Introduction
The concept of pereghivanie occupies a special place in cultural-historical psychology. On the one hand, within the scientific legacy of L. S. Vygotsky, there are no works explicitly devoted to a systematic analysis of this category, nor does it receive a fully elaborated conceptual framework comparable in scope to such notions as higher psychological functions or the social situation of development. Nevertheless, according to many contemporary scholars, pereghivanie may be regarded as one of the central categories within the conceptual system of the cultural-historical approach (N. N. Veresov, A. D. Maidansky, M. E. Osipov, L. A. Pergamenshchik, V. V. Rubtsov).
It is precisely through pereghivanie that Vygotsky links affective, cognitive, and personal dimensions of mental development, conceptualizing it as the mechanism through which the social environment becomes a source of individual development. In this sense, pereghivanie constitutes a kind of theoretical paradox: despite its minimal textual elaboration, it performs a system-forming function in the analysis of personality development.
The theoretical status of pereghivanie becomes especially evident when reconstructing the integral logic of Vygotsky’s scientific project—above all in his later works, where pereghivanie is defined as a dynamic unit of consciousness and as a “prism” of the social situation of development. In these texts, pereghivanie does not function as a description of subjective emotional states but rather as an analytical category that captures the mode of an individual’s involvement in specific social conditions of development.
At the same time, in order to fully reveal the psychological content of the category of pereghivanie, it is necessary to trace how Vygotsky’s understanding of this phenomenon evolved throughout his scientific trajectory, beginning with the theatrical period of his work. This constitutes the aim of the present article.
Pereghivanie in the Early Works of L. S. Vygotsky
In the early period of his intellectual biography, L. S. Vygotsky was closely connected with the theatrical milieu of pre-revolutionary Russia, a fact reflected in his active critical engagement with and analysis of contemporary theatrical productions. Examining performances representing various aesthetic movements, Vygotsky consistently turns to the category of pereghivanie, which he understands not so much as the actor’s inner emotional state, but rather as an active formation realized within stage action.
In an interpretation consonant with the aesthetics of A. Ya. Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre, pereghivanie manifests itself in gesture—not merely as a means of expression, but as a sign that organizes the semantic space of the performance and draws the spectator into a process of active co-experiencing. Thus, already in Vygotsky’s early theatrical writings, pereghivanie functions as a mediating link between individual experience and the cultural form of action, anticipating its later conceptualization within the system of cultural-historical psychology.
A special place in Vygotsky’s early work is occupied by his analysis of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1916), which may be regarded as his first systematic attempt to conceptualize pereghivanie in the context of drama (Vygotsky, 1916/2001). In this work, Vygotsky focuses not on the psychological characteristics of the characters per se, but on the spectator’s pereghivanie of the tragedy, for whom the dramatic action serves as a source of a complex emotional–semantic experience. The central object of analysis is not an isolated feeling, but the holistic pereghivanie of the tragic conflict that organizes the perception and understanding of the artistic work as a whole.
Vygotsky demonstrates that the experience of tragedy does not emerge as the sum of discrete emotional reactions to the actions of individual characters. On the contrary, the spectator’s comprehension of Hamlet’s central dramatic conflict becomes the system-forming principle that determines the character of pereghivanie across all other scenes and figures. Here, pereghivanie functions as a form of generalization: particular affective impressions are subordinated to the overall meaning of the tragedy and acquire significance only within the framework of the general dramatic tension. In this way, pereghivanie appears as structured and mediated by artistic form, rather than as a spontaneous or accidental emotional response.
Vygotsky’s engagement with theatre enables him to identify a fundamental characteristic of pereghivanie—its intrinsically social nature. Theatrical pereghivanie always unfolds within a space of collective experience: the spectator experiences the tragedy not in isolation, but as a participant in a cultural event, where emotions, meanings, and evaluations are already shaped by dramaturgical tradition and by the structure of the performance itself. In this context, pereghivanie emerges not as an “inner state,” but as a mode of the subject’s involvement in a socially organized situation, in which individual feeling is formed under the influence of the objective structure of dramatic action.
In the monograph Psychology of Art (1925), Vygotsky brings together his early reflections on aesthetic pereghivanie and significantly deepens their analysis (Vygotsky, 1925). Whereas in the text on Hamlet pereghivanie is primarily identified as a holistic experience of perceiving drama, in Psychology of Art it acquires a more complex internal structure and begins to be examined as a specific psychological process that integrates affective and semantic components.
