Aleksandr Voronsky
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (; – 13 August 1937) was a prominent humanist Marxist literary critic, theorist and editor of the 1920s, disfavored and purged in 1937 for his work with the Left Opposition and Leon Trotsky during and after the October Revolution. Voronsky's writings were hidden away in the Soviet Union, until his autobiography, Waters of Life and Death, and anthology, Art as the Cognition of Life were translated and published in English. Early life Voronsky was born in the village of Khoroshavka in Tambov Governorate; his father was the village priest, Konstantin Osipovich Voronsky, who died when Aleksandr was a few years old. It is likely Voronsky was not the family name, but was taken up his father because his parish was located on the river Vorona. After attending a Tambov religious school, in 1900 he enrolled in the Tambov Seminary, where he helped organize an illegal library for the seminary students. In 1904 he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and the following year he was expelled from the seminary for "political unreliability". During the 1905 revolution, he moved to St. Petersburg, and applied to join the Bolsheviks. The local organisers, Sergei Malyshev and Maria Ulyanova, younger sister of the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, initially turned him away because they thought he was too excitable and liable to buckle under arrest. but he persisted, and was put to work first as a courier, and then running a printing press. In September 1906 he was arrested and sentenced to a year of solitary confinement. Soon after his release he was arrested again in Vladimir and sentenced to two years of exile. On his way to Yarensk in Vologda guberniya Voronsky met his future wife, Serafima Solomonovna Pesina, another young Bolshevik. After finishing his exile in 1910 he moved to Moscow and then Saratov, where he helped form a provincial group of Bolsheviks and organize a number of major strikes. In January 1912 he was one of 18 delegates to the Prague Party Conference, at which he took the minutes of the conference and spoke strongly for a mass daily workers' newspaper. On his return to Russia he continued underground work and was rearrested on May 8; his exile ended in September 1914, when he returned to Tambov with his wife and newborn daughter, Galina, moving to Ekaterinoslav the following year. Participation in the Bolshevik Revolution When the February Revolution came, he became a member of the Odessa Executive Committee of the Council of Workers' Deputies and edited the local Bolshevik newspaper, Golos proletariya (Voice of the Proletariat). After the October Revolution, he helped the Bolsheviks take power in Odessa and in early 1918 moved to Saratov, Moscow, and then Ivanovo, where he assisted his friend Mikhail Frunze, edited the newspaper Rabochii krai (Workers' Land), and headed the provincial Party Committee. Literary and political career In January 1921 Voronsky left for Moscow, where he met with Lenin and Gorky to discuss plans for a new