caption death_date birth_place birth_date alt image article_title name occupation
semyon a. vengerov 1920 1855 yes lubny , poltava governorate 1855 yes semyon a. vengerov vengerov.jpg semyon vengerov
 semyon vengerov russian historian
semyon vengerov

semyon afanasievich vengerov -lrb- Семён Афанасьевич Венгеров ; 1855 , lubny , poltava governorate -- 1920 -rrb- was the preeminent literary historian of imperial russia .
he was the pater familias of an artistic clan that included his sister isabelle vengerova , a co-founder of the curtis institute in philadelphia , and nephew nicolas slonimsky , a russian-american composer .
vengerov studiously researched the careers of `` second-tier '' russian authors of the 19th and -lrb- especially -rrb- 18th centuries .
his materials proved indispensable for several generations of russian literary historians .
his archives contain the largest private collection of dostoyevsky 's letters and manuscripts .
he was a great admirer of ivan turgenev , the subject of his first major work of criticism -lrb- approved by turgenev himself -rrb- .
vengerov also presided over an influential pushkin seminar and the russian book chamber -lrb- which he had helped found -rrb- .
in the early 20th century he issued a detailed overview of recent russian literature and edited the grand brockhaus-efron edition of pushkin 's works -lrb- 1907 -- 16 -rrb- in 6 large quarto volumes ; d. s. mirsky refers to this edition as `` a monument of infinite industry and infinite bad taste '' .
vengerov 's interest in academic biographism gained him a reputation of being a positivist compiler of biographical data .
according to mirsky , his works contain `` a great mass of prefatory , commentatory , and biographical matter , most of which is more or less worthless '' .
in `` noise of time '' , osip mandelshtam claimed that vengerov had `` understood nothing in russian literature and studied pushkin as a professional task '' .
for vengerov , the greatest merit of russian literature was its essential didacticism : `` for the russian reader , literature has always been a holy thing ; contact with it makes him purer and better , and he always relates to it with a feeling of real religiosity '' .
