One is Not Born a Personality A biographical history of Soviet Psychology, including “The Best Path to Man” Written by Karl Levitin. “Not Born a Personality” was written by Karl Levitin in 1980 and first Published by Progress Publishers in 1982. Edited by Professor V.V. Davydov and Translated from the Russian by Yevgeni Filippov. Most of the section on Meshcheryakov has been replaced by an extended version published as “The Best Path to Man,” the Russian text first pub- lished in 1975 by “Znanie” Publishers, Moscow in 1975, pp. 85-143; and republished in Soviet Psychology, Volume 18, 1979, translated by Michel Vale, pp. 3-66. Published and Distributed by Erythrós Press and Media, PO Box 291994 Kettering, OH 45429-0994, USA. CC-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0) 2009 by the author, Karl Levitin Printed by Bookmasters, Inc., Ohio. Cover design by Joan Levinson. Karl Levitin (1936-2010) 1. Psychology, 2. Deaf-blindness, 3. Marxism, 4. Child development. ISBN: 978-0-9805428-9-1 6 Table of Contents Preface By Mike Cole..........................................................................................1 Preface To the Soviet Edition............................................................................3 From the Author..................................................................................................9 Chapter I. Lev Vygotsky. A Biographical Profile ........................................11 “Ages and Days” (Semyon Dobkin’s Reminiscences) .................... 17 “The Mozart of Psychology” ............................................................... 31 Chapter II. Alexei Leontyev. A Biographical Profile ..................................79 “One is Not Born a Personality!” (An Interview with Alexei Leontyev)................................................................................................. 86 Chapter III. Alexander Luria. A Biographical Profile.............................. 101 The Detective ....................................................................................... 105 “Always a Meaningful Pattern”.......................................................... 114 From “A History of Psychology in Autobiography” ..................... 124 Chapter IV. Alexander Meshcheryakov. A Biographical Profile ........... 133 The Best Path To Man A Report from a Children’s Home .................... 138 Digression One. .............................................................................................. 188 Digression Two............................................................................................... 202 Digression Three............................................................................................. 210 Digression Four............................................................................................... 232 Chapter V. Vasili Davydov. A Biographical Profile................................. 253 In Lieu of an Afterword................................................................................. 267 Brief Biographies of Soviet Psychologists .................................................. 268 Name Index ..................................................................................................... 289 7 Preface By Mike Cole 2 Preface To the Soviet Edition Levitin’s book on psychologists is entitled One Is Not Born a Personal- ity. 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 be- ing a psychologist. In psychology more than in any other science, quotidian and scien- tific 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 do- main, 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 some- what guarded mood, but was very grateful to the author upon reading it. I remember once Leontyev 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 re- markable 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. 4 ONE IS NOT BORN A PERSONALITY 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 advan- tage over them on that score. My main object in writing this preface is to attest to the truth of eve- rything 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 manu- scripts) 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 erroneous in many ways yet it pinpoints something real. It is true that the discover- ies of Soviet psychology were very significant, and it is just as true that only now are people abroad beginning to assess them objectively and cor- rectly. But this assessment is a slow process, and then, too, the assess- ments are tinged with incredulity. How could a science have been formed and ideas decades ahead of their time been generated in such difficult cir- cumstances, 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 reputa- tions 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 de- veloped not from theory but from practice in the young Soviet land. 4 PREFACE 5 Educational and child psychology and the study of the handicapped (Vy- gotsky), the treatment and study of identical twins (Luria), the concept- forming process in schoolchildren (Leontyev), the psychological aspects of the illustration of fairytales and the development of the child’s mental- ity (Zaporozhets), the way children master the simplest tools (Galperin), the development and shaping of memory in schoolchildren (Zinchenko) – this is but a random selection of the list of problems tackled by the team led by Vygotsky and, following his death, by Leontyev and Luria. For them, theory was a means and not an end. They were all anxious to make their contributions to the great transformations taking place in the Soviet state, and they succeeded. They did everything to ensure that psychology would contribute as much as possible to these transforma- tions and take a worthy place among the sciences. Speaking of practice, Vygotsky wrote: “The stone which the builders have neglected should be made the keystone.” And this proved to be quite a valid approach: it led to a theory. Now, listening to the members of the Kharkov school, and Vygotsky’s colleagues in Moscow and Leningrad, recalling the atmos- phere of those years,