A key moment in Vygotsky’s analysis is the idea of catharsis, which he interprets not as a simple “purification of feelings,” but as the result of a complex confrontation between opposing affective tendencies (counter-feelings). According to Vygotsky, the experience (pereghivanie) of an artistic work is constructed as an inner drama: the spectator simultaneously encounters contradictory emotional reactions that unfold in consciousness in the form of a conflict and reach resolution at the culminating point of the work. It is precisely this dynamic of pereghivanie, rather than isolated emotions taken separately, that constitutes the psychological mechanism of aesthetic impact.
It is important to emphasize that in Psychology of Art Vygotsky consistently demonstrates that the structure of pereghivanie is determined by the objective form of the artistic work. Artistic form organizes and directs the spectator’s pereghivanie, transforming individual feeling into a socially mediated and culturally shaped process. According to Vygotsky, art “cognizes reality” in a special way—not through logical concepts, but through pereghivanie, which functions as a form of emotional–semantic generalization of experience.
Thus, in the works of the theatrical period, the prerequisites are formed for the subsequent transfer of the concept of pereghivanie into psychological theory.
The Turn to Psychological Theory
The turn toward the psychological problematics of pereghivanie emerges at the end of the 1920s, primarily in works devoted to issues of atypical development and defectology. In the article The Fundamental Problems of Modern Defectology (1929), Vygotsky begins to consider pereghivanie not as a characteristic of aesthetic impact, but as an internal mechanism through which the external conditions of the environment are refracted in the child’s psyche (Vygotsky, 1929). Here, pereghivanie is linked to the characteristics of personality and to the level of its development, making it possible to move from the analysis of cultural forms to the analysis of individual development in concrete life conditions.
In this context, pereghivanie no longer appears as an immediate emotional reflection of a situation. Vygotsky emphasizes that the same external influence may affect a child’s development in different ways depending on how it is perezhivayetsya—that is, how it is experienced. In this way, Vygotsky begins to conceptualize pereghivanie as a mediating link between the environment and the personality, one that determines the psychological meaning of a situation for a particular child. Already at this stage, the idea takes shape that development is determined not by objective social conditions as such, but by how these conditions are refracted in the child’s pereghivanie.
Importantly, in the works of this period Vygotsky for the first time explicitly connects pereghivanie with the development of thinking and consciousness. He points, in particular, to changes in the structure of pereghivaniya as conceptual thinking develops: the growth of generalization opens up the possibility of a more differentiated and meaningful attitude toward one’s own feelings and toward surrounding reality. At this stage, although the concept of pereghivanie has not yet received a strict definition, it gradually acquires the status of a key element in the analysis of the interaction between personality and environment.
The further development of the problematics of pereghivanie is associated with the analysis of age-related changes in the structure of consciousness, above all in works devoted to adolescence. In Pedology of the Adolescent (1931), Vygotsky turns to the process of profound restructuring of psychological functions accompanying the formation of conceptual thinking (Vygotsky, 1931). Here, pereghivanie is already considered as a new formation (neoformation) reflecting a change in the personality’s relation to reality and to itself.
Vygotsky emphasizes that in adolescence not only the content of pereghivaniya changes, but also their structure. The formation of conceptual thinking creates conditions for the awareness of one’s own feelings and for a more complex, mediated relation to emotional experience. Pereghivanie ceases to be an immediate reaction to a situation and increasingly becomes an internally organized and meaningful process. It is precisely here that the idea of the unity of affect and intellect begins to take shape: the emotional life of the personality is restructured in connection with the development of thinking.
Thus, in this period Vygotsky effectively uses pereghivanie to describe a new level of consciousness characteristic of adolescence. Pereghivanie appears as a form of the personality’s relation to the world, mediated by conceptual thinking and incorporating both affective and intellectual components.
In his works of the early 1930s, Vygotsky supplements the analysis of adolescent pereghivaniya with a comparison between normative development and pathological forms of disturbances of consciousness. In particular, he turns to the analysis of schizophrenia, using it as a contrastive material for understanding the structure of pereghivanie in the norm. Such a comparison makes it possible to reveal the systemic character of pereghivaniya in the process of personality development.
