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Lev S. Vygotsky on the ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1354067X19871200
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The graphic art of

Alexandr Bykhovsky

Jo~
ao Pedro Fr
ois
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract
During his studies at Moscow University and thereafter, Lev S. Vygotsky’s (1896–1934)
interests focused mostly on the scholarly study of literary and theatre criticism.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet served as a leitmotiv to understand the specificity of the arts
within western culture: through analysis of the structural particularities of Hamlet, he
provided a model for an understanding of how the mind functions during interactions
with artworks and reconstructed the internal activity caused by art. His thoughts on
the visual arts are few, but fragments are found in his seminal work entitled Psychology of
Art (1926). Here, he showed the function of catharsis, the main concept of his theory of
aesthetic experience. This paper presents a translation of Vygotsky’s essay published in
1926, dedicated to the art of Alexandr Bykhovsky (1888–1978), a companion since his
Gomel period (1919–1924). The significance of this essay is twofold. First, it represents
a concise and lasting testimony to the creativity of an important Russian artist; second,
the essay goes beyond formal analysis of the artwork. Instead, Vygotsky’s analysis
explains the phenomenon of aesthetic experience as the viewer and the artwork inter-
act and transform each other. The paper is preceded by a note on the contextual and
biographical settings in which both Vygotsky and Bykhovsky worked.

Keywords
Aesthetic experience, Alexandr Bykhovsky, Graphic catharsis, Lev S. Vygotsky,
Psychology of Art

Corresponding author:
Jo~ao Pedro Fr
ois, Centre for Phenomenological Psychology and Aesthetics, University of Copenhagen,
Nørregade 10, 1165 København, Denmark.
Email: [email protected]
2 Culture & Psychology 0(0)

Introductory note
An acute perception of the cultural and historical factors was harmoniously woven
by Lev Semenovich Vygotsky into his sociocultural theory of human development.
His penchant for literary and theatre criticism and his keen eye for the symbolic
nature of poetic images converged in an exercise of interpretative intellectual fasci-
nation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet which gave rise to The Psychology
of Art (1925, 1965).1 Having completed his university studies in Moscow (1917) and
returned to Gomel in Belarus, he took part in the city’s cultural life and taught at the
pedagogical institute.2 Around 1919, in Gomel’s cultural circle, he came across the
plastic artist Alexandr Yakovlevich Bykhovsky (1888–1978), who at that time was in
charge of the visual arts section of Narkompros3 and the coordinator of the Mikhail
Vrubel School-Studio (1919–1922).
In Moscow, from 1924, Vygotsky extended his friendship with Bykhovsky and
in 1926 he wrote an essay for the book The Graphic Art of A. Bykhovsky, an
essential piece for understanding the creative force of this artist (Azizian, 2007).4
The 22 paged book includes 13 reproductions of graphic works produced between
1917 and 1925, published in an edition of 500 copies by the publisher
Sovremennaya Rossiya (Figure 1). This essay which is now presented in English
is unique among Vygotsky’s enormous collection of work. On the topic of the
visual arts, we find only theoretical fragments about painting and drawing, sculp-
ture and architecture in chapter X of The Psychology of Art. The allusion to these
expressive disciplines served to illustrate the law of catharsis which he regarded
as important.5
Born in Mogilev in Belarus into a family of orthodox Jews, Bykhovsky learnt to
paint at the studio of icon painter Gorbunov. In Saint Petersburg he studied at the
School for the Encouragement of Arts6 directed by the renowned painter Nikolai
Rerikh (1874–1947). Active from 1910, Bykhovsky embodied the figure of the
avant-garde artist who works in various domains of the plastic arts, being a teach-
er, poet and essayist. In 1922, he moved to Moscow and the following year held his
first exhibition at Studio Habimah,7 showing 35 paintings and etchings which
served as the leitmotiv for Vygotsky’s essay whose translation is presented below.
Irina Azizian (2007) wrote that in Bykhovsky’s plastic art, we feel the stylistic
marks of the artistic tradition and popular art of Jewish identity.8 Its dynamic
compositions reveal the particularities of his poetry – the duality of his spatial
vision, the constant search for movement, the integration of the pictorial with the
expressive and the constructivist treatment of shapes. His plastic poetry is likewise
influenced by Cosmism, the perception of a boundless world.9 Another feature
underlies his works as well: the fluctuation between optimism and dramatism of
the narratives addressed (Mentiukova, 2015).10 During the 1920s he produced
social intervention posters, brochures and pamphlets portraying political engage-
ment, plastically interpreting the social transformations of Russian society. The
aesthetic and formal dimension that followed was coherent with the time in which
he lived, but his demand of freedom and independence distanced him from the
Frois 3

