Zaporozhets, Oleksander

Zaporozhets, Oleksander [Запорожець, Олександер; Zaporožec'], b 12 November 1905 in Kyiv, d 7 October 1981 in Moscow. Psychologist; full member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (APN) from 1968. In 1922–3 he studied acting in Kyiv and appeared in four productions of the Berezil theater. He graduated from Moscow University (1930), worked at the Ukrainian Psychoneurological Institute in Kharkiv, and held the chair of psychology at the Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute (1933–41). After the Second World War he directed the Laboratory of Preschool-child Psychology at the APN Institute of Psychology in Moscow, and in 1960 he became director of the APN Institute of Preschool Education in Moscow. His doctoral dissertation (1958) on the development of voluntary movements was published in 1960. He wrote many pioneering works on child psychology (on the development of perception, reasoning, and the psyche and on the origin and nature of emotions), motor functions, and preschool education, including a psychology textbook for preschool teachers (1953, 1955, 1961, 1965) that was translated from Russian into Ukrainian (1961), Czech (1954), Bulgarian (1954), Polish (1954), Latvian (1955), Slovak (1958), and Lithuanian (1969). Some of his studies appeared in English. A two-volume posthumous edition of his works was published in Moscow in 1986; it includes a bibliography of his works and his reminiscences about Les Kurbas.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]