Leites, Aleksandr

Leites, Aleksandr [Lejtes] (Oleksander), b 15 December 1899 in Brest-Litovsk, d 3 May 1976 in Moscow. (Photo: Aleksandr Leites.) Literary critic and scholar. In the 1920s he lived in Kharkiv, where he belonged to the writers' groups Hart, Vaplite, and Prolitfront and published theoretical and critical brochures and articles about Soviet Ukrainian, Russian, and Western European literature and writers. He also wrote Syluety Zakhodu (Silhouettes of the West, 1928) and compiled, with Mykola Yashek, Desiat’ rokiv ukraïns’koï literatury (1917–1927) (Ten Years of Ukrainian Literature [1917–27], 2 vols, 1928), an important biobibliographic and documentary source. During the terror of the 1930s he moved to Moscow; there he continued writing, but, for political reasons, not on Ukrainian literature.