Homo Legens: A person Reading

Only THAT reading is satisfactory when the book is experienced. Reading “for pleasure” is not worth it. And even for “benefit” is hardly worth it.

V.V. Rozanov. “The Apocalypse of Our Time”

The past year 2024 is the year of the centenary of the cultural-historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky. Remembering the two historic speeches of L.S. Vygotsky a century ago — at the Second Congress on Psychoneurology in Petrograd and the II All-Russian Congress of Social and Legal Protection of Minors in Moscow — there is a great temptation to turn to the analysis of these materials. However, another approach is also possible, based on a return to the origins of cultural-historical psychology, namely, to the development of L.S. Vygotsky’s issues of the psychology of art. D.B. Elkonin drew attention to the productivity of this train of thought. He noted that usually the beginning of L.S. Vygotsky is associated with his report on the methodology of reflexological and psychological research at the Second Congress on Psychoneurology, and then suggested: “And we have reason to believe that the book “Psychology of Art”, which he defended as a dissertation already in 1925, was prepared by him during the Gomel period of his life... But this means that this book was ready by L.S. Vygotsky before he spoke at the congress in 1924... But this also means that he, while studying the psychology of art (in his understanding), at the same time prepared the deep foundations for a huge theoretical breakthrough in the development of a number of fundamental general psychological problems” [53, p. 476—477].

Subsequently, A.N. Leontiev called “Psychology of Art” “a transitional book in the fullest and most precise meaning of the word” [Leontiev, 1986, p. 6], in which L.S. Vygotsky sums up his work from 1915-1922 and at the same time “prepares those new psychological ideas that constituted Vygotsky’s main contribution to science” [Leontiev, 1986, p. 6]. A.N. Leontiev concludes that “The Psychology of Art” should be read historically: “both as the psychology of art and as the psychology of art” [ibid.]. Introducing the first volume of the future sixteen-volume collected works of L.S. Vygotsky, which included theater reviews and critical articles about the theater, V.S. Sobkin also considered it important to draw the reader’s attention “to the substantive connections between Vygotsky’s theater reviews and his subsequent psychological research, which manifested themselves already at the early stage of his work” [Sobkin, 2015, p. 10]. V.S. Sobkin came to the conclusion that turning to art played an important role in both the personal and professional self-determination of L.S. Vygotsky and “heard” “that ‘inaudible dialogue’ that Vygotsky conducted, reflecting on the development of theater, art and ... psychology” [Sobkin, 2015, p. 59].

Statement of the problem: the art of the author and the art of the reader

The starting point for our research was L.S. Vygotsky’s consideration of art not only as part of culture, but also as a subject of special scientific research. M.G. Yaroshevsky saw in the psychology of art “a happy combination of trends representing two different spheres of culture: art and science” [Vygotsky, 1987, p. 295], the fruit of the combination of which was “Psychology of Art”.

It would be too presumptuous to claim to present L.S. Vygotsky’s views on the psychology of art in a small publication — what has been said is true, including in relation to the history of their formation, in this case, for us, only an extremely brief designation of them comes to the fore. A comprehensive — psychological, philosophical, cultural — analysis of L.S. Vygotsky’s works was reflected in the prefaces to the repeatedly reprinted “Psychology of Art”, as well as in an article by D.A. Leontiev and V.S. Sobkin specially devoted to this problem [Leontiev, 1994]. One of his works, addressed to the psychology of art by L.S. Vygotsky, V.S. Sobkin provided with the subtitle “an attempt at reconstructing the author’s meanings” [Sobkin, 2022], explaining that the word “experience” is used in the meaning of “essay”, and this presupposes reflection of one’s own “experience, ... reactions regarding the problems touched upon by Vygotsky” [Sobkin, 2022, p. 13]. A surprisingly accurate designation of the reader’s psychological work with the texts of L.S. Vygotsky, close to the author of this publication.

L.S. Vygotsky saw the main “sin” of any theory of art in the fact that it tries to proceed “only from the objective data of artistic form or content” [Vygotsky, 1987, p. 68] and does not rely on any psychological theory of art, which was proposed by the author using literature as an example. Let us conduct our research in this logic of L.S. Vygotsky and consider a work of art as a meeting place for the author and the reader. The famous Russian philosopher, logician and librarian S.I. Povarnin wrote: “... just as in music there are two types of artists: the composer who creates musical works, and the performer who plays them on the piano and other instruments, so in the field of verbal art — in the field of scientific and poetic books — two types of private “arts” are required: the art of the author and the art of the reader” [Povarnin, 2022, p. 213].

