Yuri Tynyanov

Yuri Tynyanov wrote biographical novels — though he called them "historical tales." Kyukhlya, on Kuchelbecker; The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, on Griboedov; Pushkin, left unfinished. Documentary fact and imagination in equal measure.

He was born in Rezhitsa, in Latvia, in 1894. A literary scholar and Formalist, he belonged to OPOYAZ alongside Shklovsky and Jakobson, and developed a theory of literary evolution.

Kyukhlya (1925) gives us Kuchelbecker as eccentric, failure, Decembrist. In The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, Griboedov travels to Persia toward his death, knowing that he does. Tynyanov wrote it as a tragedy of historical inevitability.

From the 1930s he suffered from multiple sclerosis. He died in Moscow in 1943, Pushkin still unfinished.