ABSTRACT
The gulf that separates Soviet scientists of Alexander Romanovich’s generation from American psychologists of the author's cannot be overcome by ignoring its existence. From time to time Alexander Romanovich would take the author on rounds as he visited patients awaiting surgery or recovering from a recent operation at the Institute of Neurosurgery. The enormous respect he evoked was transferred to the author , a youthful foreigner in an ill-fitting white laboratory jacket. At irregular intervals during the year he talked a little about his past and about his mentor, Vygotsky. Alexander Romanovich often spoke of his work as merely continuation of Vygotsky’s. Although there were important similarities between their two approaches, the autobiography made it immediately apparent that the topics of concern to Alexander Romanovich at the beginning of his career differed from those to which he turned after meeting Vygotsky.