M.M. Bakhtin substantiated the dialogic nature of the text: the true essence of the text “always develops at the boundary of two consciousnesses, two subjects” [Bakhtin, 1979, p. 285]. A.N. Leontiev wrote about this too: poetry, painting, music, not perceived by anyone, do not reveal their essential content, “art is communicative by its very nature” [Leont'ev, 1981, p. 178].

The objective of this publication is to combine, based on the ideas of M.M. Bakhtin about the dialogic nature of the text and A.N. Leontiev about the communicative nature of art, the psychological work of the author and the reader, which results in the birth of the reader Homo Legens.

The analysis of the psychological work of the author is carried out from the standpoint of the psychotechnical approach, when fiction is considered as a carrier of non-scientific (as opposed to scientific) psychological knowledge.

The psychological work of the reader does not consist in passive reading of a work of art, but in its active recreation, which corresponds to the ideas of L.S. Vygotsky about the activity of aesthetic experience and the teachings of P.Ya. Galperin about interiorization as a source and at the same time a way of forming higher forms of human behavior, the example of which is reading. Such an understanding of reading fully corresponds to the idea of V.F. Asmus about reading as creativity.

The problem of the psychology of literature is presented in numerous studies [for example, 5; 8; 18; 24; 26; 42; 47 et al.], and our tasks do not include its comprehensive historical-psychological analysis, moreover: such an analysis would complicate our presentation. The appeal to specific sources is due to the interest in studying the phenomenon of Homo Legens — the Reading Man, whose birth occurs at the moment of the meeting of the author and the reader, which corresponds to the essence of the psychotechnical approach to literature [Stepanova, 2006].

The problem posed is of an interdisciplinary nature, which presupposes subsequent appeal to both psychological and other sources. In this regard, of undoubted interest is the collective monograph, the authors of which include psychologists, philosophers and literary scholars, with the self-explanatory title “Poetry: An Experience of Interdisciplinary Analysis” [Ivanchenko, 2015]. One can agree or argue with the specific author’s conclusions (since the illustrations of the author’s approach refer the reader to specific examples of poetic creativity), and attempt to extend the general idea to other types of literary creativity, but there is no doubt about the “main pathos” of the “interdisciplinary, systematic approach to the phenomenon of poetry, which is not limited to a purely linguistic and/or aesthetic perspective” [Ivanchenko, 2015, p. 7]. Much earlier, A.A. Leontiev drew attention to the trend of an interdisciplinary approach to various phenomena of language (and speech), when he wrote about the birth of a new linguistics that learns from related sciences — logic and psychology, physiology of higher nervous activity and anthropology, sociology and ethnography [Leontiev, 2008, p. 334]. The answer to the question of whether the interdisciplinary approach is limited to poetry is found in A. Genis: “All literature is poetry, including prose” [Genis, 2020, p. 45]. B.L. Pasternak also wrote about the unity of poetry and prose: “Poetry and prose are inseparable from each other — they are poles” [Paustovskii, 1977, p. 112], which, in his opinion, is due to the fact that art is created not by the creator, but by reality: “Art is realistic as an activity and symbolic as a fact. It is realistic in that it did not invent the metaphor itself, but found it in nature and sacredly reproduced it” [Paustovskii, 1977, p. 231].

Psychology of Literature: The Author’s Work

The problems united by the general theme of “psychology of literature” turn out to be complex and multifaceted. Summarizing the data accumulated in psychology, fiction can be analyzed in two ways: on the one hand, it acts as the subject of psychological research, and on the other — its subject, in other words, an independent bearer of psychological knowledge.

Both directions require separate consideration, which was reflected in our publication [Stepanova, 2006], so now we will limit ourselves to a brief presentation of previously obtained results, enriched with new data.

Literature as a subject of psychological research

Literature as a subject of psychology can be presented by three approaches.

According to the first approach, literature acts as an object of psychological research: literature supplies the material, and psychology acts as an explanatory science, and the psychologist thus carries out a scientific-psychological analysis of literature. A classic example of this approach is the psychology of art by L.S. Vygotsky, who called for “using the language of objective psychology to speak about the objective facts of art” [Vygotsky, 1987, p. 8]. Literature has acted as an object of research in the works of other psychologists, and special mention should be made of I.V. Strakhov’s study of L.N. Tolstoy’s psychological concept [Strakhov, 1998].

Fiction has attracted the attention of specialists in disciplines related to psychology: the Russian psychiatrist V.F. Chizh showed that “the works of a healthy genius differ in essence from the works of a sick genius” [Chizh, 2001, p. 422]; already in our time, the book of one of the leaders of Russian psychoanalysis of the first quarter of the last century I.D. Ermakov [Ermakov, 1999] was republished; Russian defectologist D.I. Azbukin wrote about the value of literary works for psychopathology and defectology [Azbukin, 1947].

According to the second approach, literature performs an illustrative function when psychologists give examples from works of art to confirm their own thoughts.

In this case, we can again refer to the works of L.S. Vygotsky and recall not only “Thinking and Speech”, but also his works on defectology, in particular an appeal to the story of V.G. Korolenko “The Blind Musician” [Vygotsky, 1983]. Russian psychologist A.M. Shcherbina, a specialist in the field of education of blind children, also analyzes this story by V.G. Korolenko.

A.N. Leontiev, considering issues of personality formation, refers to L.N. Tolstoy, A.S. Pushkin, F.M. Dostoevsky [Leont'ev, 1975]. E. Fromm, who decided to understand from the position of a psychologist what happiness, free will, conscience are, chose W. Shakespeare, L. Pirandello, G. Ibsen, F. Kafka as his reliable companions [Fromm, 2003]. F.E. Vasilyuk, when studying critical life situations, turns to F.M. Dostoevsky, A.P. Chekhov, I.A. Bunin, Yu. Trifonov [Vasilyuk, 1984].

Finally, we encounter the third approach in B.M. Teplov, who proposed considering fiction as a method of psychological research. According to B.M. Teplov, literature contains an inexhaustible supply of materials, without which scientific psychology cannot do. B.M. Teplov names the establishment of “principles of scientific and psychological use of fiction data” as a very important task [Teplov, 1985, p. 306].

A significant addition is made by B.S. Bratus`, when he notes that “the use of artistic image as a method of psychological research, the definition of its possibilities and limitations have not found due reflection in scientific literature” [Bratus', 1985, p. 55] and sets the task of understanding how the images accumulated in literature can be useful for psychology.

A.A. Leontev raises the problem of an objective method of studying the psychological specifics of art and names the analysis of the process of artistic communication as such [Leontiev, b, p. 346].

In conclusion, it can be noted that, despite the apparent difference in approaches, when literature acts as an object of research for a psychologist (1) or its means (2,3), they have much in common, while the differences, on the contrary, are very conditional.

Literature as a psychological practice

In the works of L.S. Vygotsky, B.M. Teplov, A.N. Leontiev, I.V. Strakhov and others, the idea of the psychological content inherent in literature, which has an impact on the reader, can be traced. L.S. Vygotsky speaks of the cathartic effect of a work of art, which “involves in ... a cleansing fire the most intimate, most vital shocks of the personal soul” [Vygotsky, 1987, p. 238].

We dare to suggest that literature acts as a kind of psychological practice. Behind this understanding of literature lies its consideration as a source of psychotechnical knowledge, in other words, the psychotechnical approach to literature is realized, essentially laid down by the research of L.S. Vygotsky [see more about this: 44]. V.S. Sorkin in the introductory article to the volume of theater reviews by L.S. Vygotsky sets the task of “understanding the work that Vygotsky carries out in the course of his analysis” [Sobkin, 2015, p. 12] “The Tragedy of Hamlet” and concludes: “these are psychotechnical reader improvisations regarding individual semantic knots of “Hamlet”, which Vygotsky is trying to untie [Sobkin, 2015, p. 12].

A.A. Puzyrei in the “Afterword” to the book by M.M. Zoshchenko “The Tale of Reason”1 called it “a guide on a spiritual journey” [Zoshchenko, 1990, p. 150]. He made an attempt to introduce this book by M.M. Zoshchenko into the “circulation” of modern psychology: “... the lesson that we can draw from Zoshchenko’s work as a unique experience ... of concrete and vital human psychology is extremely important, not only in relation to traditional, academic, scientific ... psychology, but also ... in relation to ... extremely interesting and in their own way very effective directions of practical psychology...” [Zoshchenko, 1990, p. 151].

Literature has a truly enormous influence on a person. K.G. Paustovsky describes his state after reading “Easy Breathing”: “Everything inside me trembled with sadness and love. <…> for the first time … I understood what art is and what its uplifting and eternal power is” [Pasternak, 1983, p. 148]. The famous puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov recalls Mayakovsky’s performance half a century later, which seems to be burned into his memory: “this heroic and tragic conversation of his with the future, his account of his entire life” [Obraztsov, 2001, p. 297]. It is no coincidence that I.V. Strakhov, who devoted a monograph to the analysis of L.N. Tolstoy’s psychological views, called him an artist-psychologist and singled out psychological realism as the strongest side of his artistic work [Strakhov, 1998]. F.M. Dostoevsky “confessed”: “They call me a psychologist, it is not true, I am only a realist in the highest sense, i.e. I depict all the depths of the human soul” хcit. from: 32, p. 113].

P.Ya. Galperin, who was not specifically engaged in the analysis of fiction, came to the conclusion that “in art, every depiction is a revelation, an exposure” [Gal'perin, p. 562].

E.A. Klimov discovered reliable and useful knowledge in the stories of N. V. Gogol “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” and in this regard noted that “Gogol is not alien to thoughts appropriate for a practicing psychologist. He is the author of the expression “to provide spiritual assistance to others”” [Klimov, 2001, p. 71].

Literature as a carrier of psychological knowledge.

Scientific and artistic knowledge

The psychological content of fiction allows us to consider it as a carrier of psychological knowledge.

Let us follow philosophers in assuming that knowledge can have different sources. V.P. Zinchenko wrote about living knowledge [Zinchenko, 2002]. The Russian philosopher S.L. Frank [Frank, 1995] drew attention to the contrast between knowledge-thought and living knowledge. For S.L. Frank, any artistic knowledge served as an example of such living knowledge. V.P. Zinchenko emphasized the adequacy of the concept of “living knowledge” in this case, but supported the author of the current publication in his desire not to exclude the concept of “non-scientific knowledge” from scientific circulation. Due to the duality of the latter, which contains an indication of the absence of knowledge, it is possible to use another concept — “extra-scientific knowledge” as a synonym for the concept of “living knowledge”.

However, I would like to draw attention to another possible option for defining a non-scientific source of knowledge. A.A. Melik-Pashayev and Z.N. Novlyanskaya in the book “Psychology and literature in a dialogue about a person” [Borisenko, 2016] cites S.S. Averintsev and M.M. Bakhtin, who wrote about “other-scientific knowledge.” Indeed, M.M. Bakhtin in his work “Towards the Methodology of the Humanities” cites S.S. Averintsev’s words about “other-scientific form of knowledge that has its own internal laws and criteria of accuracy” [cit. from: 4, p. 362]. M.M. Bakhtin draws attention to the difference between the exact sciences, which presuppose a monologue form of knowledge and one subject — the one who knows (contemplates) the thing, and the humanities — sciences of the spirit, which deal with a dialogical form of knowledge, when the subject cannot be perceived as a thing and become voiceless. Due to this, humanities knowledge “cannot become scientific in the sense of the scientific nature of the exact sciences” [Bakhtin, 1979, p. 362]. We encounter the attitude to art as knowledge in the article by V.P. Zinchenko [Zinchenko, 2006], in which he, in turn, refers the reader to G.G. Shpet (“Art as a form of knowledge”).

Summarizing the above, we will dwell on the consideration of literature as a bearer of extra-scientific psychological knowledge, since M.M. Bakhtin’s comparison of exact and humanitarian sciences presupposes an appeal to sciences, while in our case we are not talking about science, but about literature as a form of art. We encounter a noteworthy analysis of the relationship between science and art in the reasoning of V.F. Tendryakov: “In art, it is not the truth of facts that is important, but the truth of feelings.

... a general conclusion: science cognizes the objective world, art — a person’s perception of this world” [Tendryakov, 1977, p. 123].