Vygotsky demonstrates that in normative adolescent development a holistic system of pereghivaniya is formed, unified by a common meaningful relation to reality. The development of conceptual thinking ensures the integration of affective and intellectual processes, as a result of which emerging pereghivaniya acquire coherence, stability, and internal organization. By contrast, in schizophrenia this integrity is disrupted: pereghivaniya lose their systemic character, disintegrate into isolated fragments, and cease to be integrated into a unified relation of the personality to the world. This comparison allows Vygotsky to emphasize that pereghivanie is not a set of separate emotional states, but rather an element of the holistic structure of consciousness. A disturbance of this structure leads to a loss of the meaningful coherence of experience and, consequently, to profound changes in personality. Here, pereghivanie already appears both as an indicator and as a condition of the integrity of consciousness, thereby preparing the ground for its subsequent definition as a dynamic unit of consciousness in Vygotsky’s later works.
The Late Period
In the works of 1932–1933, pereghivanie receives a clear theoretical formulation in Vygotsky’s writings and is definitively incorporated into the system of concepts of cultural-historical psychology (Vygotsky, 1932/1984). In the analysis of age-related crises, and above all in the work The Crisis of Seven Years, pereghivanie is defined as a dynamic unit of consciousness in which personality and environment are presented in an inseparable unity (Vygotsky, 1933/1984). It is precisely here that pereghivanie becomes the category that makes it possible to overcome the gap between the objective conditions of development and the child’s subjective experience.
Vygotsky emphasizes that pereghivanie is neither an inner state nor a sum of emotional reactions, but rather a mode through which the child enters into relations with the social situation of development. Accordingly, development is determined not by objective conditions as such, but by their subjective refraction in the child’s pereghivanie. The same situation may have different developmental significance depending on how it is experienced, and on which meanings and affective evaluations are actualized within it.
In this context, pereghivanie acquires the status of a central analytical category: through it, the unity of affect and intellect is described, as well as the connection between consciousness and personality and the mechanism through which the social environment is transformed into a source of development. Thus, the trajectory from early aesthetic and theatrical works to late psychological texts reveals the internal logic of the formation of the concept of pereghivanie—from the analysis of artistic experience to the substantiation of pereghivanie as a key unit of consciousness and development. At the same time, drawing on Osipov’s analysis, it is necessary to emphasize that Vygotsky’s views did not develop in a linear manner: in the 1910s–1920s, the founder of cultural-historical theory “oscillated” between understanding pereghivanie as a simple emotional reflection and as a complex systemic formation, and only in Vygotsky’s final texts did these two lines converge (Osipov, 2022). In this sense, Osipov confirms the conclusion that a clearly defined place for pereghivanie within the conceptual corpus of the theory was found by Vygotsky only at the very end of his scholarly work (Osipov, 2022).
After Vygotsky’s premature death, his students and followers continued to develop the concept of pereghivanie, relying on its “classical” definition as the unity of personality and environment. Many researchers of the second generation of Vygotsky’s scientific school (1950s–1970s) sought to demonstrate the heuristic value of this category for explaining the development of the child’s personality. At the same time, in subsequent decades new approaches also emerged, considering pereghivanie from different perspectives—for example, as a special form of activity or as an object of psychological assistance. Below, the main interpretations of pereghivanie proposed by a number of authors working within the tradition of L. S. Vygotsky are examined.
The Development of the Concept of Pereghivanie in the Works of Vygotsky’s Students and Followers
L. I. Bozhovich: Pereghivanie as a Central Category of Development. The concept of pereghivanie in the context of the formation of the child’s personality was systematically investigated by Vygotsky’s student L. I. Bozhovich. In her monograph Personality and Its Formation in Childhood, she explicitly identifies pereghivanie as one of the central categories of developmental psychology (Bozhovich, 1968). Sharing Vygotsky’s views, Bozhovich conceptualized pereghivanie as a unified field of interaction between the child and the surrounding environment (that is, as an integral reflection of the situation in the child’s consciousness). According to Bozhovich, each concrete pereghivanie reflects the degree to which the child is satisfied with his or her relations with the environment and thus performs a crucial orienting function for the personality (Bozhovich, 1968). Pereghivanie “informs” the child about “the kind of relation he or she has with the environment” and prompts action in a particular direction. In other words, Bozhovich interpreted pereghivanie as an internal regulator of behavior, signaling the correspondence or non-correspondence between the external situation and the individual’s internal needs. She identified three main components in the structure of pereghivanie: the personality’s relation (its subjective evaluation of the situation and of its needs within it); orientation in the situation (an understanding of whether significant needs are satisfied or not); and an impulse toward action (a motive prompting a change in the situation or in one’s attitude toward it) (Bozhovich, 1968). Thus, in Bozhovich’s conception, pereghivanie effectively integrates the emotional, cognitive, and motivational aspects of the child’s psyche into a single act that determines the characteristics of behavior.
