Gorky Institute of World Literature

The institute is organized into departments, each specializing in a specific region or genre of literature. These departments include the Department of Literary Theory, Folklore, Old Slavic Literature, 19th Century Russian Literature, Contemporary Russian Literature and Russian Emigree Literature, Classical Western Literature and Comparative Literature, Literature of Asia and Africa, Contemporary European and American Literature, Literature of Russian Minorities and CIS Countries, and Manuscripts. There is also a department devoted to how Russian Literature is taught and disseminated abroad. The institute is also home to personal archives of writers, including Maxim Gorky and Andrei Platonov. In-house scholars devote themselves to publishing new works, and visiting scholars can also arrange to conduct research there, attend lectures, or speak about their work. The Gorky Institute was established in 1932 by decree of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union entitled, "On the events to mark the 40th Anniversary of the Literary Activity of Maxim Gorky." The institute was renamed from the Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature to the A. Gorky Institute of Literature in 1934 in accordance with another decree of the Presidium of the Central Committee, and Lev Kamenev was appointed as the first director. On 14 February 1937, the Gorky Archive and Gorky Museum were added on, the latter of which opened on 1 November 1937. On 4 March 1938, they also opened the State Museum of Alexander Pushkin, which was later moved to Leningrad in 1949. On 16 April 1938, upon joining the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences, it received its current name. It is now located at the former estate of the Gagarins, which was built in the first quarter of the 19th Century by Italian architect Domenico Gilardi. In 1950, an employee of the institute, Vera Nechaeva became a V. Belinksy Prize Laureate for the first volume of a four-volume biography of Vissarion Belinsky. In 1952 Nechaeva was appointed as head of the institute's Department of Texts.

• Years — Director • 1932–1934 — L.B. Kamenev • 1935–1936 — I.K. Luppol • 1936–1940 — A. A. Kancheev • 1940 — I.K. Luppol (acting) • 1941–1944 — L. I. Ponomarev • 1945–1947 — acad. V.F.Shishmarev • 1948–1952 — Corresponding Member Academy of Sciences of the USSR A.M. Egolin • 1952–1966 — Corresponding Member USSR Academy of Sciences I. I. Anisimov • 1966–1968 — Corresponding Member Academy of Sciences of the USSR V.R.Shcherbina (acting) • 1968–1974 — Corresponding Member USSR Academy of Sciences B.L.Suchkov • 1974–1975 — Corresponding Member Academy of Sciences of the USSR V.R.Shcherbina (acting) • 1975–1977 — Yu. Ya. Barabash • 1977–1987 — Corresponding Member RAS G.P. Berdnikov • 1987–2004 — Corresponding Member RAS F. F. Kuznetsov • 2005–2015 — A. B. Kudelin • since 2015 — Corresponding Member RAS V. V. Polonskiy