Lives and Facts: Biography in Russia in the 1920s

The article examines the 1920s debates about biography in Soviet Russia. In the first section it seeks to explain why biography was an important area of research, of taxonomy and of self-conception, focusing on Semen Vengerov (the 'old guard'), Boris Tomashevskii (the 'taxonomist') and Grigorii Vinokur (the 'linguist'). In the second section, it endeavours to give a sense of what biographies or kinds of biographical writing were being produced in the era, including those by Boris Eikhenbaum (the experimenter), Iurii Tynianov (the novelist) and Valieria Feider (the compiler). In the short final section it offers some suggestions as to what 'worked' and what did not, and shows where biography was headed in Russia in the coming era.