Vladimir Romanovich Grib

Born Jan. 15(28), 1908, in Novogrigorevka, present-day Ukrainian SSR; died Mar. 3, 1940, in Moscow. Soviet literary critic.

Grib graduated from the Kiev Institute of Law. He actively criticized the vulgar-sociological views of art from the position of Marxist historical method. Grib’s most significant works were devoted to the age of Enlightenment and critical realism of the first half of the 19th century: Lessing and His Laokoon (1933), Winkelman’s Study on Beauty (1934), Balzac’s Ideology (1934), Bourgeois Psychology and the Power of Money (1935), Balzac on the Fate of Personality in Bourgeois Society (1936), and Lessing’s Aesthetic Views and the Theater (1936).