David Vygodsky

Who was David Vygodsky?

David Isaakovich Vygodsky was a Russian literary critic, translator, poet, and teacher.

Born in Gomel in the Russian Empire into a nonreligious Jewish family, Vygodsky was the cousin of the well-known developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, on whom he was an important influence. He graduated from the Romance and Germanic division of Saint Petersburg State University and became a translator and teacher; he translated from German, French, Hebrew, and especially Spanish. At the time of the October Revolution and Civil War he was teaching Latin and giving lectures on modern literature in Gomel, but in the 1920s he moved to Petrograd. Zemlya, a collection of his own poetry, was published in 1922; in the same year, his article "A Survey of New Jewish Poetry" appeared in the Petrograd journal Parfenon. He was close to the OPOYAZ group, and his apartment was a meeting place for writers and students of literature; "it may have been here that [Lev] Vygotsky first met members of the formalist school and the acmeic poet Mandel'shtam, one of his favorite poets." Marietta Shaginyan wrote this description: