The 130th anniversary of Lev S. Vygotsky this year has been marked not just by an important event, but by one truly unique in its significance. A feature film about him has been made. This is the first Russian film about a Russian psychologist who transformed world psychology and, more broadly, the very understanding of human nature, gaining international recognition. Director Anton Bilzho, general producer Egor Odintsov, and idea author and producer Alexander Adamsky presented the film at the 48th Moscow International Film Festival.
On April 23, the results were announced. The film had been awaited with hope and received warmly, but even its creators could hardly have expected such an outcome: Anton Bilzho’s directing was recognized by the jury as the best, as was the leading male performance by Sergey Gilev. In addition, the biopic received a diploma from the Russian film critics’ jury “For a multifaceted acting ensemble”. Frankly speaking, the creators belong to the “top league” of contemporary Russian cinema — despite their youth, each has an impressive track record. In announcements and reviews, a familiar phrase is often used in reference to Anton Bilzho: “From the creator of…”. A familiar phrase, yet one that speaks volumes. The same could be said about most participants in the filmmaking process. Hence the expectations. The only true “debutant” in cinema was Vygotsky himself — and this is the film’s central intrigue.
Where to Watch From
If you came expecting a presentation of Lev S. Vygotsky’s revolutionary scientific ideas, his methodology — which has been rediscovered and embraced worldwide by the fourth and fifth generations of scholars over the past hundred years (joined now by educators, social workers, and many others) — then this is not the place. But if you wish to feel, in vivid strokes and in the language of our time, the era that gives rise to geniuses of Vygotsky’s scale and is itself shaped by them — then this is exactly where you should be.
It is important from where one watches the film: from the presidium of a scientific auditorium, from the benches of its amphitheater, or from the comfortable seat of a modern cinema. Let us choose the latter.
Although, in truth, it does not matter where Hamlet sits. Vygotsky’s teacher, literary critic Yuli Aikhenvald, wrote: Hamlet is among the crowd. Or rather, among the audience — but someone must call him from the stage, and they have been doing so for nearly half a millennium. Sometimes in jeans, like Vladimir Vysotsky at the Taganka Theatre in the 1970s. Those jeans disturbed some. But fashions change, while Hamlet remains — in different costumes, yet with the same questions, stirring the audience to reflect, because all those questions lie dormant within them.
The film is about youth. About young people. About a young era — one that always has room for a “new person”, always young. This is not an ideological construct, but a feature of history experienced as a biographical fact. The first third of the twentieth century is like this in everything: in science, in art, and, above all, in social life. The individual — and the community of individuals — becomes more important than what they produce, unlike the value system of the nineteenth century. Personality is always new (“talent is the only news”, as Boris Pasternak put it), always young. And it is precisely this personality that becomes the creator of an era of great rupture within the complex interplay of objective historical circumstances beyond its control. At times, it is also broken within that very rupture it helped create — above all in consciousness, like Hamlet and Lev S. Vygotsky.
When, in life itself, people place upon themselves a global experiment called “history”, there arise epochs that are “sensitive” to such experiments. The Renaissance was one; so too was its powerful echo in the first third of the twentieth century, often referred to by the noncommittal term “modernity”. The Renaissance affirmed the human being as a universal transformer of the world; modernity — as the creator of oneself, of one’s possibilities, and inevitably their vivid expression. Yet these possibilities are not always expressed in the results of one’s actions. Not everything is known by its fruits. One of the key figures of this period, Salvador Dalí, would say: “As a personality, I am far greater than my talent”. It is personality that is of interest — and only then “talent”, which never fully contains it. In a similar intellectual spirit, a contemporary far removed from Dalí, Pavel Florensky, remarked about the Futurists: what matters is not where they arrived, but how they moved. As in a child’s play, as described by A. N. Leontiev: when riding a toy horse or playing at being a train, what matters is not arriving, but the very act of moving.
