Mark Azadovsky

Who was Mark Azadovsky?

Mark Konstantinovich Azadovskii was a Russian scholar of folk-tales and Russian literature. As the head of the Folklore department at Leningrad State University during Stalin's anticosmopolitan campaigns of 1948-1953, he was denounced and fired along with Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Zhirmunskii, and Grigorii Gukovskii. Their scholarly work was expunged from literary journals and their names erased from all indices, footnotes, and bibliographies. After his expulsion from Leningrad State University, Azadovskii began to suffer heart trouble, complications of which led to his death in 1954.