Understanding L.S. Vygotsky’s ideas requires not only immersion in the historical context in which he lived and worked, but also engagement with the writings of his students and followers, as well as with contemporary research in cultural-historical psychology. Professors N.N. Veresov (Monash University, Melbourne) and N.E. Veraksa (Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University) have published a new book that brings all these perspectives together in concentrated form. The book grew out of a series of conversations held as part of an educational outreach project of the International Pedagogical Academy of Preschool Education.
Dialogues about L.S. Vygotsky is not simply another monograph offering yet another interpretation of the tenets of cultural-historical psychology. Its title foregrounds the book’s distinctive genre: readers encounter a lively dialogue that gradually unfolds the logic and core ideas of Vygotsky’s psychological theory. The authors assume the role of guides, offering a kind of itinerary through the terrain of cultural-historical psychology.
The dialogic format permits not only an exchange of views but also discussion, mutual criticism, and debate. It is regrettable that the authors did not make fuller use of this potential to make their dialogue richer and more engaging. At times, they seem deliberately to avoid controversy and refrain from direct disagreement with one another. There is, however, no shortage of polemic with other Vygotsky scholars (mostly on N.N. Veresov’s part).
The authors intended that, by witnessing this intellectual conversation, readers would gradually become participants in the process of reflection themselves. Vygotsky called this “collaboration”; today, the term “jointly distributed activity” has become widely used (Rubtsov, 2024). According to Vygotsky, all higher psychological functions emerge and develop through collaboration; open dialogue therefore creates particularly favourable conditions for learning—the kind of learning that leads development. At the same time, highly complex theoretical ideas of cultural-historical psychology become more accessible without losing their depth. It is no coincidence that the Preface defines the book as “a propaedeutic to the cultural-historical approach” (p. 6).
The book under review comprises eight conversations devoted to key tenets and concepts of L.S. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory and to their potential application in educational practice. A separate strand of the dialogue addresses challenges in contemporary preschool education. The authors discuss the theory’s core concepts—“development,” “consciousness,” “social situation of development,” “zone of proximal development,” “ideal form,” “perezhivanie,” and “higher psychological functions”—and effectively demonstrate their methodological and practical relevance to contemporary psychological research and practice. N.E. Veraksa repeatedly redirects the discussion towards preschool education and educational practice more broadly.
The first conversation, “L.S. Vygotsky’s Cultural-Historical Conception and Contemporary Preschool Education,” establishes the book’s overall frame. N.N. Veresov observes that no unified understanding of consciousness currently exists and that the meaning of the term “development” is gradually being hollowed out. He insists that Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology is a theory of the development of human consciousness, understood as a system of higher psychological functions.
The dialogues also discuss such concepts as “sign,” “cultural form of behaviour,” “maturation,” “play,” and “psychological age,” along with the child’s relationship with the social environment. Turning the discussion towards the practical organisation of the educational process, N.E. Veraksa places particular emphasis on the category of perezhivanie. A child does not simply “reflect” external influences like a mirror, but refracts them through their own perezhivanie. This helps explain why approximately the same situation can affect different children in markedly different ways.
The second conversation, “The Concepts of ‘Ideal’ and Present Forms and the Process of Development,” examines one of the central ideas of cultural-historical theory: the social environment is not merely a factor but the source of a child’s cultural development. Development occurs through the interaction between the present form, already available to the child, and the ideal form, which exists in culture. The social environment is not an external background but the actual space in which higher psychological functions take shape. “We are coming to appreciate the depth of this idea more and more clearly. This is especially true in our contemporary world, as the social environment is becoming a digital environment and we can see how this affects children’s development—how development follows different trajectories while remaining governed by the same laws,” N.N. Veresov concludes (p. 29).
The third conversation addresses one of the most important concepts in cultural-historical psychology: the “zone of proximal development.” The interlocutors show how learning, play, and creativity can function as forms of development. The zone of proximal development is treated as a space of possible development that arises through a child’s collaboration with an adult and other children. N.N. Veresov defines it as “the distance between the actual level of development and the possible (potential) level of development” (p. 56).
The relationship between play and learning activity, and the fundamental distinction between them identified by Vygotsky, is discussed in detail. School-based forms of instruction must not be imposed on preschool education. A child needs to develop fully through play so that imagination—the central neoformation of preschool age—can emerge. N.N. Veresov argues for a gradual transition from play to learning activity, such that in first grade “purely learning tasks are embedded in play narratives,” as envisaged in Davydov’s programme of developmental education (p. 67).