Figure 1. Book cover.

official artists, turning him into a singular figure in the artistic and historical
panorama of Russian art.11
In the introduction to the book The Graphic Art of A. Bykhovsky, Vygotsky
recovers two aspects of The Psychology of Art: the idea of catharsis and the
4 Culture & Psychology 0(0)

distinction between the two artistic forms of painting and drawing/graphic art. The
idea of graphic catharsis was laid out by Broder Christiansen (1869–1958) in
Philosophie der Kunst (1909).12 The distinction between painting and drawing,
on the other hand, originates in the proposal of the symbolist artist Max
Klinger (1857–1920), author of Malerei und Zeichnung (1891)13 which
Christiansen reworked in chapter VI of his book. Klinger and Christiansen
helped him to formulate his thoughts about the plastic arts:

The best way to show the effect of this law [catharsis] in painting is to study the
difference in style that exists between the art of painting (in the proper sense of the
word) and that of drawing. Klinger’s studies have made this evident (. . .) [he] points
out that, unlike painting, drawing uses impressions of disharmony, horror, etc., quite
frequently; all of these are of positive significance [and] he claims that in poetry,
drama, and music such features are not only permissible, but indispensable.
(Vygotsky, 1971, p. 238)

The significance he attributes to catharsis does not coincide with the value advo-
cated by Aristotle and much less so its widespread meaning defined by
Sigmund Freud:

To Vygotsky, catharsis is not simply the release of overwhelming affective attractions

liberated, through art, from their ‘evil qualities’. It is rather the resolution of a certain,
merely personal conflict, the revelation of a higher, more general, human truth in the
phenomena of life. (Leontiev, 1971)14

Thus, the highest manifestation of emotional response is realized as a shared truth,

through catharsis. This interpretation of catharsis is integrated in several theories
on art, from Lessing to Goethe. It is equally about ethical, ethic-aesthetic, psycho-
physical, religious and mystic conceptions. Although its utilization on occasion is
undeniable, Vygotsky did not fully resolve certain difficulties with the concept.
Nonetheless, Vygotsky’s key contribution rests in the notion that catharsis not
only discharges tensions, but also transforms human feelings.
Vygotsky’s essay is a successful exercise of formal contextualization and a nar-
rative of the graphic works of Bykhovsky in which the fragments on ‘Self-portrait’
(1923), ‘Lyachko’ (1924) portrait of the proletarian poet, the drawing ‘Leviathan’
(1917) or the sketch ‘Offensive’ (1919) are merely examples.
As highlighted in each of these works, the lines perform two absolutely distinct
spatial and stylistic functions: representing one thing and expressing quite another,
encapsulating the material theme of the drawing and simultaneously carrying their
resolution, which he calls a peculiar type of graphic catharsis (Vygotsky, 1926).
In fact, Bykhovsky embarked from the content towards the form, in each situation
arriving at a united form. It was not by chance that the artist named the visual arts
the ‘Form’ because in his understanding the form does not represent things, but the
Frois 5

human soul, sorrows and joys; the impulse of bravura or the flight of one
man’s reverie.15

