Grigorii Vinokur

Born Nov. 5 (17), 1896, in Warsaw; died May 17, 1947, in Moscow. Soviet linguist and literary scholar.

Vinokur was a professor at Moscow State University (1942-47) and at other higher educational institutions, and he became a member of the Pushkin Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1933. He was also a member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Moscow Dialectological Commission. His chief works dealt with questions concerning the culture of speech, the history of the Russian literary language, and problems of textual criticism; he also did research on the language and creative genius of A. S. Pushkin, A. S. Griboedov, and V. V. Mayakovsky. Vinokur was one of the compilers of The Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language (vols. 1-4, 1935-40, edited by D. N. Ushakov) and one of the editors of the academic edition of the collected works of Pushkin. From 1938 to 1947 he organized the compilation of The Dictionary of the Language of Pushkin.