Petr Semenovich Kogan

Born May 8 (20), 1872, in the city of Lida, now in Grodno Oblast; died May 2, 1932, in Moscow. Soviet literary historian and critic.

Kogan’s work was first published in 1895. An adherent of Marxism during the period before the October Revolution, Kogan waged a struggle against idealist critics. It was from a progressive point of view that he wrote his Essays on the History of Western European Literatures (vols. 1–3, 1903–10), Essays on the History of Ancient Literatures (vol. 1: Greek Literature, 1907), and Essays on the History of Recent Russian Literature (vols. 1–3, 1908–12), as well as his studies on the theater. After the Great October Revolution, Kogan was a professor at the First and Second Moscow State Universities and other higher educational institutions and served as president of the State Academy of Arts Studies (1921). A popular lecturer and an ardent propagandist of Soviet literature, Kogan failed to escape oversimplified and distorted sociological views.