The Debates of the 1970s: Polemics Around the Concept of Pereghivanie. Developing these ideas, L. I. Bozhovich and M. S. Neimark published in 1972 the article “Significant Pereghivaniya” as a Subject of Psychology. This work raised the question of whether pereghivanie could become a specific object of psychological science (Bozhovich & Neimark, 1972). The authors noted that psychology had traditionally studied cognitive processes or isolated emotions, but not holistic pereghivaniya that integrate the subject and the situation. However, following Vygotsky, pereghivanie must be understood as an indivisible unity of “personality–environment,” since it simultaneously encompasses both objective circumstances and their personal meaning for the individual. Vygotsky’s followers once again affirmed the “classical” definition proposed by the founder of the cultural-historical school: pereghivanie is a unit in which the properties of the subject and the features of the social situation are fused into a single whole—that which the subject experiences in a given situation (Bozhovich & Neimark, 1972). At the same time, the authors traced a developmental dynamic whereby pereghivanie initially emerges as a means of orientation in surrounding relations (the child emotionally “reads” whether his or her needs are being satisfied), but gradually acquires independent significance and becomes an indispensable psychological reality in which the individual begins to experience a specific need (Bozhovich & Neimark, 1972). In other words, the developing personality comes to need pereghivaniya themselves—for example, for an adolescent it becomes important to experience feelings of love, recognition, meaning in life, and so forth—and these pereghivaniya become motives of activity.
In 1972, alongside the article by Bozhovich and Neimark, F. V. Bassin published the paper “‘Significant’ Pereghivaniya and the Problem of Properly Psychological Regularity”. Bassin sought to clarify the definition of “significant pereghivaniya” and to examine whether the introduction of this category blurred the boundaries of psychology as a scientific discipline (Bassin, 1972). He insisted on the necessity of clearly distinguishing between the properly psychological analysis of pereghivanie and its philosophical or methodological interpretations. As a result of these discussions, pereghivanie came to be recognized as a legitimate object of psychological research. By defending “significant pereghivaniya” as a subject of psychology, Bozhovich, Neimark, and their supporters strengthened the methodological status of this category within Soviet psychological science. At the same time, the debates also revealed a problem—namely, the heterogeneity of interpretations of pereghivanie. Different authors emphasized different aspects—cognitive, emotional, or activity-related—which subsequently led to the emergence of new approaches.
D. B. Elkonin: Pereghivanie as a Unit of Consciousness and a Driving Force of Development. D. B. Elkonin, a close student of Vygotsky, also turned to the concept of pereghivanie in his later works. In the Afterword to Volume 4 of Vygotsky’s Collected Works, Elkonin provided a detailed analysis of Vygotsky’s ideas and fully endorsed his thesis that pereghivanie is a unit of consciousness expressing the unity of environment and personality (Elkonin, 1984). Elkonin emphasized that without taking pereghivanie into account it is impossible to understand how the child’s psyche functions and develops (Elkonin, 1984). From his perspective, pereghivaniya act as a driving force of mental development alongside activity and learning. At the same time, Elkonin preserved the “classical” Vygotskian understanding of the concept: pereghivanie represents an indivisible unity of the personal and the situational, through which the external situation acquires meaning for the child (Elkonin, 1984).
An important methodological contribution made by Elkonin was his emphasis on the need to search for new methods of studying pereghivaniya. He criticized the widespread practice of one-time cross-sectional measurements followed by mathematical data processing as inadequate for investigating the dynamics of pereghivanie (Elkonin, 1984). Elkonin argued that long-term individual observation and longitudinal methods (the monographic method) must be introduced in order to understand how pereghivaniya are formed and transformed in a particular child. This methodological guideline was of great importance, as it demonstrated that pereghivanie is a subtle phenomenon, unique to each personality, and one that requires qualitative rather than exclusively quantitative approaches. In this way, Elkonin consolidated the status of pereghivanie as a central explanatory principle in child psychology, called for its consideration in the analysis of leading activity and social situations, and highlighted the necessity of developing special methods for studying this phenomenon (Elkonin, 1984).
