The First Commentary on L. S. Vygotsky’s Papers at the II All-Russian Congress of Psychoneurology in Petrograd (January 1924)

At the Second All-Russian Congress on Psychoneurology in Petrograd (January 1924), Vygotsky delivered three papers. The first paper (“Methodology of Reflexological and Psychological Research”), was printed separately, but the text of the other two reports (“How Psychology Should Be Taught Now” and “Results of a Questionnaire on the Moods of Students of the Graduating Classes of the Gomel Schools in 1923”) has not survived. A brief account of these two reports, which appeared in the magazine Krasnaya Nov’ in 1924, is reprinted here for the first time. The author was the revolutionary M.I. Ginzburg (1877-1940), a researcher at the Moscow Psychological Institute in the mid-1920s. He wrote under the pseudonym G. Dayan. Ginzburg-Dayan was severely criticised in 1935 on charges of Trotskyism.