It would also be necessary to specifically mention the possibility of considering fiction as a bearer of extra-scientific humanitarian knowledge in general. In particular, it is precisely this reading of artistic texts that we encounter in the works of L.S. Vygotsky on defectology, in which L.S. Vygotsky “argues” with Korolenko, who describes the experiences of a blind person [Vygotsky, 1983].

The psychological content of literature can be understood (or called) differently. Soviet literary scholar Lydia Ginzburg wrote about psychological and analytical prose. At the same time, she saw in psychological prose an attempt to correlate “the concept of personality inherent in a given era and social environment and its artistic depiction” [Ginzburg, 1977, p. 5].

The attitude we are developing towards literature as a carrier of psychological knowledge is not new for psychology. G. Allport identified the problem of the existence of two approaches to understanding personality — psychological and literary — and set the task of reconciling them.

Developing the idea of G. Allport, B.S. Bratus` discovered in literature a number of useful “edifications for scientific psychology, relating both to a specific research process and to self-awareness, self-education of a professional psychologist” [Bratus', 1985, p. 56], but at the same time he drew attention to significant limitations in the use of artistic material by scientific psychology.

As the experimental approach develops, there is a temptation to abandon the appeal to literary texts, however, according to A.Sh. Tkhostov, the intuitive accuracy of writers provides “a kind of ‘ecological validity’ to psychological interpretation” [Tkhostov, 2006, p. 109]. The consideration of literature as a carrier of psychological knowledge presupposes the clarification of the fundamental differences between scientific and non-scientific psychological knowledge. We find an attempt to solve this problem in the works of S.L. Frank. He considers Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Maupassant and Ibsen to be teachers of psychology; and he suggests looking for the necessary material for real psychology among clinical observations of the mentally ill. However, S.L. Frank emphasizes that it is unacceptable to demand that thinkers-artists like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Ibsen or dreamers and preachers like Nietzsche and Maeterlinck give their thoughts and observations a scientific form. He sees danger where “such literature is either taken as a substitute for scientific knowledge, or itself makes such a claim” [Frank, 1995, p. 427]. If we return to literature as a carrier of non-scientific psychological knowledge, then we can identify at least two of its fundamental differences from scientific knowledge. Firstly, scientific psychological knowledge is a product of the work of professional psychologists, while a huge amount of psychological work in literature is carried out by the author. Another thing is that a writer sometimes turns out to be more of a psychologist than a professional, and this speaks of the psychological intuition of the creators of artistic texts — as Marina Tsvetaeva wrote: “the most valuable thing in poetry and in life is what fell through” [Tsvetaeva, 1991, p. 362].

Secondly, scientific psychological knowledge is the result of research using psychological methods of work. The writer has artistic methods, thanks to which the sequence of certain events (or experiences, or contemplations of nature) turns from a description of everyday life into a work of art.

Psychology is a science, and literature is an art, however, from the fact that scientific knowledge differs from non-scientific knowledge, it does not follow that the latter should be abandoned. Literary knowledge is valuable not only in itself, it, as S.L. Frank notes, “provides the richest food for scientific thought” [Frank, 1995, p. 427]. Moreover, according to V.P. Zinchenko, “art is decades, if not centuries, ahead of science in the knowledge of the inanimate and especially the living” [Zinchenko, 2003, p. 439]. Isn’t it better to use the non-scientific psychological knowledge inherent in literature for scientific psychological purposes?

Psychology of Literature: The Work of the Reader

The perception of a literary text is the subject of special analysis.

The reader is active — this idea is found in the works of philosophers, writers, psychologists, etc. L.S. Vygotsky wrote: “... artistic perception is not accessible to everyone, and the perception of a work of art is a difficult and tedious mental work” [Vygotsky, 1991, p. 278]. A work of art is perceived not only by the ears and eyes, “there is a complex constructive activity carried out by the listener or viewer and consisting in the fact that from the presented external impressions the perceiver himself constructs and creates an aesthetic object” [Vygotsky, 1991, p. 279]. A.A. Leontiev, considering art as communication, notes that, like any communication, art must be taught: “A person who perceives art also creates it, and we need to teach him to create art” [Leontiev, b, p. 300]. In his book on psycholinguistics, he writes about the “psycholinguistic theory of text comprehension” [Leontiev, a, p. 141] and cites M.M. Bakhtin’s words that the content of the text is polyphonic and multi-aspect, and then clarifies: “the recipient ‘reads’ the text” [Leontiev, a, p. 143].