L. I. Bozhovich and D. B. Elkonin: Contributions to Pedagogy and Developmental Psychology. What Bozhovich and Elkonin—representatives of the second generation of Vygotsky’s school—shared was the aspiration to introduce the concept of pereghivanie into the practical sphere of education and upbringing. Bozhovich pointed out that understanding a child’s pereghivaniya provides teachers with a key to the child’s motivation and behavior, making it possible to adjust educational influences in accordance with the internal needs of the personality (Bozhovich, 1968). Elkonin, in his analyses of play, learning activity, and children’s communication, emphasized that each social situation of development is characterized by specific, typical pereghivaniya of the child (for example, adolescents’ pereghivaniya associated with finding one’s place among peers). These pereghivaniya determine the inner dynamics of age-related development. Thus, within the second generation of Vygotsky’s school, pereghivanie became firmly established as a psychological mechanism of development, without which neither developmental crises nor stable developmental periods can be fully analyzed.
F. E. Vasilyuk: Pereghivanie as an Activity of Overcoming Critical Situations. By the 1980s, a new and original approach to the phenomenon of pereghivanie emerged, proposed by F. E. Vasilyuk. In his book Psychology of Pereghivanie (1984), Vasilyuk carried out a comprehensive theoretical and practical investigation of pereghivaniya, moving beyond the boundaries of narrowly child-centered psychology (Vasilyuk, 1984). Vasilyuk set himself two major tasks: first, to develop a general psychological theory of pereghivanie as a process through which individuals overcome critical life situations, thereby extending activity theory; and second, to examine the problem of the cultural-historical determination of pereghivaniya, that is, how a particular culture and historical epoch shape human experience (Vasilyuk, 1984).
While drawing extensively on Vygotsky’s ideas, Vasilyuk proposed a novel interpretation. He viewed pereghivanie not merely as a state or an analytical unit, but as a special inner activity aimed at resolving situations in which habitual external actions are impossible. For example, when a person encounters an irreparable loss, the situation cannot be changed externally, and the individual is compelled to pereghivat’—to work through and transform his or her relation to the situation in order to come to terms with the loss. Vasilyuk referred to this process as the activity of pereghivanie, contrasting it with passive, “contemplative” experiencing, in which emotions simply unfold without leading to a transformation of one’s relation to the situation (Vasilyuk, 1984). He also advanced the hypothesis of a multilevel structure of pereghivanie, within which several levels can be distinguished—from elementary emotional reactions to meaningful, value-based relations—depending on which level becomes leading in a given case. Vasilyuk’s key thesis is that pereghivanie is not a discrete mental function (standing alongside memory, thinking, and so forth), but a complex process that involves all major psychological functions and is subordinated to its own task—the resolution of a vital life contradiction (Vasilyuk, 1984). Vasilyuk’s theory laid the foundation for the existential–humanistic direction in Russian psychotherapy (experiential psychotherapy).
A. G. Asmolov: The Diversity of Approaches to the Analysis of Pereghivanie. In his work Psychology of Personality: Principles of General Psychological Analysis (1990), A. G. Asmolov undertook an attempt to systematize the various interpretations of pereghivanie that had emerged in Russian psychology. He identified three main directions in the analysis of pereghivanie: (1) pereghivanie as an emotionally colored life event of the subject, directly given in consciousness (here pereghivanie is understood as a synthesis of knowledge and one’s attitude toward a certain life fact); (2) pereghivanie as striving or “wanting,” reflecting in consciousness the process of choosing motives and goals and thereby influencing the determination of activity; and (3) pereghivanie as activity (in the interpretation proposed by F. E. Vasilyuk and his followers) (Asmolov, 1990). In essence, Asmolov pointed out that there is no single unified understanding of pereghivanie: there is a classical interpretation (the first direction, stemming from Vygotsky–Bozhovich), a motivational–volitional one (partly developed within the activity approach of A. N. Leontiev and others), and an activity-existential interpretation (Vasilyuk). Asmolov argued that all three directions must be taken into account within a general psychology of personality. His analysis demonstrated that by the 1990s the tradition of researching pereghivanie continued to develop, generating new meanings while preserving the core laid down by Vygotsky: the understanding of pereghivanie as a special holistic phenomenon that integrates emotion, motivation, and meaning.
