Vinogradov, Viktor

Born Dec. 31, 1894 (Jan. 12, 1895), in Zaraisk; died Oct. 4, 1969, in Moscow. Soviet linguist and literary scholar; academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946).

Vinogradov graduated from the Institute of History and Philology and the Archaeological Institute in Petrograd in 1917. He was a professor at Leningrad (1920-29) and Moscow (1930-69) universities; he headed the subdepartment of Russian at Moscow State University from 1945 to 1969. He was director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1950-1954) and of the Institute of the Russian Language of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1958-68) and academician-secretary of the department of literature and language of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1950-63). He became editor of the journal Voprosy iazykoznaniia in 1952. He headed the section of historical poetics and stylistics of Russian classical literature at the Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (Pushkin House) from 1968. He was a member of the Main Editorial Board of the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

Vinogradov was the author of works on Russian grammar (The Russian Language: Grammatical Studies on the Word, 1947; State Prize of the USSR, 1951) and the history of the Russian language (Essays on the History of the Russian Literary Language of the 17th to 19th Centuries, 1934; 2nd ed., 1938) and monographs on the language and style of Rus-sian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries and on the “natural school.” His books On Artistic Prose (1930), On the Language of Belles Lettres (1959), and Stylistics: Theory of Poetic Speech: Poetics (1963) were devoted to the theoretical analysis of problems in stylistics and poetics based on Rus-sian literary materials. He participated in the compilation of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, edited by D. N. Ushakov (vols. 1-4, 1935-40), and in the editing of Russian-language dictionaries published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (vols. 1-17, 1948-65; vols. 1-4, 1957-61). He directed the compilation of the Dictionary of the Language of Pushkin (vols. 1-4, 1956-61). He was a member of numerous foreign academies and Chairman of the International Committee of Slavists (from 1957). He was awarded the Order of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals.