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Kozulin's book is a fine contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on Vygotsky's psychology. A contemporary of Freud, Vygotsky was influential in shaping the development of Marxist psychology after the Soviet revolution. Although neglected during the Stalin period, Vygotsky's ideas became the foundation of contemporary Soviet psychology, surviving through the contributions of such giants of psychology and Leontyev and Luria.
Whether Vygotsky's psychology will survive in Russia now that the Soviet state has collapsed is an open and fascinating question. Perhaps paradoxically, it is here in the west that Vygotsky's fortunes are rising. Besides the volume by Kozulin, Lethbridge (1992) and Wertsch (1981, 1985), among others, have each produced works whose focus is Vygotskian psychology; and Cole and his colleagues (e.g., Vygotsky, 1978), and Kozulin (Vygotsky, 1986) himself, have edited and retranslated significant portions of Vygotsky's work. Furthermore, Yaroshevsky's “official” biography of Vygotsky has been available in English since 1989.
The first two chapters of the present volume comment on aspects of Vygotsky's work not generally taken up by scholars in the field: The Psychology of Art, and a monograph on Hamlet. It is tempting to dismiss these two works as, in some sense, juvenilia, except that, as Kozulin points out, not only are they intrinsically interesting, but several of the ideas presented are germinal to Vygotsky's later, more mature, psychology.
In The Psychology of Art, Vygotsky approached what would become a central issue in his psychology: “What is it that distinguishes human consciousness as an historically and culturally specific function?” (p. 36) His early attempt to answer this question involved as exploration of the psychological nature of literary discourse.