Moses on his way to the promised land: On Vygotsky’s Notebooks

Abstract

The publication of a voluminous selection of notebooks from the Vygotsky Family Archive represents a major event for the Vygotsky studies. The material provided in the book turns out to be truly novel; it reaches far beyond mere compilations of existing texts, reprints, and (re-)translations. The key question we address in our contribution is: does this newly made available material have a significant impact on our understanding of Vygotsky’s life and work? We first offer a rough summary of the book’s content, then indicate what readers may expect from the Notebooks and what they will not find there; and finally, we focus on Vygotsky’s early quest for his own Jewishness and on the shift toward systemic and semiotic thinking that marks the last years of his life.