Vinokur Grigory Osipovich (1896-1947)

Vinokur (Winokur) Grigory Osipovich (1896, Warsaw – 1947, Moscow) — philologist and linguist.

Grigory Vinokur graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology at Moscow University in 1922. From 1920 to 1922, he was seconded by the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR as a translator and adviser at the Soviet diplomatic missions in Reval and Riga. From 1922 onwards, he worked as a translator and editor of foreign news at ROSTA.

Grigory Vinokur was actively involved in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Moscow Dialectological Commission. From 1924, he was a freelance contributor to the State Academy of Artistic Sciences. His research focused on poetics and textual studies. In 1942, he defended his doctoral dissertation titled Essays on the History of Pushkin’s Language and Text.

In the 1930s, he was a senior research fellow at the Institute of Russian Literature, the Institute of Language and Writing, and the Institute of Language and Thinking. During the same period, he also taught at MIFLI (Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History), Moscow State University (MSU), and Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. From 1941 to 1945, he headed the Department of Russian Language at MSU.

Grigory Vinokur authored works on the theory of linguistics, grammar, word formation, the history of the Russian literary language, and language culture. He was one of the compilers of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language (edited by D. N. Ushakov), and developed methodologies for compiling an author-specific lexicon. He initiated the project for a dictionary of Pushkin’s language and contributed significantly to Pushkin studies.

His daughter, Tatyana Vinokur (1924, Moscow – 1992, Moscow), was also a philologist and received her Doctor of Philological Sciences degree in 1981. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology at Moscow State University in 1948. From 1952 to 1960, she taught at several Moscow universities and from 1960 to 1992 was a researcher at the Institute of the Russian Language, USSR Academy of Sciences. She authored several philological works.

Selected Works:

Культура яз. Очерки лингвистической тех­нологии, М., 1925 (Culture of Language: Essays in Linguistic Technology, Moscow, 1925)

Биография и культура, М, 1927 (Biography and Culture, Moscow, 1927)

Рус. яз. Истор. очерк, М., 1945 (The Russian Language: A Historical Overview, Moscow, 1945)

Избр. работы по рус. яз.: М., 1959 (Selected Works on the Russian Language, Moscow, 1959)

Филол. иссл.: Лингвистика и поэтика (Сост. Т.Г.Винокур и М.И.Шапир), М, 1990 (Philological Research: Linguistics and Poetics (compiled by T. G. Vinokur and M. I. Shapir), Moscow, 1990)

О яз. худ. лит-ры (Сост. Т.Г.Винокур), М., 1991. (On the Language of Literary Fiction (compiled by T. G. Vinokur), Moscow, 1991)