Vasilii Alekseevich Desnitskii

(pseudonyms—V. Stroev, V. Golovinskii). Born Jan. 18 (30), 1878, in the village of Pokrov, present-day Gorky Oblast; died Sept. 22, 1958, in Leningrad. Revolutionary and Soviet literary scholar.

Desnitskii studied at the University of Iur’ev (Tartu). In 1897 he began to work with the Social Democrats in Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, the Urals, and southern Russia, and from 1903 to 1909 he was a Bolshevik. A delegate to the Third through Fifth Congresses of the RSDLP, he was elected a member of the party’s Central Committee at the Fourth Congress in 1906. Desnitskii contributed to Bolshevik newspapers. In 1909 he was an active participant in the fractional Capri school, and in 1917 he helped found the Menshevik-oriented newspaper Novaia zhizn’. Until March 1918 he was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from the Social Democratic Internationalists (the “new lifers”).

In 1919, Desnitskii dropped out of political life. He worked as a scholar and teacher at the A. I. Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad and at other institutions of higher learning in Leningrad. His principal works concern Marxist literary methodology and the history of Russian and foreign literature of the 18th through the 20th century.