Translation
The graphic art of A. Bykhovsky by Lev S. Vygotsky
The key to understanding the drawings by Bykhovsky is in the duality of their
spatial interpretation and perception. As shown by Christiansen,16 this duality is
the main spatial premise of the graphic style. The stylistic contrast between a
drawing and a painting is in the different treatment of spatial depth. Painting
forces us to forget the plane bearing the image. In a good painting we do not
see the rectangular canvas covered with paint: it disappears, gives way, and the
fictitious space of the painting surges towards us with all its power, while its real
space disappears. Graphic art, in contrast, ‘deliberately retains the flat nature of
the drawing, inclusively when spatial depth is represented’.17 It compels us, with
equal strength, to see and perceive the three-dimensional spatial meaning of the
representation and the two-dimensional flat surface of the drawing. By maintain-
ing the drawing’s surface for the eye, graphic art enables a specific language of lines
to develop.

The line speaks to us clearly only when it extends along the plane of the surface. Then,
the line and its action are effectively just as we see them and its visible movement lends
it melody.18 [. . .] In a drawing – if it has style – we directly read the language of the
lines, without concerning ourselves with their significance for the third dimension, and
thus before interpreting them as an object.19

In this way, only half of graphic art is figurative art; to precisely the same extent it is
expressive art. Its material draws it close to painting; its style takes it towards music.
To reiterate, this is the key to Bykhovsky’s designs.20 In each of his graphic
works, the line performs two absolutely distinct spatial and stylistic functions.
The lines always represent something but they express something else. They
embody the material theme of the design but they also carry within themselves
their resolution, a peculiar form of graphic catharsis. Bykhovsky’s drawing is
built on two spatial and stylistic planes: on a first plane – three-dimensional and
material-figurative and on another, a rhythmic-abstract plane. This interplay of two
senses of his graphic art, this autonomous lyrical surpassing and dissolution of the
lines, independent of any material theme, constitutes the essential feature of his
artistic creation.
The sharp, expressive and cutting lines, broken and altered in relation to the real
and visible, are not, nonetheless, so distorted by the artist to make the shapes of
reality vanish definitively. His portrait remains a portrait and its sharpness does
not make it different from the original. This faithfulness to reality, combined with
an acute stylistic freedom of the material shapes, is the enigmatic essence of his
6 Culture & Psychology 0(0)

style. And just how, in a maximalist style, does he manage to present this max-
imalism so parsimoniously?
Quite faithfully and with material precision, one and the same grey circle depicts
a summer hat on the painter’s head (‘Self-portrait’, 1923) and, at the same time,
fulfils very adequately the function of the radiance or nimbus of an icon (Figure 2).
What we see is simply a grey hat placed on his head, but this head with that
stubborn strength, with the rugged angles, with such a broken, stylistically sharply
pointed line is not at all simply inscribed within the grey circle, lit up by a grey
light, encased within an ash ring. This is, of course, the accomplished technique of
the graphic art of icons, in which ‘movement is restricted to the extreme, and there,
where it is permitted, is placed within some immovable borders to which it is
literally secured’.21 And here we see: this new ‘icon’ is a heroic-pathetic portrait.
Yes, it is a head of a contemporary man, mottled with grey; it is a Jew heading for
his final ‘spiritual homelessness’ (M. Gershenson).22
Here, the realism of the hat (a detail of the portrayal) and the realism of the face
(the image as a whole) have not only lost nothing by the stylized action of the lines
on the plane but, conversely, have been raised to a higher stage of reality. The
entire sense of the melody of the lines is communicated to the face and lifts it to a
height that cannot be reached by realism.
Frequently, this violence of style over reality, over the line that follows the
contours of the object, is so subtle and imperceptible to the eye, almost elusive,
that it is necessary to pay attention to it, to direct our gaze twice to ponder over the
same stroke: First as a real contour (in space), then as a stylized line (on the surface
of the plane), so that after this examination, the eyes are able to correctly read
the drawing.
In the portrait of the proletarian poet Lyachko (1924),23 we see an everyday, of-
the-peg, well-known cap (Figure 3).24 And yet its contour requires observation
twice over, first to enable comprehending it as a true cap and then to discern how,
with zigzags and broken lines, the artist stylized (the essence of) his model, trans-
forming it into a complex rather than a simple object. And once again, only a detail
reveals the sense of the drawing as a whole. Here, the entire simple and strong
character of the proletarian face is preserved and conveyed, that national Russian
corner of the eye, that industrial wrinkle – its whole mode of existence, the whole
psychology of the face is preserved faithfully. Nonetheless, all this is expressed in
the language of equal masses – equal masses and dismembered shapes. The face,
that is more correctly, the masses that form it, emerges like the blueprint of a
machine, as parts of a mechanism. This face is narrated in the language of
the factory.
Thus, the model dissolves in the drawing, in the melody and play of the lines; it
loses its material weight, the crust of things, and suddenly the true nature of the
thing transpires, its secret plan, its hidden purpose.
And this dissolution becomes the central method and principle of the artist’s
work. How diminished and impoverished the world is in his drawing
‘Leviathan’ (1917) (Figure 4). In this world, there is practically nothing –
Frois 7

