Valentin Voloshinov
Russian linguist (1895–1936)

Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (Russian: Валенти́н Никола́евич Воло́шинов; June 18, 1895, St. Petersburg – June 13, 1936, Leningrad) was a Russian Soviet linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology.
Biography
Details of Voloshinovs's early life is unclear but it is believed he was born in to the family of an attorney. In his youth, he was a member of the mystical Rosicrucian society where he befriended Anastasia and Marina Tsvetayeva. Even before the revolution, he became a close friend of Mikhail Bakhtin, a participant in the Nevel school of philosophy.
Voloshinov studied at the Faculty of Law of Petrograd University but his studies were interrupted in 1916. From 1919 to 1922, he lived in Nevel, later in Vitebsk where he published several articles on music, gave lectures on art history and literature at the Proletarian University founded by Pavel Medvedev in Vitebsk. In 1922, following Medvedev, he returned to Petrograd, where, after he and Bakhtin moved there in the spring of 1924, their close communication continued. He performed poems and musical sketches in the salon of pianist Maria Yudina.
After graduating from Leningrad University, he was a postgraduate student of the Research Institute of Comparative History of Literature and Languages of the West and East and later an associate professor at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute.
The public source identifies “Valentin Voloshinov” as russian linguist (1895–1936). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Valentin, Voloshinov and Russian.
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This entry incorporates text from “Valentin Voloshinov” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.