born Nov. 17, 1895, Orel, Russia
died March 7, 1975, Moscow, U.S.S.R.
Russian literary theorist and philosopher of language.
His works frequently offended the Soviet authorities, and in 1929 he was exiled from Vitsyebsk to Kazakhstan. He is especially known for Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929), which advanced theories that he further developed in The Dialogic Imagination (1975). His wide-ranging ideas significantly influenced Western thinking in cultural history, linguistics, literary theory, and aesthetics.