Creativity thus turns into a manifesto of growth, of a personality’s refusal to accept its own psychological “given state” (as V. P. Zinchenko would say), along with the human community growing alongside it. And precisely then creativity becomes accessible to psychological study. The viewer’s catharsis determines the intensity and height of the tragedy — not dramaturgy, directing, or acting in themselves. Such is the conclusion of “The Psychology of Art”. This is the context in which Lev S. Vygotsky lived and worked — and which he, to a great extent, helped to create. This is how it is shown in the film.
Hamlet — a twenty-year-old student, brilliantly understood by the nineteen-year-old Vygotsky in his manuscript on Hamlet. Vygotsky and Vysotsky speak about the same thing.
Is It Easy to Be Young?
It is difficult to be young — to be eternally “new” — at a moment of historical transition (and do we know any other kind, unless we speak of archaic societies frozen like insects in amber?). These difficulties, and the experience of them, are at the center of the film. The issue lies not so much in ideological pressure as in self-determination. The struggle with Kornilov remains only a background; within it, Kornilov himself disappears as a figure in science. Vygotsky would not live to see its political culmination. The drama unfolds within the “circle”, within the “gazebo”. Outwardly, however, the “gazebo” appears as play. As in the classic Chekhovian plot: people sit peacefully, engaged in abstract conversation, while at the same table their destinies collapse. Each participant of this “circle” could be the subject of a separate film. In the 1990s, the renowned director Peter Brook even conceived a film about Alexander Luria (a life ready-made for a gripping narrative with elements of a detective story), but the project never materialized. In “Vygotsky”, he is played by Bogdan Zhilin — perhaps contrary to many expectations. Yet art exists to surprise, not to justify expectations. The young actor Bogdan Zhilin “failed to meet expectations” — and did so brilliantly.
In the film, Vygotsky casually says to his wife Roza: “They do not consider me a Marxist”. Yet this was something that once made him unwilling to live. In fact, he said it not to his wife but to Bluma Zeigarnik, with a note of despair, and she later conveyed it. The phrase was: “I do not want to live. They do not consider me a Marxist!” Not out of political opportunism. Even before the “canonization” of Marx, Vygotsky discovered in him a methodology for understanding the drama of the emergence of the “new person” in history — the acute, dialectical contradictions of this process. This tension is felt not only on the grand historical scale, but also here, in the destinies of living people whom we study in laboratories, with whom we work in schools and specialized institutions. A psychologist deals only with “historical” people — and therefore always with “new”, “young” people, who do not yet have the experience of “being”, the knowledge of “with whom”, or the feeling of “what kind”.
Vygotsky’s daughter, Gita L. Vygodskaya, also conveyed a description of the experimental psychologist: an “inventor, a trickster”. Not for the sake of inventing tricks, but in order to “probe” the subject for the “intrigue of development”, even in a seemingly descriptive situation. And Vygotsky’s thesis that general psychology can only be genetic reflects the spirit of his tense era, in any cross-section of which there lay a dialectical spring of development, always ready to unfold in an unpredictable direction.
For the opportunist Kornilov (in the film vividly portrayed by Vladimir Mishukov, who, they say, was equally striking in real life), it was sufficient to combine reactology with empirical psychology, covering it all with the “banner of Marxism”, in order to produce a new science. But Vygotsky saw in this a symptom of crisis — an “escape from development”. It is not formalism or eclecticism in themselves that are problematic, but the fact that under the “banner of Marxism” there is nothing left that can develop.
In the film, even People’s Commissar Alexander Semashko (an outstanding physician and statesman, a student of Sechenov and Sklifosovsky, and a nephew of Georgy Plekhanov — almost unrecognizable in the performance of Alexander Semchev) understands that it is difficult to construct a “new person” out of such eclecticism, and attempts to set Vygotsky against Kornilov by commissioning a devastating report, but Vygotsky rejects both the idea of constructing, fabricating “new people”, and the very logic of persecution.
