Open this book at almost any page and you find a scene rather than a doctrine. A journalist rides the bus from the Dubna nuclear centre and 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 charge of a class, admits she is "even afraid," because "you can mould them into any kind of person." Escher's impossible staircases and reflecting spheres sit between the chapters. Karl Levitin was a science journalist, not a psychologist, and One Is Not Born a Personality is what a gifted reporter made of a decade spent among the people who built Soviet psychology. It is a warm, admiring, deliberately unsystematic portrait of a real and first-rate scientific tradition — and for once in this series the first thing to say about a Progress title is that the science in it is genuine, humane and, in places, permanent.
That has to be said plainly at the outset, because the reflex of a critical introduction is to hunt for the falsification, and here the usual quarry is largely absent. The book does not rewrite 1917, does not defend a purge, does not lie about a famine. What it does instead — and what makes it worth reading closely — is tell the truth about a group of scientists while keeping a careful, revealing silence about what the Soviet state did to them. To see that, we first have to be clear about what the book is and when it was really written.
The spine says 1982; the author's own note says otherwise. "From the Author" is signed "Karl Levitin, Moscow, 1980," and its occasion is the 1979 Tbilisi symposium on the unconscious, where Levitin felt "some very familiar and very necessary voices were conspicuously absent" — Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontiev had both died in the late 1970s. So this is a book of about 1979–80, issued in English translation in 1982, edited by the psychologist Vasili Davydov (himself one of its subjects) and prefaced by Vladimir Zinchenko. It 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.
That last point governs the whole commission. By 1980 Vygotsky was no longer an Eastern secret. Mind in Society, the Harvard selection of his writings, had appeared in 1978; the Western rediscovery was under way. Levitin's book is pitched squarely into that opening. Zinchenko says as much — "only now are people abroad beginning to assess them objectively and correctly" — and the book leans repeatedly on Western authority to make its case, quoting at length the Chicago philosopher Stephen Toulmin, who warns his own colleagues that if they let "our political attitudes toward the government of the USSR" distract them from the science, "it will then be we ourselves, not Vygotsky and Luria, who are the ideologues." That is a shrewd frame. It lets a Progress book present Soviet psychology to Western readers not as propaganda but as a discovery the West is belatedly, enviously making — which happens, in this case, to be substantially true. The export purpose is real; it is just unusually well served by honesty, because the underlying achievement could stand on its own feet.
The tradition the book portrays is the cultural-historical school: Lev Vygotsky and, around and after him, Luria, Leontiev, Alexander Zaporozhets, Daniil Elkonin, Pyotr Galperin, Davydov — the "Kharkov school" of the 1930s and its Moscow continuation. Its founding idea is the one the title states. As Leontiev puts it in his interview, "one is not born a personality, one becomes a personality by socialisation and enculturation, by acquiring the habits, skills, and methods of handling tools. Personality is a product of social activity and its traits can be explained only in these terms." Against both the geneticist who reads character off the chromosomes and the idealist who finds the self already present in the newborn, the school held that the specifically human mind is built — assembled in the child out of the tools, signs and relationships a culture hands it. This is not a slogan. It generated a research programme, and several parts of that programme have outlasted the state that funded them.
Vygotsky's own contribution is the durable core. His account of the higher mental functions — that memory, attention and thought become human only when the child masters an external cultural instrument (a word, a knot, a number) and gradually turns it inward — reoriented developmental psychology worldwide. So did the idea for which he is now best known everywhere, the zone of proximal development: the gap between what a child can do alone and what the same child can do with help, which Vygotsky argued was where teaching should aim and where the next stage of development is actually forming. Any teacher-training college in the world now teaches some version of it. The book does not use that phrase, but it shows the same instinct at work when Galperin describes the school's signature method as "the active and purposeful moulding of certain psychic qualities in a person" under controlled conditions — building a mental function on purpose, to see how it is made. Vygotsky died of tuberculosis on 11 June 1934, at thirty-seven, having given psychology, as the book fairly says, a little over ten years. The scale of what he left in that time is not exaggerated here.
