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Andrej Sacharov, Den Frieden retten! Ausgewdhlte Aufsatze, Briefe, Aufrufe, 1978-1983. Eine 'Kontinent'-Dokumentation herausgegeben yon Cornelia Gerstenmaier, Burg Verlag, Stuttgart-Bonn, 1983, 223 pp. It seems almost completely forgotten that in Spring of 1983 there was a serious hope that Sacharov would be released from banishment and allowed to emigrate to the West with his wife, Elena Bonner. In retrospect, these false hopes can be seen as one more way of putting pressure on the weakened heart of this fighter for civil rights. In the meanwhile, the press campaign against Sacharov and his wife has become more extensive and more shrill. Forced psychiatric treatment hovers in the background. Anatolij Aleksandrov, President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, asserted that Sacharov has recently undergone "serious psychological transformations". He is to be counted among the mentally ill and considered irresponsible. At the same time, it is required of this supposedly crazy person that he come around to seeing his error and that he return to the Soviet straight and narrow. Sacharov's wife is presented in the same Soviet press as the evil spirit behind his problems, serving the interests of international Zionism. Such visions come from people like the 'historian' Nikolai Jakovlev; and even Andropov is supposed to have told American senators that Sacharov is a "mad man". The fourth international Sacharov hearing in Lisbon (October 1983) exposed the untenability of the situation of the Sacharovs. The occasion was used to bring back to attention the works of Sacharov from 1978 to 1983, as presented by Cornelia Gerstenmaier. Hopefully, this publication is not too late and more importantly, will not prove too much of a risk for the Sacharovs. What is important about this publication is that it keeps us from getting locked into a vision of Sacharov as the 'lost man in Gorky': rather, it keeps him alive as a man whose fate is intimately bound up with his thought. The editor has taken care to present Sacharov's thoughts on a wide range of subjects: East-West relations, current events, civil rights, peace, disarmament, and the duties of the scientist in the contemporary
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world. There is a poignancy and immediacy in reading the appeals that Sacharov once made on behalf of others who were in the state where he now finds himself. The editor has used the collection as the occasion to situate Sacharov in the mainstream of Russian intellectual history, and to present a number of the appeals and declarations of solidarity that have been made on his behalf. Also included are documents from the satellites, as well as the attack in lzvestija on Sacharov by four members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (July 3, 1983). Solidarity with Sacharov has to go beyond the popular sentiments of those who use it to bring a 'pox on both houses' to both superpowers. For, Sacharov has - both in his open letter to the Pugwash Conference and in that to the American physicist Sidney Drell - tried to help us understand how the imbalance of strategic forces has put us into thermonuclear danger. It only remains that his message be heeded.
Raisa Orlova, Poslednif god ~izni Gercena (Herzen's Last Year), Chalidze Publ., NY, 1982, 94 pp. Central to an understanding of the Russian intelligentsia, Herzen's life spanned the significant years between Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the FrancoGerman War, not to forget the Paris Commune. The serious events of these times were accompanied by unpleasantness in Herzen's own family. Herzen's influence is undoubtedly due to the stance taken by him and his friend, Ogarev, toward Russia - the voice of freedom and of the freely spoken word. At the height of his influence, one said that Russia had two rulers, one Alexander in St Petersburg and the other Alexander in London. One element in Herzen's appeal is the experimental attitude he took toward life. He was author and political activist, and even yearned to be a pure thinker; and he thought that he was writing mainly for the next century. Raisa Orlova, wife of Lev Kopelev, has managed to bring all the facets of Herzen to focus in this account of his last year - a study that was begun in Moscow only to be finished in the West. Irrespective of their own attitude toward Herzen, he has served as 'iramoralist' moral example for each successive wave of Russian emigrants. Each group has brought with them 'its Herzen' and its pretension to instruct the leaders of the West about the true Russia. Even the Soviet regime has
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its somewhat stylised version of Herzen. The image of Herzen is that of the bearer of the free Russian word. In fact, he serves as model for the exile who has no power but that of the word, who compensates for his powerlessness by becoming t r u e seer, and who creates his own pseudo-public. Even the so-called Westernizers among Russian emigrants retain a special relationship to the homeland that makes their exile a true suffering. The author of the present study has succeeded in showing why Herzen is the paradigm for this sort of emigrant status. He was the romanticist of freedom, raising his children in a strictness that belied his fundamental individualism and 'progressive' pedagogical declamations; he managed to make enemies of people on both sides of the various barricades in diverse European events. In fact, Herzen's last year (he died in Paris, January 22, 1870 at the - for that time - relatively old age of 58) was spent in conflict with the Nechaev he did not want to see as the heir of himself, of Ogarev, of Turgenev, of Chernyshevsky, and others of his generation. Herzen ends up pleading, in the face of impending nihilism, for rationality and restraint, even on the part of emigrants vis-gt-vis their homeland. Herzen's letters "to an old comrade" (i.e., Bakunin) are, to use Ibsen's words, Herzen's day of judgement of himself. The nihilists and new radicals are dealt with as dangerous; and civilisation is prized and praised. The author fails to mention that Herzen here is taking positions once occupied by Pecherin, who opposed Herzen when the latter was a progressive. Nechaev was so threatened by what Herzen wrote in these letters that he tried unsuccessfully - to have them suppressed. Almost a script for a movie emerges from Orlova's account of the interaction among Herzen, Ogarev, Bakunin, Nechaev, and the others. Herzen's appeal for reason on the part both of East and of West comes fascinatingly close to Sacharov's analogous appeals. Herzen's appeals are written in concise and expressive language, finely tuned when compared with the long periods of the disputes among the ~migrbs. The materials in this volume deserve to be translated into other world languages, for the message is wider than just the circle of Russian emigrants.
