learning much about the stream of European, particularly Russian, thought during the present century, as well as about the flavor of its social context. Furthermore, this book will forcefully place the entire discipline and the reader's own life and endeavor-past, present and future-in a new light. For the advanced reader, this book will represent a meaningful step in the collective dialogue which has sprung off Vygotsky's ideas. Goriana Litvinovic University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Belgrade Albert S. Lindemann. The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1894-1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. x, 301 pp. $27.95. In The Jew Accused, Albert Lindemann examines three widely publicized crimi- nal cases from the period just before the First World War. All three of these cases involvedaccusations against Jews and all three became "affairs" at least in part because of their anti-Semitic implications. The best known of the cases discussed by Lindemann is that of Alfred Dreyfus, the French army captain accused of espionage in 1894. The other two cases he considers in depth are that of Mendel Beilis, the manager of a brick factory in Kiev who was accused of ritual murder, and that of Leo Frank, an Atlanta businessman who was accused of a sexually-motivated killing. Drawing almost exclusively on secondary sources, Lindemann not only reviews the events that constitute what he calls his "Three Affairs," but, in order to provide a sense of context, he also considers the place of Jews in European and American society around the turn of the twentieth century. Individual chapters are devoted to the situations in France, Russia, and the United States. Readers of Russian History will most likely be interested primarily in what Lindemann has to say about the Beilis case, but the great value of his book lies not so much in the narrative Lindemann has distilled from his secondary sources, but rather in the way he weaves together a consideration of the Dreyfus, Beilis, and Frank affairs in an attempt to uncover underlying patterns of anti-Semitism in the decades before World War I. Lindemann argues that even though anti-Semitism is in some ways a unique form of race hatred, it is not a phenomenon so "inapproachably mysterious" (p. 279) that it can not be studied from a social scientific perspective. Throughout his study, Lindemann emphasizes the complexity and the ambiguity of the role of anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues, for example, that negative images of the Jews "were countered and for the most part overwhelmed by positive ones" (p. 276). He also highlights the ironic fact that it was sometimes persons with decidedly anti-Semitic views who, because of their basic commitment to justice, became important defenders of victimized Jews. The French .