N. N. Veresov: Pereghivanie as a Phenomenon and as a Theoretical Concept. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, N. N. Veresov—a Russian-Australian scholar and representative of the fourth generation of Vygotskians—raised an important methodological question concerning the content of the concept of pereghivanie (Veresov, 2016). He proposed a clear distinction between pereghivanie as a real psychological phenomenon (what a person directly feels and becomes aware of in a concrete situation) and pereghivanie as a theoretical category within the conceptual system of L. S. Vygotsky. Veresov points out that in Vygotsky’s texts the concept of pereghivanie is used primarily in the latter sense—as an analytical tool for explaining development rather than for describing the child’s subjective sensations (Veresov, 2016). Veresov emphasizes that this distinction makes it possible to correctly relate pereghivanie to other categories of cultural-historical theory, without replacing scientific analysis with a simple description of the child’s experiences. Thus, Veresov’s contribution consists in a methodological “reflection” on the concept: he returns researchers to Vygotsky’s texts and calls for a strict determination of the place of pereghivanie within the theoretical system in order to avoid eclecticism. This is especially important for contemporary studies, in which pereghivanie is often used broadly and metaphorically; Veresov, by contrast, demands scientific rigor in the spirit of Vygotsky (Veresov, 2016).
The analysis presented shows that the direct students of L. S. Vygotsky (L. I. Bozhovich, D. B. Elkonin) remained faithful to the original “Vygotskian” understanding of pereghivanie as a unit of the “child–environment” system and demonstrated that without this category an analysis of personality development is impossible. Subsequent generations of researchers deepened this analysis: in the 1970s, the methodological significance of pereghivanie was consolidated through debates and theoretical generalizations; in the 1980s, new approaches to understanding pereghivanie and to its practical applications were outlined (including the activity-based approach of F. E. Vasilyuk). By the end of the twentieth century, pereghivanie had firmly entered Russian psychology as a multidimensional concept requiring interdisciplinary reflection.
Pereghivanie in Contemporary Research (International Experience). From the late twentieth to the early twenty-first century, interest in the phenomenon of pereghivanie experienced a renewed rise. Works have appeared—and continue to appear—that re-examine Vygotsky’s legacy, compare his views with other approaches, and apply the concept of pereghivanie in contemporary research and practical contexts (education, sociocultural adaptation, the digital environment, and others). Below, several contemporary interpretations presented in the literature of the 2010s–early 2020s are considered.
I. A. Meshcheryakova investigated the problem of pereghivanie in the context of adolescent development (Meshcheryakova, 1998). She emphasized that within the Russian tradition there is no single unified conception of pereghivanie and that it is necessary to distinguish genetic forms of pereghivanie—from simple, immediate forms in children to higher forms that acquire the status of inner activity in adults. Drawing on Vygotsky, Meshcheryakova proposed to consider the development of pereghivanie in the same way as the development of any psychological function—from involuntary forms to voluntary, culturally mediated ones (Meshcheryakova, 1998). She also made an attempt to develop methods for studying pereghivaniya through “mapping”: together with B. G. Meshcheryakov, she proposed the methods The World of Pereghivaniya and The Panorama of Problems, in which high school students were asked to visualize and structure their principal pereghivaniya and problems. These works of the late 1990s continued the line initiated by Vygotsky—a systemic study of pereghivanie in connection with personality development and the social situation of development.
A. M. Prikhozhan studied anxiety as a specific pereghivanie within the framework of L. I. Bozhovich’s ideas (Prikhozhan, 2006). She drew on Bozhovich’s view that the emergence of new needs is accompanied by the formation of new emotional structures: when a person develops a new significant need, a corresponding pereghivanie arises, reflecting the satisfaction or frustration of that need (Bozhovich, 1978, cited in Prikhozhan, 2006, p. 100). In essence, by studying anxiety in children, Prikhozhan conceptualized it as a manifestation of a system of pereghivaniya connected with needs for security, success, and other motives that develop in ontogenesis (Prikhozhan, 2006).
The idea of dramatic pereghivanie as a crucial component of adolescent development was incorporated into the Multimedia Theatre model developed under the leadership of O. V. Rubtsova between 2019 and 2024. At the practical level, the concept of pereghivanie manifests itself in two main aspects of the implementation of this type of school theatre model.
The first aspect involves the creation of “micro-dramas” that is, small-scale dramatic situations in which participants can intensely experience specific emotions and conflicts. During theatrical sessions, adolescents are offered exercises, études, and improvisations in which they are engaged in imagined yet psychologically meaningful scenarios. The emotional responses that arise in these situations are regarded not as a by-product, but as a central element of development (Rubtsova, 2023). As Rubtsova notes, micro-dramas intentionally modeled within theatrical activity, together with the accompanying pereghivaniya, create conditions for moving all participants from their current level of development to their potential level. In other words, when an adolescent deeply experiences a situation on stage, this experience can transform their understanding of and attitude toward similar situations in real life. For example, by playing the role of an offended classmate and genuinely experiencing this sense of hurt, a student may reconsider their actual behavior toward peers.
