Literary scholar of the Bakhtin circle who criticised Formalism in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship; shot in the Great Purge
He studied law at St Petersburg University, joined the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1917 and left them the next year. Elected mayor of Vitebsk in 1917, after the revolution he founded a proletarian university there and formed the Bakhtin circle with Voloshinov and Bakhtin. Back in Petrograd from 1922, he laid the foundations of Blok scholarship at the Pushkin House and, as head of fiction at the State Publishing House, brought out the arrested Bakhtin's Dostoevsky book. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928) criticised Formalism on scholarly grounds, yet Fadeyev of RAPP branded him a formalist. Professor at Leningrad University from 1933, he was arrested in 1938, shot on 17 July and rehabilitated in 1956. The book was once ascribed to Bakhtin, but is now mostly held to be Medvedev's own.
Activities and affiliations
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1917–1918
Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR)
Scholarship and theory -
1925–1938
Soviet Union state institutionsPushkin House research fellow; Leningrad University professorMain
Scholarship and theory
Career Timeline
- 1909–1914Law faculty, St Petersburg University
- 1915At the front in the First World War, war reports
- 1917Joined the Socialist Revolutionaries; mayor of Vitebsk
- 1918Left the SRs; founded the Vitebsk Proletarian University
- 1920Began his dialogue with Bakhtin in Vitebsk
- 1922Returned to Petrograd; In Memory of Blok
- 1925Research fellow at the Pushkin House
- 1928The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship
- 1933Professor at Leningrad University
- 1938Arrested in March, shot on 17 July
- 1956Rehabilitated