D.A. Leontiev sees the mechanism of interaction of the individual with the objective forms of culture and, indirectly through the latter, with other individuals in the creation and perception of art, and writes about art as a mechanism for transmitting meanings [Leontiev, 1998].

As for fiction, its perception was the subject of special concern for writers.

First of all, let us turn to the analysis of the reader’s work by writers, since their view in this case can be called a professional search for ways to “reach the reader.” In addition, this corresponds to the above-expressed idea of the existence of two approaches: scientific and artistic, literary.

Russian writer Ya.B. Knyazhnin, characterizing the work of understanding the text, wrote about three types of reading: “There are three ways of reading: first, to read and not to understand; second, to read and understand; third, to read and understand even what is not written” [cit. by: 21, p. 231]. M.M. Bakhtin specifically emphasized: the text awaits active understanding, which is always dialogic [Bakhtin, 1979]. The above-mentioned S.I. Povarnin wrote about how difficult it is to become a reader: “We will find Goethe’s words true: “These good people do not even suspect what labor and time it takes to learn to read. I myself have spent 80 years on this and still cannot say that I have fully achieved my goal” [Povarnin, 2022, p. 213]. S.I. Povarnin’s contemporary, the Englishman S. Maugham, added in his book Summing Up, written in his mature years: “I read slowly and do not know how to skim through books” [Moem, 2018, p. 94].

S.Ya. Marshak, a well-known children’s writer, wrote articles about literature in which he reflected not only on the writer, but also on the reader. In the essay “On the Talented Reader” he noted: “... the reader is an irreplaceable person. Without him, not only our books, but also the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin are just a mute and dead pile of paper” [Marshak, 2022, p. 99]. But one must become a Reader in the true sense of the word, and S. Ya. Marshak writes about the great work that the reader does: “The reader ... must and wants to work ... Literature needs talented readers as well as talented writers” [Marshak, 2022, p. 105]. The aforementioned essay by S.Ya. Marshak’s “On the Talented Reader”, first published in the magazine “Novy Mir” in 1958, was later included by the writer in the 1961 collection “Education by Word”. In the same 1961, the magazine “Questions of Literature” published an article by the philosopher and literary scholar V.F. Asmus “Reading as Labor and Creativity”. A random coincidence in time or a non-random product of time? V.F. Asmus quite rightly notes that most readers do not even think about whether reading is labor; they are not inclined to follow the work of their own thoughts, which occurs during the reading of fiction. V.F. Asmus notes what a lot of work is needed so that “the life depicted by the author arises “secondarily”, becomes life for his reader” [Asmus, 1968, p. 56]. In order for reading to be fruitful, the reader must work hard himself, and in addition to the work necessary to simply reproduce a sequence of phrases and words, the reader must expend “special, complex, and, moreover, truly creative work” (ibid.).

In the process of reading, the reader is active, the special activity of his consciousness is regulated by two attitudes: on the one hand, he treats what he is reading as a kind of reality, and on the other, he realizes that the piece of life shown by the author is not immediate life, but its image. Thus, in the process of reading, the reader possesses a kind of dialectic and sees “the real equivalent of artistic fiction” [Asmus, 1968, p. 59].

V.F. Asmus poses a question about the content of the reader’s work, which is important for our subsequent presentation. In the process of reading a work of art, the reader to some extent repeats the path of thought and feeling taken by the author, but he does not follow the author’s route exactly and with a result different from the author’s. Moreover, the more complex the image of the heroes, manifested in a series of their actions, the more significant the variations in the reader’s awareness, understanding and evaluation. However, this does not mean that reading a work of art is a process in which subjectivity and arbitrariness prevail, but only proves that the activity of the reader, viewer, listener himself leads to awareness of the content of a work of art. V.F. Asmus concludes: “The content of a work of art does not pass — like water pouring from a jug to another — from the work into the reader’s head. It is reproduced, recreated by the reader himself — according to the guidelines given in the work itself, but with the end result determined by the mental, spiritual, spiritual activity of the reader” [Asmus, 1968, p. 62].

The reader’s activity is creativity, and the creative result of reading depends not only on the reader’s state at the moment of reading, but also on his entire spiritual biography. S. Maugham drew attention to this “bias” of the reader, conditioned not so much by the intellectual as by the personal exactingness of the reader. “I have come to the conclusion,” he wrote, “that I shall never find the one book that fully satisfies me, which I am looking for — I will not find it for the reason that such a book can only be some expression of myself” [Moem, 2018, p. 261].