The fourth conversation turns to the laws of psychological development discovered by Vygotsky. These include, on the one hand, the four laws governing the genesis of higher psychological functions, brought together in the “general genetic law of cultural development,” and, on the other, the laws underlying the formation of “psychological systems,” which determine the interrelations among different psychological functions, the processes of their differentiation and synthesis, their hierarchy, and so forth, as N.N. Veresov maintains (p. 76). The systemic organisation of psychological functions became the focus of the “late” Vygotsky’s research.
The fifth conversation, “Vygotsky’s Dialectics,” seeks to reveal the methodological core of his theory. The authors argue that dialectics should be understood as a method for analysing the process of development, rather than as a universal scheme imposed upon psychology’s “particular” subject matter. This is hard to dispute; yet most of the conversation is devoted precisely to examples of applying dialectics to various psychological problems in Vygotsky’s work. Readers learn little from this conversation about the dialectical development of his theory “from the abstract to the concrete,” or about the development of a child’s consciousness. The book also contains excursions into philosophy that are, to put it mildly, questionable—for example: “Spinoza took the concept of matter and distinguished two attributes within it: the psyche and the brain” (N.E. Veraksa, p. 97). The conversation on dialectics is perhaps not the book’s strongest.
The sixth conversation, “The Psychology of Creativity in the Works of L.S. Vygotsky,” discusses a cultural-historical approach to creativity. Creativity is understood here as a transition from indeterminacy to structure, from conception to embodiment, and from initially external cultural meaning to the individual’s personal meaning. According to Vygotsky, what makes an activity creative is not the materials or tools used, but the meaning that extends beyond the immediate action. The development of a child’s creative abilities therefore cannot be reduced to a set of “activity-based tasks”; it requires the child’s entry into the space of culture, where the meanings and values accumulated by humanity “become the individual personal meanings of a human being” (N.N. Veresov, p. 118).
The seventh conversation, “Dialectics and the Study of Child Development,” returns the reader to the methodological foundations of cultural-historical psychology. The interlocutors consider why educators need dialectics. Its central concern is the idea of contradiction as the source of development. Various factors may accelerate, slow, or alter the trajectory of development, but they do not explain its internal driving forces and logic. To understand child development, one must determine the nature of the interaction between its two lines—the natural and the cultural—and recognise the social environment as the source of human forms of behaviour. In this context, particular attention is paid to the concept of the “social situation of development.”
The eighth conversation, “Consciousness: Cultural or Natural?”, returns to the question posed at the very beginning of the book: what is consciousness from a cultural-historical perspective? Answering it requires taking into account the shift in our understanding of Vygotsky’s work over the past quarter-century, prompted by the publication of a large corpus of his archival manuscripts, lecture transcripts, and notebooks. “These works revealed a new Vygotsky to us. A completely new one”—far deeper than the Vygotsky we knew before and thought we knew very well, N.N. Veresov acknowledges. Vygotsky’s principal achievement “was that he posed and answered the question of what human consciousness is… It emerges at the moment when a person begins to participate in cultural practices, in joint activity, and in practices involving the use of artificial means” (p. 144).
In their analysis of L.S. Vygotsky’s oeuvre, the authors focus mainly on works and ideas from his late period. This emphasis is justified: in his later writings, Vygotsky’s theoretical thought reached its height and full maturity—its “acme.” It is regrettable, however, that the book gives little attention to Vygotsky’s works and discoveries of the 1920s (apart from the idea of vraschivanie), and thus to the roots of his theory. Neither the “instrumental method” nor the “method of double stimulation” is mentioned even once; moreover, the 1928 lectures on developmental psychology are, for some reason, described as “one of the last lecture courses Vygotsky gave” (N.N. Veresov, p. 86). Still, the book does not claim to offer a comprehensive account of Vygotsky’s views.
Several conversations—especially the fourth and fifth—occasionally shift into N.N. Veresov’s monologues, while N.E. Veraksa’s contributions are limited to clarifications and expressions of support. The other dialogues, too, albeit less markedly, suffer from a lack of intellectual “polyphony.” Exceptionally complex, multifaceted, and contested questions concerning Vygotsky’s legacy are viewed through a single scholarly lens (though admittedly a powerful one). Despite this limitation, the authors have undoubtedly achieved their main goal: to demonstrate the pressing relevance of L.S. Vygotsky’s legacy to contemporary science and educational practice.
The publication of the book under review is, in our view, an important event in cultural-historical psychology and compelling new evidence that Vygotsky’s ideas will continue to live and develop in their native cultural soil.