Born in Vitebsk, present-day Belarus, Yuri Nikolaevich Tynianov (Юрий Николаевич Тынянов) was a leading Russian and Soviet literary theorist, historian and novelist as well as a member of the Russian formalists. Alongside Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) and Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), Tynianov worked toward a description of literature by reference only to the formal characteristics and language of the work itself, without relying on historical or biographical descriptions to generate meaningful readings.