David Isaakovich Vygodsky (Russian: Дави́д Исаа́кович Вы́годский) (September 23, 1893 – 1943) was a Russian literary critic, linguist, translator, poet, and teacher. Born in Gomel in the Russian Empire (now in Belarus) into a nonreligious Jewish family, Vygodsky was the cousin of the well-known developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, on whom he was an important influence. He graduated from the Romance and Germanic division of Saint Petersburg State University and became a translator and teacher; he translated from German (Johannes Becher), French (André Malraux), Hebrew (Chaim Bialik), and especially Spanish (Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Benito Pérez Galdós, and others). At the time of the October Revolution and Civil War he was teaching Latin and giving lectures on modern literature in Gomel,