From the Editors

This issue is published on the eve of a significant anniversary. According to A.N. Leontiev, a hundred years ago, L.S. Vygotsky showed him the first draft of the cultural-historical theory of the development of higher psychological functions. Today we would like to summarize some results. What has been done over the past century and what are the main vectors of development of cultural-historical psychology?

Any theory, which deserve such a name, is a system of scientific concepts. Cultural-historical psychology sees in them "the key to everything human, truly human" (L.S. Vygotsky). Tracing the "fate of concepts" in the development of the human psyche, the creators of this theory created their own, new concepts, and sometimes new terms, such as "rotation", "zone of nearest development" or "jointly distributed activity".
The authors of the articles published in this issue present the results of a systematic analysis of the content of a number of core concepts of cultural-historical psychology, capturing the main points of its century-long development. From these points the processes of self-regulation of subject activity and the dynamic boundaries of personality are studied. There are some attempts to develop a matrix of cultural-historical analysis of experiential data, and to show how the concepts of activity theory work in psychotechnical and psychotherapeutic practice.

In the last two decades, painstaking archival research has been conducted. Most of Vygotsky's notebooks and notes, A.N. Leontiev's workbooks, and many other valuable manuscripts from the classics of a bygone era were published. Continuing this great thankful work, the journal publishes the transcript of Vygotsky's speech at the 1931 reactological discussion. The scientific and autobiographical reflections contained in it add several unique touches to the Vygotsky's portrait.
Over the past century, the cultural-historical school has become a powerful tree with many branches and offshoots, connected by the mushroom red of the ideas with the forest of scientific psychology and with world culture in general. We would like to present Vygotsky's school as a dialectical "identity of the different," with a palette of bright, original shades and lively internal contradictions that serve as a motor for its development in theory and practice. The editorial board hopes that this approach will contribute to the development of cultural-historical psychology in the next, the 2nd century of its glorious history.