ABSTRACT
In parallel with his revisionist stance in the 1930s Vygotsky demonstrated increasing understanding of and fascination with the work of the German-American scholars of the Gestalt movement in psychology, one of the most ground-breaking and influential intellectual movements of the time. Under the influence of this theoretical tradition and, most notably, its somewhat marginal participant Kurt Lewin, Vygotsky started the important and critical application of holistic ideas in the context of Soviet psychological research. The Vygotsky of the 1930s is a militant “holist”: yet another persona of his that notably shaped the way he thought about the human mind, brain, and culture in their inseparable unity. As a result, the entire outlook – methodology and conceptual framework – of his theory dramatically changed during the first half of the 1930s. However, this exciting convergence of German-American and Russian psychological thought was short-lived: mortally ill from the late 1910s, Vygotsky died in June 1934, leaving his emergent integral theory unfinished. In the last note that he scribbled before his death he compared himself with the Jewish prophet Moses, who saw the Promised Land but had to die without ever entering it.
