The book by the classics of modern psychology L. S. Vygotsky and A. R. Luria reveals the main provisions of the theory of cultural-historical development of the psyche. Using a wide range of material from the fields of comparative psychology, ethnopsychology and genetic psychology, the authors vividly discuss three different paths of development that make up the history of human behavior. For psychologists and everyone interested in problems of human knowledge. The text of the book was translated from the original language using an artificial intelligence program. For the most part, the translation of the text is of very high quality, but in some cases, due to the imperfection of the technology, there may be incorrect phrase translations in the text, as well as single words and expressions may not be translated.