Critic who carried out 1930s literary policy as secretary of the Writers’ Union organising committee and later became a Dostoevsky scholar
Born Semyon Rabinovich, he was first a Menshevik, joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, edited Red Army newspapers in the Civil War and graduated from the Institute of Red Professors (1925). In 1932–36 he headed the fiction sector of the Central Committee's agitprop department and was secretary of the Writers' Union organising committee, institutionalising socialist realism in practice. In February 1940 he and Fadeyev sent the Central Committee a report On the Anti-Party Group in Soviet Criticism denouncing the Literaturny kritik group of Lifshitz and Lukács, and the journal was closed that year. In the 1949 campaign against cosmopolitans he was himself dismissed from the Institute of World Literature. From 1956 to 1981 he taught at the Literary Institute and wrote several books on Dostoevsky.
Also known as: Semyon Rabinovich · V. Ya. Kirpotin
Activities and affiliations
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1918–
Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks
Ideology and propaganda -
1937–1949
Soviet Union state institutionsSenior research fellow and deputy director, Gorky Institute of World Literature
Scholarship and theory -
1956–1981
Soviet Union state institutionsHead of the chair of Russian literary history, Literary InstituteMain
Scholarship and theory
Career Timeline
- 1918Joined the RKP(b); edited Red Army newspapers
- 1919Editor of Khersonskaya Pravda and of the 58th Division newspaper
- 1925Graduated from the Institute of Red Professors
- 1925–1932Head of the chair of Marxism, Tolmachev Military-Political Academy
- 1932–1936Head of the fiction sector of the CC agitprop; secretary of the Writers’ Union organising committee
- 1937Senior research fellow at the Gorky Institute of World Literature
- 1940Report with Fadeyev against the Literaturny kritik group
- 1946Condemned Zoshchenko
- 1949Dismissed in the anti-cosmopolitan campaign; severe reprimand
- 1956–1981Head of the chair of Russian literary history, Literary Institute