Figure 2. ‘Self-portrait’ (1923).

neither men, nor trees, beasts or stones – as if it were empty, or dead, or was
abandoned yesterday by all the beings that inhabited it. And only the circles
through which ‘the wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and
round it goes, ever returning on its course’.25 How this world is disincarnated,
stripped of its clothing, how its structure is exposed and its flesh spread out!
But even the dematerialized world still preserved something of its exaggerated
childish, naive materiality, the last specks and particles of matter. How low the
stars are, we can actually reach them with our fingers, what naive little boats!
But those are the very last crumbs and fragments of matter, unused and for-
gotten on the workbench; the rubbish and scraps of the world, which even
more strongly emphasize the emptiness.
And this emptiness is doubled before our eyes. Here the world is rendered like a
small vessel. The circle, transferred into space, a tangible circle in its material
significance, is tiresome to the eye: it forces our gaze to revolve aimlessly and to
return to the same point. It is not without reason that up to now the circle has been
8 Culture & Psychology 0(0)

Figure 3. ‘Lyachko’ (1924).

the symbol of the absurd mundanity of the daily vortex, an emblem of senseless
rotation and vexation of spirit.26
This is not the case of the circle on the plane: here the pure poetry of the curved
line is revealed. And this void no longer appears impoverished and cramped. We
sense that the infinity of the universe is embodied therein, the narrow leaf sways,
opens inwards, into the depth – and we can see that immense spaces fit inside it,
incalculable pathways of the planets and the sun. And the vision of the world
appearing on this page is no longer the vanity of vanities,27 an idle and tedious
haze, but the unimaginable majesty of the universe, the majestic nudity of the
world, devoid of all materiality, of all accidental formations, excrescence and
dust particles on the surface of the world. All this resounds from the drawing
with immense childish simplicity and naı̈ve tangibility. This is why the artist
needs these stars that can be touched, and the sails asking to be blown. Like
children’s little boats on a spring pond, like cardboard stars, cut out with a scissor,
it is this refreshing sense of immediate reality that underlies the theme of majesty.
The cosmic is handed to us in the form of a plaything.
And the artist remains true to this path, no matter where it may lead him.
Indeed, he cannot change it from within. This is the nature of the style that he
Frois 9

Figure 4. ‘Leviathan’ (1917).

chooses, this is the inner impulse of his creative work. He never was a creator of
new approaches of portrayal, an inventor of formal combinations, an apostle of
technical innovation. Indeed, such tasks could never have arisen before him. Not
having learnt from someone else, he picked up the paintbrush alone, mastered it
uninfluenced by external guidance. His creation emerged from within, not like that
of an artisan before a task, but from an inner impetus. This is why every one of his
10 Culture & Psychology 0(0)

