L. S. Vygotsky’s Participation in The Debate on the Belarusian National Question: Between Art, Language, and Politics

ABSTRACT This article presents three texts by Vygotsky, unpublished in Portuguese and English, on the topic of Belarusian theater and literature. Published in 1923, this material is virtually unknown and reveals the participation of this renowned author within the field of psychology in the cultural and national debates of Belarus. To better understand the issues raised in this corpus, we present a brief history of the establishment of the Belarusian State as well as the Soviet policy of Belarusization carried out throughout the 1920s. Next, we present a close reading of Vygotsky’s texts, with the aim of identifying and analyzing the points of view presented, and explaining references that may be little known to a foreign reader, particularly regarding Belarusian literature. The presented corpus reveals Vygotsky as a literary and theatrical critic as well as an activist of culture, facets that precede and presuppose the great psychologist that he would later become.