The Pyatorka: An Interview with several of its members

The Pyatorka: An Interview with several of its members


Michael Cole & Natalia Gajdamaschko


mcole@ucsd.edu 

natalia_gajdamaschko@sfu.ca

In recent decades it has become commonplace to downplay the idea that Lev Vygotsky, Alexander Luria, and Alexei Leontiev formed a troika, a three musketeers-style collaboration.  (Martins 2013; Yasnitsky and van der Veer, 2016/other refs). For example, the subtitle of Martins’ article is “The ‘troika’, did it ever exist?” Martins draws primarily upon two sources to answer this question, Alexander Luria and Anton Yasnitsky

From Luria’s autobiography he cites the following passage:

When Vygotsky arrived in Moscow, I was still conducting studies by the combined motor method with Leontiev, a former student of Chelpanov with whom I have been associated ever since. Recognizing Vygotsky’s uncommon abilities, Leontiev and I were delighted when it became possible to include Vygotsky in our working group, which we called the “troika.” With Vygotsky as our acknowledged leader, we undertook a critical review of the history and current status of psychology in Russia and the rest of the world. Our aim, over-ambitious in the manner characteristic of the times, was to create a new, comprehensive approach to human psychological processes. (Luria, 1979, p.40)

Martins then turns to Yasnitsky (2011), leader of a “revisionist revolution” in the study of Vygotsky’s work. Yasnitsky, who objected strongly to versions of Vygotsky’s career in which the “troika” served as the wellspring for a unified psychological theory based on the concept of activity. Concerning the question of whether or not a close collaboration involving Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev ever existed, Yasnitsky wrote the following.   

The core of the narrative is the story about the 1924 meeting in Moscow of the three founding fathers, Lev Vygotsky, Alexander Luria and Aleksei Leontiev, and formation of the first alliance of the “trojka” (“the three”). Then, a second alliance was formed by the five first generation students of “the triumvirate”, named the “pyaterka” (“the five” in Russian), which included Alexander Zaporozhets, Lidia Bozhovich, Roza Levina, Nataliya Morozova, and Liya Slavina. (Yasnitsky, 2011, p.424).

To cast doubt on the existence of a period during which Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev worked as a team, he points to absence of a corpus of jointly written papers, and only a single publication co-authored by Vygotsky and Leontiev. He focuses instead on the three or four years before Vygotsky’s death when a well-documented dispute between Leontiev and Vygotsky took place to argue against the idea of “The history of troika da piaterka (“the three and the five,” in Russian) and the interpretation of the history of Vygotskian psychology along the lines of A. N. Leontiev’s so-called “activity theory” (Yasnitsky, 2011, p. 28).

In this essay we present an interview conducted in April, 1977 by Mike with several members of the “pyatorka” about their early collaborations with Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev. Our purpose is not to argue that there was continuity of a collaboration around a unified theory that survived the purges, World War II, and the period of Stalinist authoritarianism that followed. Rather, we believe that the interview provides evidence for collaboration between the three men during the latter half of the 1920’s and the existence of a pytorka, the members of which survived the war. 

The Context of the Interview

From the mid 1970’s to approximately 1990 and the demise of the USSR, Mike represented American Psychology in official academic exchanges between the American Council of Learned Societies, the Interuniversity Research and Exchange program and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. These duties afforded him the opportunity to pursue his own interests in the work of Alexander Luria, which at the time focused on publication of an English language edition of Luria’s autobiography. 

In a passage of the autobiography not cited by Martins or Yasnitksy, Luria mentioned both the collaboration involving Vygotsky and Leontiev, as well as the origins of the pyatorka:

When we first began this work, the three of us-Vygotsky, Leontiev, and I-used to meet at Vygotsky’s apartment once or twice a week to plan the research that would be required to develop his ideas. We reviewed each of the major concepts in cognitive psychology-perception, memory, attention, speech, problem solving, and motor activity. Within each of these areas we had to come up with new experimental arrangements which would incorporate the notion that, as higher processes take shape, the entire structure of behavior is changed. 

At this time I held a position as director of the Laboratory of Psychology in the Krupskaya Institute of Communist Education, which was named for Lenin’s wife, a woman who, following the Revolution, was extraordinarily supportive of educational work in the USSR. The institute was across the street from what was then called the Second Moscow University (now the Pedagogical Institute). Drawing on students from the university, I formed a student psychology circle where we discussed Vygotsky’s ideas. Each of Vygotsky’s students and colleagues undertook the task of inventing experimental models for the development of instrumental behavior. (Luria, 1979, p. ??)

Curious about the history of these collaborations, Mike asked Luria if it would be possible to gather the group for a collective interview to hear about their experiences.

Luria thought the idea interesting and arranged for people to meet at his apartment near the Kremlin for tea and discussion. One member of the group was missing, Alexei Leontiev, who invited Mike to his apartment for dinner in place of attending the meeting. Mike recorded the conversation on a tape recorder. For many years, the recording remained in Mike’s office. In 1984, during a visit by Vasili Davydov, Mike made him a copy of the recording but subsequently could not find the original which he thought had been destroyed when his office was inundated during a severe rainstorm. However, it seems Mike forgot that in 1987 he had sent a copy of the recording to Alexandre Metraux, a Swiss psychologist who was also interested in Luria’s work. In the course of assisting track down details of the publication of Luria’s autobiography, Metraux had discovered the tape from the 1977 interview which he digitalized and sent to Mike. The current article contains a transcription and a translation of that recording carried out by Natalia, as well as the digital copy of the recording itself.

The audio is two 30-minute sides in length, and contains a recording of only three of the pyatorka present at the interview- Elkhonin, Bozhovich, and Zaporozhets with some interspersed comments by Luria, Morozova, and Levina. Moreover, the Zaporozhets portion ends in mid-sentence. Fortunately, the recording that remains provides a rich picture of the early days of the pyatorka and their relationship to Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev. We invite the reader (and the listener in the case of those who understand Russian) to become acquainted with its contents. 

Recording: Russian (Original)

Transcription of Recording: Russian | English

Michael Cole’s commentary on the Pyatorka: English

Translation of this introductory article: Russian

Picture of the Pyatorka: Link

References:

Luria, A.R. (1979). The making of mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Martins, J. B. (2013). Notes on the relationship between Vygotsky and Leontiev: The “troika”, did it ever exist?  Dubna Psychological Journal, No. 1, 84-94

Yasnitsky, A.  (2011). Vygotsky Circle as a Personal Network of Scholars: Restoring Connections Between People and Ideas. Integrative Psychological Behavior, 45, 422–457.