Vygotsky's Theory of Creativity

In Educational Psychology (1997/1926), Vygotsky pleaded for a realistic approach to children’s literature. He is, among other things, critical of Chukovsky’s story “Crocodile” and maintains that this story deals with nonsense and gibberish, without social relevance. This approach Vygotsky would leave soon, and, in Psychology of Art (1971/1925), in which he develops his theory of art, he talks about connections between nursery rhymes and children’s play, exactly as the story of Chukovsky had done with the following argument: By dragging a child into a topsy-turvy world, we help his intellect work and his perception of reality. In his book Imagination and Creativity in Childhood (1995/1930), Vygotsky goes further and develops his theory of creativity. The book describes how Vygotsky regards the creative process of the human consciousness, the link between emotion and thought, and the role of the imagination. To Vygotsky, this brings to the fore the issue of the link between reality and imagination, and he discusses the issue of reproduction and creativity, both of which relate to the entire scope of human activity. Interpretations of Vygotsky in the 1990s have stressed the role of literature and the development of a cultural approach to psychology and education. It has been overlooked that Vygotsky started his career with work on the psychology of art. In this article, I want to describe Vygotsky’s theory of creativity and how he developed it. He started with a realistic approach to imagination, and he ended with a dialectical attitude to imagination. Criticism of Chukovsky’s “Crocodile” In 1928, the “Crocodile” story was forbidden. It was written by Korney Chukovsky (1882–1969). In his book From Two to Five Years, there is a chapter with the title “Struggle for the Fairy-Tale,” in which he attacks his antagonists, the pedologists, whom he described as a miserable group of theoreticans who studied children’s reading and maintained that the children of the proletarians needed neither “fairy-tales nor toys, or songs” (Chukovsky, 1975, p. 129). He describes how the pedologists let the word imagination become an abuse and how several stories were forbidden, for example, “Crocodile.” One of the slogans of the antagonists of fantasy literature was chukovskies, a term meaning of anthropomorphism and being bourgeois. In 1928, Krupskaja criticized Chukovky, the same year as Stalin was in power. Krupskaja maintained that the content of children’s literature ought to be concrete and realistic to inspire the children to be conscious communists. As an atheist, she was against everything that smelled of mysticism and religion. She pointed out, in an article in Pravda, that “Crocodile” did not live up to the demands that one could make on children’s literature. Many authors, however, came to Chukovsky’s defense, among them A. Tolstoy (Chukovsky, 1975). Ten years earlier in 1918, only a few months after the October Revolution, the first demands were made that children’s literature should be put in the service of communist ideology. It was necessary to replace old bourgeois books, and new writers were needed. In the first attempts to create a new children’s literature, a significant role was played by Maksim Gorky. His ideal was realistic literature with such moral ideals as heroism and optimism. Creativity Research Journal Copyright 2003 by 2003, Vol. 15, Nos. 2 & 3, 245–251 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Vygotsky’s Theory of Creativity Gunilla Lindqvist University of Karlstad Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Gunilla Lindqvist, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Karlstad, 65188 Karlstad, Sweden. E-mail: gunilla.lindqvist@