Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev

Who was Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev?

Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev was a Russian literary scholar. He was a professor, social activist, and friend of Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as of Boris Pasternak and Fyodor Sologub. Medvedev held several government posts in education and publishing after the 1917 revolution, publishing a great deal of his own writing on literary, sociological, and linguistic issues. Medvedev was arrested during the 1930s period of purges under the rule of Joseph Stalin, and "disappeared" shortly after his arrest. He was shot on July 17, 1938.

One of his works, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, was believed to be written by his "co-thinker" Bakhtin, using his name to escape censorship. This belief was raised during the 1970s in Russia but developed fully in Clark and Holoquist's English biography of Bakhtin of 1984. Now, it is mostly believed that the work was written by Medvedev although influenced by Bakhtin's ideas.