Lev Vygotsky (Russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский, IPA: [vɨˈɡotskʲɪj]; November 17 [O.S. November 5] 1896 – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, the founder of an unfinished Marxist theory of human cultural and bio-social development, the “cultural-historical psychology” (although the phrase never actually occurred in Vygotsky’s writings; sometimes also referred to as “sociocultural theory“) and a “science of Superman”, a new psychological theory of consciousness and its relationship to the development of higher psychological functions, as well as the leader of the Vygotsky Circle (also referred to as “Vygotsky-Luria Circle”).

During the early twenty-first century, several scholarly reevaluations of the popular version (sometimes disparagingly termed “Vygotsky cult”, “the cult of Vygotsky”, or even “the cult of personality around Vygotsky”) of Vygotsky’s legacy have been undertaken and are referred to as the “revisionist revolution in Vygotsky Studies”. Vygotsky studies conducted within the framework of the “revisionist turn” during the 2010s revealed not only systematic and massive falsifications and distortions of Vygotsky’s legacy, but also demonstrated a rapid decrease of this author’s popularity in international scholarship that began in 2016–2017 and strikingly accelerated in 2018. This situation has been described as the “Vygotsky bubble” (“пузырь Выготского”; also, informally, the “vygo_bubble”) and is a foundational crisis in global “Vygotskiana”. The reasons of this crisis are not entirely clear yet and are being discussed in scholarly circles.