On “Psi-Art”
It may seem that Vygotsky is constantly hiding “from the report” in play, in theatricalization — in a wardrobe, even in a morgue, where Sabina Spielrein (beautifully portrayed by Victoria Isakova) continues a psychoanalytic session with him. Incidentally, according to Gita Lvovna, he readily opened himself to new experience in order to comprehend it rationally, while Freud remained for him a reference figure within a constant zone of critique. Because, as he put it, “limping, Freud moved toward the truth”, and it was precisely for the sake of this “truth” that Freud held Vygotsky’s attention — not because of the “limp”. And on screen — it is pure theater of human relations, at times almost vaudevillian.
This has already unsettled some critics “from the presidium”. But what if one looks from life itself? Only more than thirty years later would philosopher and director Guy Debord write “The Society of the Spectacle”, in which vaudeville may coexist with tragedy (though this view was anticipated by Vygotsky’s contemporary Jacob Moreno). For Aristotle, the author of “Poetics”, this would be unacceptable even on stage. “Poetics” is about the elevated, the tragic. The low and the comic appear only as a dialectical counterpoint — and largely in the lost part of the treatise. The treatise and life…
Historians of psychology have long and rightly been interested in the theatrical “dominant” in Vygotsky’s work, his dream (following Georges Politzer) to “construct psychology in the terms of drama”. In essence, to turn psychology into “PSI-ART” (perhaps someone will dare to attempt this in the new century — after all, it is one of the “scenarios of the future” of our science?). For art, theater has always been the stage for exploring new meanings of new people with new ideas — long before psychological experiments, observations, and surveys, in which this “novelty”, at its limit “the only news”, does not reveal itself without special effort. Vygotsky, Politzer, and Moreno appear here in meaningful convergences, historically symptomatic.
Is there much fiction in the film? Yet this is the essence of art — though not of all art. “I will weep over fiction” — this is Pushkin. A young actor mourns a nonexistent Hecuba — this is Shakespeare. An actor’s tears save people in advance. In 1600, people would burn Giordano Bruno at the stake in Rome without suffering. And this was not some early but the very height of the Renaissance! In artistic fiction, the focus is on what matters most for those who have not yet been born — for the “new”, for the “young”. Mandelstam’s “whisper before the lips”. The artist’s suffering precedes the living heart. And it is precisely this (as well as joy) that teaches one to feel, to be alive. Anticipatory suffering and joy of the artist. I think — just as of a true psychologist, which Vygotsky was, insisting not on separating different “psychologies”, but on “separating psychology from non-psychology” (the conclusion of “The Historical Meaning of the Psychological Crisis”).
At first (after the rehabilitation of his legacy), Vygotsky was seen as a new monument; later, as a tragic devotee of ideas that proved to be ahead of their time. In general, if something “comes at the right time”, it usually means that you yourself come from a distant past that has only now matured to self-awareness. Vygotsky was passionately devoted to science, yet behind his scientific ideas there was an endless fascination with people. And this fascination is beautifully conveyed in the film. From the “presidium” in Sergey Gilev’s remarkable performance (indeed, the entire cast is excellent), he may appear somewhat simplified, even boyish. But that is precisely the point: Hamlet lives in real people, not in reflections about them.
Does Gilev play a Vygotsky who is playing? That is exactly what he was like: for him, play was the “ninth wave” of child development — and of human development in general. In play, a stethoscope can be turned into a “thought meter”, allowing one to “read thoughts” through an unformed, turbulent, still-developing dialogue with oneself — a dialogue that will eventually take shape in great words addressed to others, so that thought may continue. This is science, not play. Even the “presidium” would not argue with that.
The Taganka Theatre once staged a remarkable ending to Brecht’s “Life of Galileo”, in the same production with Vysotsky, kindred in spirit to “Hamlet”. At first, Galileo appears powerful, overflowing, expansive; gradually he fades under the pressure of the Church. And in the finale, defeated and lost, he is left only to utter, almost inaudibly, against all odds: “And yet it moves!” But Lyubimov chose a different solution. Small children run onto the stage carrying globes and, without paying any attention to Galileo, begin cheerfully, playfully spinning them. Galileo’s fate is decided by the future!
