Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lev Vygotsky died of a relapse of tuberculosis on the 11th of June 1934, at the age of 37, in Moscow. His early death cut short a career that would have fundamentally reshaped the understanding of human development.
Lev Vygotsky was born on the 17th of November 1896 in the town of Orsha, which was then part of the Russian Empire and is now Belarus. His father Simkha Leibovich was a banker and his mother Tsetsilia Moiseevna raised him in the city of Gomel where he was home-schooled until 1911.
Lev Vygotsky met Alexander Luria at the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd in January 1924. Luria became his closest collaborator and the architect of their shared theoretical framework.
The zone of proximal development is a concept introduced by Lev Vygotsky to characterize an individual's mental development. It is bracketed by the learner's current ability and the ability they can achieve with the aid of a more knowledgeable other.
Lev Vygotsky's book Thinking and Speech was published posthumously in 1934. The text explores the relationship between thought and word in the structure of consciousness.