Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov

Soviet Union state institutions Marxism–Leninism 1895–1936 ○ Tuberculosis

Linguist of the Bakhtin circle and author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, who located ideology in words and signs

Born in St Petersburg, he was Bakhtin's friend from before the revolution, and in 1919–22 formed the Bakhtin circle with Medvedev and Bakhtin in Nevel and Vitebsk. He graduated in linguistics from Leningrad University (1924) and taught at the Institute for the Comparative History of Literatures and Languages and the Herzen Pedagogical Institute. Freudianism (1927) criticised psychoanalysis, and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) argued that ideology exists as signs and that the meaning of words is settled in verbal intercourse over which classes contend. Attacked by the Marrists in the early 1930s, he stopped publishing and died of tuberculosis in 1936; Russian Wikipedia says he was never repressed, English Wikipedia that he was arrested. Rediscovered in the West in the 1970s, his books became the object of a long dispute over whether Bakhtin wrote them.

Also known as: V. N. Vološinov