Johannesgasse 22/4/13, A-IOIO Wien 1, Austria.
KURT MARKO
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Lev Vygotsky, Istorija razvitifa vys~ych psichi?eskich funkci] (History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions) in Sobranie so?ineni] (Collected Papers), Vol. 3, Moscow, Pedagogika, 1983, pp. 6-328. The volume Under review brings a reader the most authentic version of the cultural-historical theory of mind developed by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). As it happened with almost all of Vygotsky's works, the way of this book to the reader was neither short nor easy. History of the Development emerged as a product of theoretical and experimental studies conducted by Vygotsky and his collaborators, Alexander Luria, Alexej Leont'ev and others between 1926 and 1931. Like many other works History of the Development was not published until 1960, when the five first chapters of it appeared in a volume titled The Development of
Higher Mental Functions (Razvitie vys~ych psichi~eskich funkcij, Moscow, Izd, APN, 1960). At that time it was erroneously assumed that those five chapters comprise the entire work. Only with the current publication does the original version of Vygotsky's major work become available. A project to study higher mental functions in a cultural-historical perspective sprang from Vygotsky's dissatisfaction with traditional introspective psychology coupled with his disagreement with the biological reductionism of reflexology and behaviorism. In his analysis of the crisis in psychology, which preceded History of the Development, Vygotsky uncovered intellectual and socio-historical mechanisms which with inevitability have been splitting psychology into naturalistic behaviorism and mentalistic phenomenology (see my review in SST 26 (1983), pp. 249-256). History of the Development thus appeared as a concrete challenge to both of these trends and as a bid for the new unified psychological theory. According to Vygotsky, this new psychology is to be built upon three concepts: that of "higher mental functions", that of "cultural-historical development", and that of "mastering one's own behavioral processes" (p. 14). Unlike his contemporaries, behaviorists and reflexologists, Vygotsky started with the mental functions which distinguish the human being from the rest of animals. At the same time, he pointed out that these specifically human functions are built upon the lower natural ones. The latter, however, should undergo a radical transformation, rather than simple maturation, in order to become the higher functions. This process, which Vygotsky
Studies in Soviet Thought29 (1985).
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designated as that of cultural development, includes two major trends: the acquisition and mastering of such cultural means of mental development as language, writing, drawing and counting; and, simultaneously, the development of higher functions like voluntary attention, logical memory, formation of concepts, etc. (p. 24). In the course of cultural development an individual masters his own behavior and mental operations. Such a mastery becomes possible because of the mediating function of what Vygotsky called "psychological tools". The concept of a psychological tool, Vygotsky admitted, was inspired by the Hegelian notion of mediation. The cunning of reason consists principally in its mediating activity which, by causing objects to act and react on each other in accordance with their own nature, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason's intentions. Tools and signs, according to Vygotsky, are the most powerful mediating systems. But while tools are directed "outside", toward the mastery of nature, psychological tools - and first of all semiotic systems - are directed "inside" toward the mastery of an individual's natural psychological processes. Humans, therefore, master themselves from the outside - through psychological tools (pp. 88-90). The rest of Vygotsky's work consists of testing the hypothesis of cultural development in application to such functions as memory, attention, counting, oral and written speech, will, and decision making. A standard experimental situation included some problem, like memorizing a number of items, which could, at least partially be solved "directly", by the natural abilities of a child. Then some external semiotic means, like codes, pictograms, etc., were introduced to help a child restructure his or her activity, which now became mediated, i.e. organized along the lines dictated by the use of psychological tools, ultimately to achieve a better solution to the problem. Vygotsky charted the developmental stages in the acquisition of psychological tools. He also described the process of internalization, i.e. gradual transition from overt or "material" use of semiotic means to their inner existence as mental operations. As a matter of illustration let us consider a decision making study which also has interesting philosophic overtones. The most simple and at the same time revealing form decision making takes is a case of choice. Making a choice also provides the most lucid example of mastering one's own behavior. Vygotsky argues that while the competing motives of the individual may be "natural", the choice of one of them, when tension is close to equilibrium,
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is necessarily "artificial" and dependent on psychological tools. Vygotsky reminds us of the parable of the ass between two bundles of hay and of the interpretation of this parable given by Spinoza. The major difference between the proverbial ass and the human being is the latter's ability to master his own motives. This mastering comes from "outside", in the form of a casting of lots. In the experimental situation a child had to choose one of two actions, which had equally strong motives behind them. Time was limited and tension was high. In this situation the child introduced an "outside" stimulus, a lot, which, although it had absolutely no connection with the situation, is taken to be a decisive motive. Vygotsky points out that the above-mentioned experiment is a case of "experimental philosophy" (p. 277). What we actually see here is a study of free will vs. determinism. On the one hand, the choice is strictly deterministic - almost a reflex-like response to a stimulus, the black side of a die. On the other hand this stimulation is completely artificial since it is deliberately introduced by the child himself. Therefore, the same choice is essentially free. Thus a dialectics of free will and determinism reveals its constituent psychological elements in the experimental study of decision making. If in the "natural" behavior, motives and actions are inseparable, in higher functions they are disassociated. Action is carried out deterministically with the help of existent "natural" mechanisms, while motives, dislocated from their previous positions, may be attached to deliberately chosen external signs. Through internalization these external means move "inside", becoming verbal commands to oneself. Mature forms of decision making and regulation of one's own behavior are thus nothing but the products of this submergence of psychological tools into consciousness. Using the favorite expression of Vygotsky, one may say that in this experiment his entire psychological system is revealed as the Great Ocean in a drop of water.
Boston University
ALEX KOZULIN