Luria is the second pillar, and the book's portrait of him is its liveliest. Levitin catches him mid-thought on the brain, dismantling the old maps of fixed "centres" in favour of the idea that a complex act like writing is carried out by a whole dynamic system of cooperating regions, so that damage in different places disturbs it in different ways. This is the founding intuition of neuropsychology as a discipline, and Luria is one of its founders. The book gestures, too, at the human documents that made him famous in the West — the studies of wounded soldiers, the man with the shattered world, the mnemonist who could not forget — and at his early forensic work on affect and response that anticipated, and in his telling improved upon, the lie detector. Readers who come to Luria only through this affectionate sketch should know that his own books, The Man with a Shattered World and The Mind of a Mnemonist, are among the most humane things ever written about injured minds, and remain in print.
Then there is Zagorsk, and this is where the book earns its warmth outright. In the town's boarding school, following methods developed by Ivan Sokolyansky and carried forward by Luria's pupil Alexander Meshcheryakov, teachers undertook to build a full human mind in children who were born both deaf and blind — children sealed, in the book's recurring image, under a "dark soundproof dome." The method was patient and materialist to the bone: begin from the child's remaining senses and its bodily needs, and teach it the human world through the human objects that meet those needs — the spoon, the comb, the chisel. "The workshops here are not just a place where they learn 'skills'," Levitin writes; "they are places where human personalities are moulded." And the claim is cashed out in fact. In 1977 four young people who had been deaf and blind from birth graduated from the psychology department of Moscow University. Leontiev, the department's dean, called the achievement a window "into the innermost depths of consciousness." One may resist the metaphysics and still recognise the thing itself as one of the genuine moral accomplishments of twentieth-century education. A theory of mind that could do that is not lip-service; it is a working proof. Toulmin's warning to sceptical Westerners lands with full force here — the references to Marx in this tradition, he says, "represent something more than ... political lip service," and Zagorsk is the evidence.
None of this needs rescuing in the ordinary sense of the word — it was never buried under falsification. It needs, rather, to be held up clearly, because the honest reader's next question is the one the book will not answer.
Notice the verb that keeps returning: mould. The children are "moulded"; qualities are "moulded" in a person; the teacher can "mould them into any kind of person." In the Zagorsk context the word is exact and blameless — you really are building a mind that would not otherwise exist, and the child emerges not diminished but enlarged, able to type a letter and feel "what a pleasure it is." But the same young teacher completes her sentence: "you can mould them into any kind of person. And I will have to make them good citizens of our society." There, in one breath, the book crosses from a science of how minds are formed to a programme for what they should be formed into.
This is the tradition's genuine philosophical charter, and also its point of maximum political exposure. The thesis that one is not born a personality but becomes one through activity in the collective is, as science, true and fertile. It is also, read a half-turn further, the founding proposition of a state that claimed the right to form the new man — to treat the human being as raw material for its own project. The book poses the underlying question with real force: does a person "come to this world completely naked — inside and outside — and what we later call soul is not born with him, but appears only when he comes in contact with the life which we have created for ourselves?" That is a profound and, to my mind, largely correct question. But "the life which we have created for ourselves" is doing enormous work in that sentence, and the book never asks who the "we" is, or what happens when the collective doing the moulding is not a free association of equals but a bureaucratic state with camps in it. The science is silent on that, as science may honestly be. The trouble is that the state was not silent; it had its own ideas about the new man, and it acted on them.
The scientists knew this better than the book lets on — because they had been on the receiving end. And here the silence becomes a finding.
