Viktor Vinogradov

Who was Viktor Vinogradov?

Viktor Vladimirovich Vinogradov was a Soviet linguist and philologist who presided over Soviet linguistics after World War II.

Vinogradov's teachers at the Petrograd Institute of History and Philology included Lev Shcherba and Aleksey Shakhmatov, but Charles Bally's ideas influenced him the most deeply during his formative years. He made his mark as a scholar of Russian literature with a series of works examining the style and language of Russian classical writers, including Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and Anna Akhmatova. In 1926 he married Nadezhda Malysheva, a singing teacher.

From the standpoint of linguistics, Vinogradov set out as a good-natured critic of the Russian Formalists: he was on friendly terms with many of them. After moving from Leningrad to Moscow in 1929 he became implicated in the "Slavists conspiracy" and the authorities exiled him to Vyatka in 1934. Two years later, he was allowed to settle somewhat closer to the capital, in Mozhaysk, only to be exiled to Siberia after Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941. His father, an Orthodox priest, was purged in 1930.