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One Is Not Born a Personality

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One Is Not Born a Personality One is Not Born a Personality Profiles of Soviet Educational Psychologists By Karl Levitin, Edited by Professor V.V. Davydov.: Translated from the Russian by Yevgeni Filippov. Published by Progress Publishers in 1982 Table of Contents Preface............................................................................................................................................ 1 From the Author .......................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter I “Ages and Days” Lev Vygotsky. A Biographical Profile..................................... 7 Semyon Dobkin’s Reminiscences.............................................................................11 “The Mozart of Psychology” ....................................................................................21 Chapter II. “One Is Not Born a Personality” Alexei Leontiev. A Biographical Profile.53 “One is Not Born a Personality!” (An Interview with Alexei Leontiev)..................56 Chapter III. “Always a Meaningful Pattern” Alexander Luria. A Biographical Profile..67 II. The Detective.....................................................................................................69 From “A History of Psychology in Autobiography” ........................................81 Chapter IV. “A Thinking Reed” Alexander Meshcheryakov. A Biographical Profile....88 “A Thinking Reed” (A Report on the Work of Alexander Meshcheryakov) ...91 Digression one. ...........................................................................................................................98 From the Works of Vygotsky ...........................................................................................98 From Meshcheryakov’s Book...........................................................................................98 Davydov on Meshcheryakov’s “Awakening To Life”..................................................98 From Alexei Leontiev’s Speech at Moscow University..............................................100 From Bonifaty Kedrov’s Speech....................................................................................103 From Evald Ilyenkov’s Speech.......................................................................................103 Digression Two ........................................................................................................................108 From Sasha Suvorov’s New Year’s Letter to Olga Skorokhodova ..........................108 To the Rector of Moscow State University from Yuri Lerner ..................................108 From a Letter to the Komsomolskaya Pravda Newspaper........................................109 From Natasha Korneyeva on “What I would Like to Be” ........................................110 Digression Three ......................................................................................................................114 I............................................................................................................................................114 II ..........................................................................................................................................118 III.........................................................................................................................................123 Digression Four........................................................................................................................130 From a Book by AL Vinapra Ushev..............................................................................130 From an Article by Raisa Mareyeva...............................................................................133 Chapter V. Vasili Davydov. A Biographical Profile............................................................145 “Much Learning does Not Teach Understanding”.....................................................146 In Lieu of an Afterword ..........................................................................................................154 Brief Biographies of Soviet Psychologists ............................................................................155 Preface Levitin’s book on psychologists is entitled One Is Not Born a Personality. Over the centuries, philosophers, psychologists and educators have been trying to prove that seemingly obvious proposition. All of them have been faced with misapprehension on the part of laymen, scientists and even politicians. Psychological concepts are, in essence and origin, understandable and familiar to everyone practically from early childhood. A child is admonished and, less often, praised for its attention, memory, skills, attitudes, willpower, etc. Almost every adult prides himself on being a psychologist. In psychology more than in any other science, quotidian and scientific concepts are interwoven. This breeds the illusion that psychology is simple and understandable to all. Psychologists have more reason than any other scientists to be wary of journalists making forays into their domain, in particular into the “holy of holies” which has to do not only with experiments and theoretical problems but also with the personalities of the scientists themselves. To me and many of my colleagues, most of the psychologists portrayed in this book are not just scientists. They are teachers’ teachers, our own teachers, colleagues and friends – in short the people nearest and dearest to us. Some of them are still around; one can learn from and argue with them, while others remain only in their works and in our memories. So I opened this book by Karl Levitin in a somewhat guarded mood, but was very grateful to the author upon reading it. I remember once Leontiev told me he was thinking of writing a book about Vygotsky. He was sure no one could do a better job than he. That may well have been so, but he never got around to writing it. Luria also wanted to write about Vygotsky, but he didn’t manage to do it. I would like to write a book about my psychologist father, Petr Zinchenko, about how he worked, fought during the war, and taught. I wanted to write a book about Gorbov, one of my teachers and a close friend. As it was, I had to confine myself to delivering a funeral lecture on that remarkable man at Moscow University. Perhaps none of this is accidental. As they say, the cobbler’s children go without shoes, and the psychologist often finds it hard to write about people. This may be partly because to write about people who are near to you, you must be able to look at them from a distance, which is not easy. But perhaps what is most needed is a special ability to see a person in his wholeness and complexity, whereas we psychologists arrive at such an understanding only by the arduous path of analysis, schematisation and studying the “anatomy of the spiritual organism.” So psychologists must grudgingly admit that writers and journalists have an unquestioned advantage over them on that score. My main object in writing this preface is to attest to the truth of everything written in this book. I can do so with some confidence because I literally grew up in the midst of the Kharkov circle of psychologists and knew many of them personally before I ever heard the word psychology. Later the same people taught me psychology in Moscow. And I must admit that the eyewitness accounts and legends, as it were, which are handed down from generation to generation, recorded here coincide with my own impressions and knowledge. Levitin has done a thorough job of collecting these oral accounts and studying the literature (and manuscripts) of those days to recapture the remarkable atmosphere of the early years of Soviet psychology. It was actually a kind of Russian avant-garde movement in psychology which followed ten years after the avant-garde period in art. Most readers abroad think that both these instances of the avant-garde shared the same fate. Like any view, this one is also 2 ONE IS NOT BORN A PERSONALITY erroneous in many ways yet it pinpoints something real. It is true that the discoveries of Soviet psychology were very significant, and it is just as true that only now are people abroad beginning to assess them objectively and correctly. But this assessment is a slow process, and then, too, the assessments are tinged with incredulity. How could a science have been formed and ideas decades ahead of their time been generated in such difficult circumstances, and in the face of biased criticism at that? True enough. Conditions were hard, there were plenty of annoying distractions, hunger and unfair judgments; there was scientific and ideological struggle. But there was also the joy, the exhilaration of pioneers. These people loved their country, their people and their science. They were genuine patriots; they thought nothing of fame and were not concerned with their reputations as thinkers. They were eager to lay the foundations of a Marxist psychology. And they did not want it served to them on a silver platter – the root of many debates at the time – they wanted to build it themselves. Psychology developed not from theory but from practice in the young Soviet land. Educational and child psychology and the study of the handicapped (Vygotsky), the treatment and study of identical twins (Luria), the concept-forming process in schoolchildren (Leontiev), the psychological aspects of the illustration of fairytales and the development of the child’s mentality (Zaporozhets), the way children master the simplest tools
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