Thus, the difficulty of understanding fiction is a relative concept, and the ability to “understand” depends on the level of reading culture. “Incomprehensibility” in art is “an inaccurate name for the reader’s laziness, helplessness, virginity of the reader’s artistic biography, the absence of modesty and desire to work in him” [Asmus, 1968, p. 64].

If S. Ya. Marshak and V.F. Asmus writes about the work of the reader from the standpoint of literary criticism, then the question involuntarily arises about how psychologists see the work of the reader. What is hidden behind the process of perceiving a literary text if it cannot be presented as pouring from one jug to another?

B.G. Ananyev, in connection with the discussion of issues of the psychology of art, set the task of studying the formation of artistic talent and, as working concepts that can be used, settled on “interiorization” and “exteriorization” [Anan'ev, 1982]. He noted that from the first days of life, a child manifests himself as a viewer, listener, and creator. A person becomes a reader before he learns to read, since the mechanism of interiorization in the field of art is often independent of a person.

However, another understanding of interiorization as an active process is possible, which is true for both the perception of art and artistic creativity. Let us turn to the study of the process of interiorization by P.Ya. Galperin. L.S. Vygotsky wrote that the nature of aesthetic experience has not yet been sufficiently studied, but “we are convinced that a complex constructive activity is taking place here… which consists in the fact that from the presented external impressions the perceiver himself constructs and creates an aesthetic image…” [Vygotsky, 1991, p. 279]. The research of P. Ya. Galperin allows us to come closer to understanding what kind of psychological work lies behind the active creation of an aesthetic image. The result of his research was the understanding of interiorization as a transition from the non-psychic to the psychic and, in this regard, the discovery of the answer to the question of the origin of the psyche, which was reflected in the most systematized form in the article “On the Question of Interiorization”. At the same time, attention is drawn to the commonality of the formulations in this article by P. Ya. Galperin and the above-mentioned work by V.F. Asmus.

The process of interiorization, according to P.Ya. Galperin, means that “the mental plane is not an empty vessel into which some thing is placed, that the process of interiorization is the process of formation of the internal plane. [Gal'perin, p. 430]. Transfer to the internal plane is “the process of its formation, and not a simple replenishment with new content” [ibid.]. V. F. Asmus wrote about this, noting that the content of a work of art is recreated by the reader.

Thus, the process of reading as understanding a literary text can be presented as a process of interiorization of objectively given literary samples into the subjective property of the subject, as a transition from the non-mental (for the reader this is the author’s text) to the mental, which, according to P.Ya. Galperin, helps to overcome the eternal gap between them. At the same time, the study of the stage-by-stage formation of mental actions allowed P.Ya. Galperin “was the first to reveal the meaning of the “transition from the outside to the inside” as a condition (but only a condition!) for the transformation of a non-mental phenomenon into a mental one” [Gal'perin, p. 432]. P.Ya. Galperin formulates his understanding of interiorization in a polemic with L.S. Vygotsky, noting that in experimental studies of concepts, the fact of transferring external forms of action to internal ones appeared, but this did not change the process itself in essence. And only the line of genetic research restored the basic meaning of the concept of interiorization. Through the prism of such an idea of interiorization, one can also consider the perception of an artistic text, while the latter is a special type of art. Cultural-historical psychology of art acquires a concrete sound, the circle is closed: from L.S. Vygotsky’s ideas about the formation of higher mental functions and higher forms of behavior, a special case of which is reading, to P.Ya. Galperin’s doctrine of interiorization and further — to L.S. Vygotsky’s psychology of art at a new level. The question inevitably arises: how, if at all possible, can we organize the formation of the skill (action) of reading, not only as mastering signs, but also as comprehending meanings? P.Ya. Galperin studied the formation of an objective action, and so far it remains unclear what might be hidden behind this action, given that each reader has his own meanings, which has been repeatedly pointed out by authors of works of art. A.N. Leontiev also wrote about the focus of art on comprehending the “personal meaning of reality, reality” [Leont'ev, 1981, p. 184]: “... the most difficult thing in the art of words is to go beyond meaning in the material of meaning” [ibid.].