Maxim Morozov

To the report on Meshcheryakov

Alexander Ivanovich Mescheryakov, a friend, colleague and contemporary of Ewald Ilyenkov, was a
remarkable Soviet psychologist, born on 16 December 1923 and died in 1974 at the age of 51 from acute
heart failure. I say this not because you can't read about it on Wikipedia yourself, but to point out that his
life was in some ways isomorphic to the lives of many talented Soviet Marxists who sincerely considered
themselves “soldiers of the October socialist revolution” (apart from Ewald Ilyenkov, these included
Mikhail Lifshitz, Viktor Glushkov, Anatoly Kanarsky and many others). For them the works of Marx and
Lenin were not just slogans, they took as their guide the Soviet Communist Party's plan to build
communism by 1980 and did everything they could to ensure that this plan did not remain an empty
sound. As we know, they lost out on that stretch of time. Their deaths were of course linked to the
approaching collapse of the socialist states, which they foresaw. With their passing, theoretical
communism in fact ceased its forward movement and moved into organised retreat. But that does not
mean that they lost out altogether, because history develops by leaps and bounds, with interruptions of
gradualness and, as Vladimir Lenin said, pays little regard to our subjective desires and notions of how
things “should be”.

It is very important that in this period of the first decisive attack on the old principles of social life,
fundamental discoveries were made and crucial results were achieved which help to make sense of the
ways in which the main task set by Karl Marx can be fulfilled. This task consists in the so-called “leap into
the kingdom of freedom”, which comprises in reorienting the nature of the production of society from
the creation of things to the creation of conditions for the production of man himself, that is, of an
integral, universal fully developed human personality. This, according to Marx, is the basic essence of
communist production, or “communism as the unravelling of the mystery of history, knowing of itself that
it is this unravelling”. One such crucial result, which is directly linked to the solution of Marx's task, was
Meshcheryakov's work with pupils at the Zagorsk boarding school, the results of which cannot in any way
be reduced to the special-defectological field.

The work with deaf-blind children was of course not started by Meshcheryakov himself. His teacher, Ivan
Sokolyansky, started such work on a large scale back in the 1920s. One of the most famous results of this
work was Olga Skorokhodova, a deaf-blind girl who became a famous Soviet writer, defectologist, PhD in
pedagogical sciences, and the only deaf-blind researcher in the world at the time. Olga Skorohodova was
also involved in the work in Zagorsk. What is interesting: in his book Meshcheryakov describes the
evolution of methodological approaches from Pavlovian behaviourism, which could not provide a
successful solution to pedagogical problems, to what Ilyenkov called “the Spinozian idea of movement
along the contours of external objects”. This change in the theoretical basis of pedagogical activity was
decisive in achieving the results of the so-called “Zagorsk experiment”, known from Ilyenkov's articles.

Speaking of Meshcheryakov's book. Thanks to Andrey Maidansky, the manuscript of the second volume
of “Deafblind Children” (also known in English as “Awakening to Life”) has recently become available,
which was planned for publication but was not prepared in Soviet time. Today we have arranged for the
manuscript to be transcribed and translated into hypertext format in order to complete it and publish it
as a separate book. This new book by Meshcheryakov contains reflections and analyses of the work in the
context of the problems of language and thought, word and act, gesture and verbal language, and
promises to shed light on many of the controversial issues surrounding Ilyenkov-Meshcheryakov's
teaching results that are still - after 40 years - far from being resolved.

It also should be noted that Alexander Meshcheryakov developed the central notion of pedagogy as a
systematic science - the notion of “co-divided activity” (совместно разделенная деятельность), the
attitude to which is still rather unconcerned in the pedagogical and philosophical environment. The
translation of this term is complicated, as it encompasses the whole problematics outlined in Hegelian
Logic, “the bifurcation of the one and the cognition of its contradictory parts”. The translation options like
“joint, split, collaborative” do not quite capture the specificity of notion that Ilyenkov and Mescheryakov
meant. Probably the right word would be “shared”. There is no doubt that without reference to the
philosophical heritage, this meaning cannot be fully apprehended or made clear to the teacher-
practitioner's mind. However, the emphasis must be placed on the sharing, the communalization of
activity that results in the individual's incorporation into the cultural, active-based context of proper
human existence. This is the “humanizing” effect of activity with the objects of the external world that
Meshcheryakov wrote about. The joint, shared activity of people, in which by necessity different actions
of different individuals are combined, is the basis and form of the transmission of the content of
subjectivity (or experience) from person to person. There is essentially no other way of entering into the
holistic experience of another individual than to engage with the activity which formed that experience.
The notion of co-divided activity takes the representations of pedagogy beyond a narrowly conceived
rationalism (and the verbalism that follows). It becomes clear that the content of human reality (in other
words, the experience of historical man) cannot simply be rationally assimilated, but that what is required
is a direct feel of that experience by man himself. This is why this content is objectively and historically
“compressed” to a size accessible in its spatial and temporal characteristics to forms of individual activity.
Theoretical science and art are the closest forms of “compression” of this experience, which, however, do
not exist in and of themselves, but only in the context of the practice and through the practice of humanity
as its substance. Through the form of jointly-shared, co-divided subject activity, the individual is included
(by feeling and thought) in the universal content of historical culture, in the historical experience of
humankind.

In this connection - the last thing I would like to mention - is the way of perceiving this most important
achievement of Meshcheryakov, that object activity, activity precisely with the sensual things of the
external world, opens for the individual the possibility of ascending to the heights of world culture in a
broad sense. Leda Kamenopoulou's article on Meshcheryakov and even more so Monika Wozniak's article
comparing the views of Ilyenkov and the Polish philosopher Marek Siemek contrast the Ilyenkov-
Meshcheryakov notion of subject activity with the notion of human communication of individual with
individual, in other words: transformative activity versus intersubjectivity. This opposition is as false as,
say, the opposition between the ideas of Ilyenkov and Meshcheryakov and “Stalinist dialectical
materialism”, which was certainly not the one-dimensional monster that they try to portray it as. Such
ways of opposing are metaphysical, anti-dialectical in nature, and the abstractions derived from such a
way are of course thoroughly ideological. The unfolding of this problematic requires a close and patient
reading of Ilyenkov and Meshcheryakov works, and I am happy to welcome the expansion of the
geography and number of languages of such a reading. This very meeting-seminar of ours will show better
than any reasoning that a co-divided activity is impossible without communication between individuals,
that is, it is represented through intersubjectivity, which is, however, determined by the logic of the object
itself, created by man for man. In our case, by Ilyenkov's article, which he wrote for all of us. I suggest we
now turn to reading and discussing the text itself.