The second aspect concerns the exteriorization of adolescents’ pereghivaniya through theatre. Within the Multimedia Theatre framework, conditions are deliberately created for the exteriorization of adolescents’ inner conflicts and pereghivaniya, helping them to overcome the crisis of the transitional age in a constructive manner (Konokotin et al., 2025). Thus, the Multimedia Theatre model represents a clear example of how pereghivanie can be transformed into a pedagogical tool: here it does not arise spontaneously, but is embedded in the design of educational activity and becomes a central mechanism for achieving a developmental effect, through which participants move from the zone of actual development to the zone of proximal development.
The influence of Vygotsky’s ideas on pereghivanie can also be traced in international educational practice. For instance, O. V. Rubtsova and G. Daniels (2016) examined pereghivaniya in relation to the education of adolescents with behavioral difficulties, drawing on Vygotsky’s original “theatrical” approach (Rubtsova, Daniels, 2016; Sobkin, 2015). They interpreted dramatic events and the pereghivaniya associated with them as cultural means for transforming the social situation of development of adolescents. In experimental projects (such as the Drama and Exclusion project in the United Kingdom), the authors demonstrated that participation in specially organized theatrical activity evokes strong collective pereghivaniya in adolescents, which can change their attitudes toward school and toward themselves (Rubtsova, Daniels, 2016).
M. Fleer and N. N. Veresov study pereghivanie in the context of play activity. They emphasize that in children’s play, emotion and thinking are inseparable. In role-play or imaginary play, the child simultaneously feels, thinks, and acts. Pereghivanie makes it possible to understand this unity—for example, when a child plays the role of a doctor and at the same time feels fear, care, and engages in sense-making. During play, children exist on the boundary between the real and the imaginary: they emotionally live through an imagined situation while at the same time understanding that they are playing. Pereghivanie helps explain how a child can simultaneously “fear a dragon” and understand that the dragon does not exist. Play often gives rise to contradictory feelings—fear, joy, tension, uncertainty—which create a dramatic pereghivanie: moments of heightened emotional involvement that may lead to development (for example, the formation of self-regulation or the ability to take another’s perspective) (Fleer, Veresov, Walker, 2020). Fleer and Veresov stress that pereghivanie is not simply an emotion, but the refraction of the social situation through the child’s personality. The same play context is experienced differently by different children, which explains why identical play activities can produce different reactions and developmental effects depending on prior experience. Pereghivanie is linked to the formation of a conscious relation to emotions: in play, the child learns not only to feel, but to become aware of what is felt, why it is felt, and in which role. This represents a step toward the development of consciousness. Fleer and Veresov show that through emotionally rich play (for example, in playworlds), executive functions—attention, memory, cognitive flexibility, and self-control—are developed. Pereghivanie in such play serves as a key mechanism of this development.
K. Potapov (2021) describes a case of using “role experimentation” supported by digital technologies: during the experiment, adolescents monitored sleep parameters and discussed “dramatic situations,” which contributed to the development of reflection and self-awareness (Potapov, 2021). In these studies, the concepts of “drama” and pereghivanie are used to enrich educational practice: the core idea is that by creating conditions for intense and productive pereghivaniya (for example, experiences of success, cooperation, or empathy), it is possible to influence students’ personal development. This aligns with Vygotsky’s conclusion that pereghivanie can change the direction of personality development.
Contemporary researchers in different countries are also experimenting with methods of visualizing and dramatizing children’s pereghivaniya in learning contexts (Kornelaki, Plakitsi, 2020; Ramos, Renshaw, 2017). For example, A. K. Kornelaki and C. Plakitsi attempted to link the formation of scientific concepts in primary school children with the idea of pereghivanie arising in the course of experimental–play-based science education (Kornelaki, Plakitsi, 2020). They applied Vygotsky’s experimental-genetic method by embedding it into an educational program in which children acquired scientific knowledge through living through imagined journeys (the myth of Zeus’s Lightning). The results showed that emotional engagement and pereghivanie of the narrative enhanced the effectiveness of learning (Kornelaki, Plakitsi, 2020).
