Juri Tynjanov (1894–1943)

Juri Tynjanov was born to a Jewish family of doctors in Rezhitsa, Russian Empire (present-day Rēzekne, Latvia). He went to gymnasium (high school) in Pihkova and studied from 1912 to 1919 at the Faculty of History and Linguistics of the University of St. Petersburg. There he attended the seminar on Alexander Pushkin held by Semyon Vengerov, a renowned literary historian. Tynjanov was fluent in German and French, and became a literary critic. He wrote more than half a dozen books about Pushkin and his era, most of which have never been translated into English. After graduation, he worked as a teacher and translator for the Comintern. From 1920, he served as the secretary of OPOJAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), a prominent group of linguists and literary critics. In the years 1921–1930, Tynjanov was a professor at the Institute of Art History. He started writing fiction in the mid-1920s. His first historical novel, Küchlja (1925) was about the Decembrist poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker, a friend of Pushkin. His novel Smert Vazir-Muhtara (Death of the Vazir-Muhtari, 1927–1928) described the fate of the diplomat and playwright Alexander Griboyedov. He also spent many years researching and writing a novel about Pushkin's childhood and youth that was unfinished at his death. His novella Second Lieutenant Kije (1927), set in the time of the Emperor Paul I, brought him his widest fame and was adapted into a film in 1934. That same year, he was elected a member of the board of the Writers' Union of the Soviet Union. During World War II, he was evacuated from Leningrad sick with multiple sclerosis and died at age 49 in Moscow.