Read the preface's account of the school's early years and you get hardship without a perpetrator. Conditions were "hard," Zinchenko writes; there were "hunger and unfair judgements"; the science was forged "in the face of biased criticism." Handsome, vague words. What they decline to name is a specific act of the Soviet state. On 4 July 1936 the Central Committee issued its decree "On Pedological Distortions in the System of the People's Commissariats of Education," which abolished pedology — the child-study movement in which Vygotsky's developmental work was embedded — as a "pseudo-science," liquidated its institutions and pulled its books. Vygotsky had been dead two years and could not be arrested; his work could be, and was. His writings went effectively unpublished for the next two decades. That the book's own bibliography lists his Selected Psychological Studies as appearing in 1956 — twenty-two years after his death, and the year Khrushchev denounced Stalin — is the whole story told in a single date, if you know to read it. The book prints the date and omits the reason.
The same shadow falls across the others, more faintly. Luria's remarkable cross-cultural expeditions to Uzbekistan in 1931–32, testing how literacy and collectivisation reshaped perception and reasoning — described here as a thrilling adventure — produced findings that were politically unwelcome (they implied that peasants "backward" in reasoning could be so for cultural reasons the Revolution had not yet undone), and Luria did not publish them in full until 1974, near the end of his life. The Kharkov years themselves, when Leontiev, Luria and Zaporozhets decamped from Moscow to Ukraine at the turn of the 1930s, were in part a strategic retreat from an increasingly dangerous ideological climate. The book presents this migration as intellectual adventure, which it also was. It does not present it as flight, which it partly was.
None of this is obscure or contested history, and the point of naming it is not to catch Levitin in a lie — he tells none — but to complete the picture his book leaves three-quarters drawn. The cultural-historical school was not the serene achievement of a state that nurtured its scientists. It was the achievement of scientists who did world-class work and survived the system that is here presenting them as its ornament. The theory that a person is formed by the society around him was developed by people whose own life's work was periodically un-formed by decree. That irony is the real subject the book circles and never lands on.
The tradition this series writes from has no quarrel with the school's Marxism — on the contrary. The root the school claimed is a real one. When Leontiev grounds personality in "the system of social relations," and when the book quotes the school on human needs arising within "the totality of social relations," they are drawing directly on Marx's sixth thesis on Feuerbach, that the human essence "in its reality" is "the ensemble of the social relations." That is not decoration bolted onto the psychology; it is its foundation, and Toulmin is right that Western readers who assume otherwise flatter themselves. On this the school and the anti-Stalinist left agree entirely: the human being is social all the way down, made and not given.
The disagreement is about the other half of Marx, the half the book's title leaves implicit. If the person is formed through the collective, the emancipatory tradition always insisted on the end of that formation — a society, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." The individual is the aim, not the feedstock. A psychology of formation is humane exactly to the degree that the society doing the forming is one its members freely make; it curdles into something else when the "collective" is a euphemism for a state that forms people for its own ends and calls the result the new man. The book cannot resolve this tension because the science cannot — but a reader can hold the question open, and should. For the political half of the answer, Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is the standing reference in this series: written in the very years pedology was banned, it is the argument that by the 1930s the "collective" in whose name the Soviet person was to be formed was administered by a privileged bureaucracy with interests of its own — which is precisely why the question of what the new man was to be formed into, and by whom, could not be safely asked inside the USSR, and why a great developmental psychology had to keep its silence to survive.
So: read this book, and read it warmly. It is the best popular door into one of the twentieth century's genuinely great scientific traditions, written by a reporter with a real eye and real affection for his subjects, at the moment that tradition was passing into history and into the Western canon at once. The cultural-historical psychology is not a Soviet fabrication to be exposed; it is a Soviet achievement — arguably the Soviet achievement in the human sciences — and this series is glad to help carry it. Vygotsky on the making of mind, Luria on the wounded brain, Zagorsk on the deaf-blind child who learns to think: these are permanent, and they are here.
Read it, too, against its silences. When the teacher says she will "make them good citizens of our society," ask which society, formed by whom, and toward what. And when you reach the date 1956 beside Vygotsky's collected works, remember that the humane and hopeful science this book celebrates was, for twenty years, something the same state would not let its own citizens read. That the manuscripts survived — that, as the book quotes Bulgakov, "manuscripts don't burn" — is true, and moving, and not the same thing as saying the fire was never lit.