In the film’s finale, Vygotsky flies, almost dancing, through somewhat theatrical paradisal groves. A parade in Paradise? A solemn arrival in heaven? As I understand it — no: into the future, young — to the young. Welcome him. Welcome him and think: to be or not to be. And if to be — then with whom. Shakespeare and Vygotsky have left us the possibility of the most important and most difficult choice: read, watch. To be — and to live — young.
And yet, is there really a choice? “And yet it moves!”
Vygotsky — thank you for being alive!
The film was made over eight years — only two years less than Lev S. Vygotsky’s ten-year path in psychology, at least in terms of his official career in the field (1924–1934). The filmmakers worked the way their hero Vygotsky worked, and as Vysotsky sang — “not for fame, not for pay, but in their own unusual way”. They worked and lived; clearly, they immersed themselves in the film, grew into it, became one with it. Eight years is a lifetime. This, in essence, is what the film’s producer Egor Odintsov spoke about before the premiere screening.
Let me repeat: this is a film about the young and for the young. About a young century for another young century. Centuries equally cruel and beautiful. Seemingly distant — and yet, as it turns out, very close. So close that it becomes difficult to draw a line between historical memory and historical imagination.
Vladimir P. Zinchenko wrote that in the psychology of the twenty-first century, a place is certainly reserved for Vygotsky (and for Piaget, who was also born in 1896, three months earlier). Now — in cinema as well.
We will, of course, write our own articles, perhaps even books, but this is the best thing that could have been done for the 130th anniversary of this genius. It is symbolic that all of this happened on the eve of the birthday of his granddaughter, the brilliant successor of her grandfather’s work, Elena Kravtsova.
On April 26, she would have turned 76; she is listed among the film’s consultants. It is a pity that she did not live to see this new triumph. Not only in the jury’s recognition, but also in the many warm words about him and about the film that I heard from young viewers. After all, Vygotsky himself did not live to see his own triumph. Nor did he seek it.
But his aspiration is captured in a letter to his student and colleague Roza Levina:
“Crises are not a temporary state, but a way of inner life. When we move from systems to destinies (it is both frightening and joyful to utter this word, knowing that tomorrow we will begin to investigate what lies behind it), to the birth and death of systems, we shall see this with our own eyes”.
“To move from systems to destinies” — cultural-historical psychology has yet to dare this step. We remain entangled in “systems”, and now — in “networks”. We construct both and demonstrate success in constructing things that, in real life, often do not exist and cannot exist. People no longer speak of the “new person” in the sense of the Soviet ideal, yet its image still lingers.
Vygotsky clearly indicates what must be studied — and what finitude can be grasped in thought. All his “systems” and their zones of proximal development he viewed through the lens of destinies, especially in practice, above all in corrective work with children. It is no coincidence that this aspect of his work occupies a central place in the film. Nor is it accidental that the letter was addressed to R. E. Levina, a psychologist and defectologist.
Revisit his article “Defect and Overcompensation”. A child with a defect (just as a gifted child) is a destiny, not a system of underdeveloped (or overdeveloped) functions. A defect is overcome through the development of personality, for it is a challenge thrown by fate — not to “systems”, not to “structures”, not to “functions”, but to the personality, which alone possesses a destiny. The destiny of an eternally “new person”, not one formed according to someone else’s systemic prescriptions.
Vygotsky — thank you for being alive!
Vladimir Kudryavtsev,
Doctor of Science (Psychology),
Professor at the Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis
and Moscow State University of Psychology and Education,
Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Cultural-Historical Psychology”
“To the Soul with Measure and Number. In Memory of Lev S. Vygotsky”. Episode of the program “The Obvious — the Incredible”. June 28, 1997. Watch the program.