Figure 5. ‘The Blue Alarm Bell’ (1922).

drawings is fed with reflection, nursed with blood, conceived and born from
his soul.
This method offers much particularly in the application to the graphic elabo-
ration of the revolutionary heroic motif, because, in essence, this is precisely the
general method of the creation of the heroic in art.
The pathetic is revealed in the lines. Even so, a minor reality is kept, the thing as
it is. Take his ‘The Blue Alarm Bell’ (1922) (Figure 5). The cosmic sense of this
composition is clear at first glance. That it is not simply the bell tower and the
alarm bell of the village, that we see the crushing of the firmament, the collapse of
the world; that behind the tremendous effort of the bell-ringer as he pulls the rope
are superhuman forces – this becomes evident to all. On the other hand, how
courageously he preserved the realism of the large wooden beams, of the ladder
and the whole fragile construction. But how imposingly the proportions are
Frois 11

Figure 6. ‘Offensive’ (1919).

deformed! And in the very general and abstract geometric shapes, giving body to
the figure of the bell-ringer, we find that reality is not annihilated. But its essence is
extracted – only what is necessary: the heroic support of his feet, the pathetic span
of his hands. This is pure movement: all the rest is irrelevant in this man. And once
again, the poor and parochial – the platform and the bell – are transformed into
something formidable and magnificent.
The pathos of the revolution is embodied in this composition in all its severe
intensity. Here it is preserved and displayed in its universal dimension: not that of
the pseudoclassic ‘era of glory’, but in the alarm bell of the revolution, which in all
truth existed, reverberated in the sidereal spaces of the world.
The episode of the Civil War in ‘Offensive’ (1919) is conveyed in a similar
grandiose style (Figure 6). Here, the confused mass of insurgents who rebelled
spontaneously, the attackers, where it is impossible to discern the bullets from
the people, the horses from the bayonets, are enlightened and humanized by the
12 Culture & Psychology 0(0)

grandiose figure with the pitchfork of victory. Here is a clear illustration of man
against beast, against savage strength, a monstrous bat with enormous and horri-
fying wings.
But the artist’s main triumph is in the way that he was able to transform chaos,
a mass of people and things, into a kinetic unit. The sharp lines allow this shapeless
mass to breathe a colossal determination directed towards a single point. The
disorderly episode of the partisans is expressed in the steel line of the revolution.
If in Blok’s poem ‘The Twelve’28 there is an anarchic, fragmented psychologism,
here its iron logic is rendered, its objective and true meaning.
But even where the artist remains a pure lyric, as in his first works ‘The Death of
the Three Poets’, ‘The Fallow Deer’, and when he conveys the objective epic and
pondered blueprints and layouts of things like in ‘Tbilisi’, he is always a penetrat-
ing searcher of the concealed skeleton of things. Matter loses its materiality, the
world – its flesh, the things – their three-dimensionality: everything is disincarnated
and resolved in its graphic essence, into the artist’s pure thinking about things.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dmitri Olenev for his invaluable help in locating the original texts for
this article. I’m in depth to Halima Naimova and Andrea Cravinho for their help in correct-
ing a previous version of this article. To Olga Mentiukova I’m especially grateful for infor-
mative data on Alexandr Bykhovsky’s artworks in Russian Museums. I also thank Carolina
Silva and L ucia Buisel for assistance in solving image design problems.

Author’s Note
Jo~ao Pedro Frois is now affiliated with Centre for Phenomenological Psychology and
Aesthetics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

ORCID iD
Jo~ao Pedro Fr
ois https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6624-3975

Notes
1. Doctoral thesis presented in 1925 at Moscow Institute of Psychology and published as a
book in 1965. See Lev S. Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art, 1971.
Frois 13

