David Vygodsky

At the time of the October Revolution and Civil War, he taught Latin and gave lectures on modern literature in Gomel, but in the 1920s, he moved to Petrograd. Zemlya (Land), a collection of his poetry, was published in 1922; the same year, his article "A Survey of New Jewish Poetry" appeared in the Petrograd journal Parfenon. He was close to the OPOYAZ group, and his apartment was a meeting place for writers and students of literature; "it may have been here that [Lev] Vygotsky first met members of the formalist school and the acmeic poet Mandel'shtam, one of his favorite poets." Marietta Shaginyan wrote this description: In Leningrad, on Mokhovaya Street, there was a typical Leningrad apartment house.. And in a typical gloomy Leningrad apartment in this building lived the man who in the first years of the October Revolution discovered for the Soviet reader the wonderful poetry of Cuba. He appeared shy and very pleasant, and it was impossible not to love and respect him. He was very pale, thin, short, with eyes that were kind and as clear as those of children beneath unusually thick eyebrows that almost shaded them. The apartment had books everywhere, piled to the ceiling and covering the floors. You would wait for him for hours, and then he would come back from Liteiny Avenue, where in those days alluring secondhand bookshops crowded both sides of the avenue, hauling home with difficulty a bunch of new books. This marvelous Leningrad booklover, known then as a Hispanist who knew many languages, was David Isaakovich Vygodsky, a name that was widely known across the ocean. Even today, books from South America arrive at his Leningrad address with touching inscriptions.. He was a friend of both Osip Mandelstam and Benedikt Livshits; the latter dedicated a sonnet to him. He was arrested on February 14, 1938 (as part of a general purge of translators) and, despite an unusual and courageous campaign of support from such writers as Yury Tynyanov, Viktor Shklovsky, Konstantin Fedin, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, died in the Gulag.

David Vygodsky is recorded with the occupation literary historian. Recorded as literary historian, literary critic, linguist, hispanist and translator.