ABSTRACT
The story of Vygotsky’s influence on educational thinking in the West is a fantastic one-it reads, as they say, like a fairy story. A young Russian intellectual-in the first instance a student of literature-at the age of thirty-eight writes a book on the relation of language to thought. Having previously worked on the ideas with colleagues for some ten years, he finishes the manuscript off in haste, a race against tuberculosis, and dies before it is published. Two years after its publication the book, Thought and Language, is suppressed by the Soviet authorities and remains so for twenty years-though not before the substance of a magnificent last chapter, presented as a paper at an American conference, finds its way-in English-on to the pages of a psychological journal. A long silence is finally broken when, in 1962, twenty-eight years after its original appearance, scholars in Cambridge, Massachusetts produce an English translation of the whole work and Bruner is on hand to write the introduction.