2. René Van der Veer & Jan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for
Synthesis, 1991.
3. Narkompros: The People’s Commissariat for Education.
4. Lev S. Vygotsky, Grafika A Bykhovskogo [The Graphic Art of A. Bykhovsky]. Moskva:
Sovremennaia Rossiya, 1926.
5. Concerning Vygotsky’s understanding of catharsis, see Jo~ao Pedro Fr ois, Lev
Vygotsky’s theory of aesthetic experience, in Tracie Costantino and Boyd White
(Eds.), Essays on Aesthetic Education for 21st Century (pp. 109–122) (Rotterdam:
Sense Publishers, 2010).
6. Shkola Obchevstva Poocherenia Khudojestv.
7. Habimah (Habima), trans. Stage: the first Hebrew theatre company founded in Moscow
in 1917.
8. Irina Atikovna Azizian, Aleksandr Bykhovsky. Stupeni tvorchestva-bytiia (Aleksandr
Bykhovsky. Scales of creativity), 2007.
9. About this topic, see Boris Groys (Ed.). Russian Cosmism (Cambridge, MA: EFlux-
MIT Press, 2018).
10. See Olga Mentiukova, Filosofii tvorchestvo khudojnik i poeta A. Ia. Bikhovskogo
[Philosophy of Alexandr Bykhovskii’s Creative Work: Art and Poetry (1888–1978)], 2015.
11. Irina Atikovna Azizian (1935–2009) – Painter, architect and teacher, friend of
Bykhovsky. Author of the most complete study on the life and work of this artist in
Alexandr Bykhovsky Level of Creativity-Being (2007). In 2015, Olga Mentiukova pub-
lished an article entitled Philosophy of Alexandr Bykhovskii’s Creative Work: Art and
Poetry (1888–1978).
12. Broder Christiansen, Danish (German) philosopher and linguist who specialized in art.
In 1909, Broder Christiansen wrote Philosophie der Kunst [Philosophy of Art, Hanau,
Clauss & Feddersen]. This book came out in a Russian edition in 1911 as Filosofiia
Iskusstva (Izdatelstvo Shipovnik, Saint Petersburg), and became popular among
Russian formalists, who selectively borrowed from its contents.
13. Vygotsky could have read this treaty in German but just as other intellectuals of his time
he read the Russian translation of Christiansen’s book. The Psychology of Art makes only
two references to Klinger so this book does not feature in his bibliographical list. On Max
Klinger’s work see the article by Elizabeth P. Streicher – “Max Klinger’s Malerei und
Zeichnung: The Critical Reception of the Prints and Their Text” (Studies in the History of
Art, Vol. 53, 1996, pp. 228–249). Towards the end of the 19th century and turn of the 20th
century, Klinger’s ideas found considerable resonance among graphic artists:

“complementary but contrasting functions to painting and to works in black and

white (. . .) he defines the domain of Painting [Malerei] as nature, beauty, and ‘the
world as it should be’ and that of Drawing [Zeichnung] as subjectivity, fantasy, and
‘the world as it should not be’.” (Streicher, 1996, p. 233)

14. See A.N. Leontiev, Prologue in Lev S. Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art (Cambridge:
M.I.T. Press, 1971, p. IX).
15. Based on Alexandr Bykhovsky’s manuscript in the Manuscripts Section of the
Tretyakov Gallery cited by Olga Mentiukova in her text, p. 734 (see note 11).
16. See note 12.
17. Christiansen, 1911, p. 230.
14 Culture & Psychology 0(0)

18. Ibid., p. 243.

19. Ibid., p. 244.
20. From Bykhovsky’s standpoint:

Graphic art tries to liberate itself from the material as much as possible. Like a
thought, it is not material, not corporeal. The appearance of graphic art is similar
to a hieroglyph: it is a sign, no more than a cause for imagination, a cause that must
evoke a bunch of memories by the most neutral means—in black and white, and
leaving it to perception to independently complete the orbit, to freely anticipate
the image.