Another example is the work of M. V. Ramos and P. Renshaw (2017), who proposed a method of visual mapping of children’s pereghivaniya during an educational excursion (Ramos, Renshaw, 2017). Drawing on Vygotsky’s idea of development as drama, the authors attempted to schematically represent how children’s pereghivaniya are distributed over time and space within learning activity. They introduced the concepts of prolepsis and analepsis (anticipatory pereghivanie and recollective pereghivanie), demonstrating the recursive nature of pereghivanie: children imagine a future event (anticipating its experience) and later return to it emotionally, reinterpreting past experience. Visualization of such dynamic “contours of pereghivanie” helps to clarify how individual emotional episodes influence a child’s development (Ramos, Renshaw, 2017). These innovative methods demonstrate that Vygotsky’s ideas about the dramatic structure of pereghivanie and its connection with learning continue to inspire the international research community today.
Thus, contemporary interpretations preserve the core of the Vygotskian understanding: pereghivanie is still viewed as an interrelation of the emotional and the meaningful, the personal and the social. At the same time, the scope of research has expanded considerably. The concept of pereghivanie is now applied to the analysis of a wide range of phenomena—from post-traumatic personal growth (Pergamenshchik, 2010) to the formation of environmental consciousness in children. In all these cases, it attracts researchers’ attention as a category that makes it possible to integrate external influences, internal responses, and personal change into a single analytical framework. It is precisely this integrative power of the concept, originally articulated by Vygotsky, that ensures its continuing relevance today.
Conclusions
The analysis conducted demonstrates that the category of pereghivanie within L. S. Vygotsky’s scientific project is formed not as a secondary term, but as an internal mechanism that reveals the integrity of the analysis of development. Despite its relatively limited textual presence in Vygotsky’s legacy, pereghivanie performs a system-forming function: through it, affective and meaning-related components of consciousness, the individual dynamics of personality, and the structure of the social situation of development are brought into relation (Rubtsov, Maidansky, 2025). In this sense, pereghivanie does not function as an “inner state,” but rather as a specific unit of analysis that captures the mode of the subject’s involvement in a culturally organized situation and the way in which the environment becomes a source of development.
Tracing the genesis of the concept from early theatrical and aesthetic texts to later works on age-related crises makes it possible to clarify the logic of its formation. In the early works, pereghivanie appears as a culturally mediated process, determined by the form of artistic action and unfolding within a space of collective experience. In the works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, this understanding is transferred into psychological theory: pereghivanie begins to be conceptualized as a mediating link between environmental influence and the personal meaning of a situation for the child, and subsequently as an indicator of the restructuring of consciousness in age-related development. In the late texts (above all in the analysis of crises), pereghivanie receives its final theoretical formulation as a dynamic unit of consciousness, in which personality and environment are represented in unity, while development is described through the “refraction” of the social situation in the child’s experience.
The subsequent fate of the concept within the Russian tradition confirms both its heuristic value and the risk of semantic diffusion. The line extending from Vygotsky to L. I. Bozhovich and D. B. Elkonin preserves the “classical” understanding of pereghivanie as a unity of “personality–environment” and demonstrates its significance for explaining motivation, behavior, and age-related dynamics. At the same time, in later theoretical developments (in particular in the work of F. E. Vasilyuk), pereghivanie comes to be interpreted as a special form of activity aimed at overcoming critical situations, which expands the scope of application of the category and brings it into the practical domain of psychological assistance. The methodological clarification proposed by N. N. Veresov—the distinction between pereghivanie as an empirical phenomenon and as a theoretical category—appears to be a fundamentally important condition for the further productive use of the concept within a cultural-historical perspective.
Overall, the review of contemporary research (including international work) shows that the concept of pereghivanie retains its relevance precisely because of its integrative power: it makes it possible to conceptualize development as a process in which emotion and meaning, the individual and the social, learning and personal change are incorporated into a single dynamic of the reorganization of consciousness. At the same time, further work with this category requires both theoretical rigor—a clear determination of the place of pereghivanie within the system of concepts of cultural-historical psychology—and methodological advancement—the development of research procedures capable of capturing the dynamics of pereghivanie over time (longitudinal observations, analysis of “dramatic” events, and methods of mapping and visualizing experience). In this context, returning to the genesis of the concept in Vygotsky’s work and comparing the different lines of its development make it possible not only to refine the content of the category of pereghivanie, but also to outline prospects for its further operationalization in studies of developmental processes as well as in social and educational practice.