One Is Not Born a Personality

Open this at almost any page and you find a scene rather than a doctrine. A journalist takes the long detour through Zagorsk, where deaf, dumb and blind children are learning to hold a spoon. An old neurologist thinks aloud about the brain while a tape recorder turns. A young teacher about to take her first class admits she is frightened, because of what she might make of them. Escher's impossible staircases sit between the chapters.

Karl Levitin was a science journalist rather than a psychologist, and this is what a gifted reporter made of a decade spent among the people who built Soviet psychology. It is a warm, deliberately unsystematic portrait of a genuinely first-rate scientific tradition - the school of Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev, and the generation that followed them - and the science in it is real, humane and in places permanent.

Its occasion was an ending. Levitin signs off from Moscow in 1980, prompted by a symposium at which, as he puts it, some very familiar and necessary voices were conspicuously absent: Luria and Leontiev had both died in the late 1970s. The book reads exactly like what it is, an elegy and a stock-taking written just after the founding generation passed, at the moment the West was beginning to catch up - the Harvard selection of Vygotsky had appeared in 1978 and the rediscovery was under way.

Edited by the psychologist Vasili Davydov, himself one of its subjects, with a preface by Vladimir Zinchenko.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on what the book will not say about what the state did to these scientists.