From Alexandr Bykhovsky’s text entitled Ž Grafike [About Graphic Art] inserted in the brochure of
his first exhibition at Studio Habimah (in Annex: I. A. Azizian, Aleksandr Bykhovsky. Stupeni
tvorchestva-bytiia [Aleksandr Bykhovsky. Scales of creativity], 2007, p. 252).
21. Quote not found.
22. Mikhail Osipovich Gershenson (1869–1925). Russian linguist, philosopher, historian of
culture, and translator, he authored books about A. Pushkin (Mudrost’ Pushkina, 1919)
and other novelists. Gershenson was the initiator of the famous ‘Vekhi’ (1909), a col-
lection of essays by Russia’s most prominent philosophers, which would be published in
many editions (Zavershneva & Van der Veer, 2018, p. 308). In March 1917, Gershenzon
became one of the organizers of the All-Russian Union of Writers. After the October
Revolution, he took part in the activities of various organizations involved in literary
life (Bureau of the Literary Department of the People’s Commissariat of Education,
1920–1921, etc.). He wrote books The Triple Image of Perfection (1918), Dream and
Thought of I.S. Turgenev (1919), Golfstrom (1922), The Key of Faith (1922), numerous
articles on Pushkin. Gershenzon wrote that Russia had entered a period of ‘spiritual
homelessness’ [‘spiritual abandonment’] which, despite the painfulness of the destruc-
tion of habitual life forms, gives the individual and society the opportunity for deep self-
awareness (Source: Encyclopaedia Krugosvet).
23. Nikolai Nikolaevich Lyachko (1884–1953), son of a soldier and a peasant mother,
began working at an early age. He participated in the workers’ movement from 1901
and his first literary works are dated 1905. From 1918 to 1919 onwards he was linked to
cultural organizations focused on the cultural development of the workers. He was a
member of the Muscovite literary group Kuznitsa (1920), where he was considered one
of the best and most gifted writers of prose. His most well-known text is ‘The Blast
Furnace’ (Domennaia Petch) on the reconstruction of industry in Post-Civil
War Russia.
24. Military cap, originally with a peak and tall band.
25. Ecclesiastes 1:6.
Lev Vygotsky studied the book of Ecclesiastes as a youngster. Vygotsky’s Notebooks. A
Selection (2018) edited by Ekaterina Zavershneva and René Van der Veer includes as
the opening chapter the oldest Vygotsky’s manuscript found, entitled – ‘The tragicom-
edy of strivings’ (1912). This text is an analysis of the book of Ecclesiastes.
Aleksandr Bykhovsky nicknamed Vygotsky ‘the prophet’. In the early fall of 1917
he wrote,
Frois 15

“the times of the inquisition have passed, but they will seem paradise compared to
what is still to come. . .The hatred of enlightened and civilized people is worse than the
hatred of brutes and fanatics. All sorts of deaths and horrors are impending. The
punishment and wrath of God are dreadful. All that happened will seem insignificant
compared to what is happening, is on its way, is near. Everything goes down into the
abyss. Doom is impending.” (Lev Vygotsky, About optimists, Samara, Autumn 1917,
in Zavershneva & Van der Veer, p. xiii, and pp. 23–24)

26. Ecclesiastes 1:14.

27. Ecclesiastes 1:2 – ‘all is vanity of vanities, all is vanity’.
28. Allusion to the poem ‘The Twelve’ by Alexandr A. Blok (1880–1921).

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Author biography
Jo~ao Pedro Frois holds an MA degree in Psychology, an MA in Special Needs
Education and a PhD in Educational Sciences from Lisbon University with a
dissertation on Philosophy of Art Education. He is a research affiliate of the
Centre for Phenomenological Psychology and Aesthetics, Department of
Psychology, University of Copenhagen. He has published articles in several jour-
nals on the Psychology of the Arts and Museum Education and has conducted
scholarly work on Lev S. Vygostky’s theory of Psychology of Art. His interests lie
in the Psychology of Visual Arts, Empirical Aesthetics, Aesthetic Education, and
the Philosophy and History of Art Education. In 2014, he was awarded Fellow
Status by the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics IAEA.