He graduated from the Romance and Germanic division of Saint St. 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).
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. At the time of the October Revolution and Civil War he was teaching Latin and giving lectures on modern literature in Gomel, but in the 1920s he moved to Petrograd. Zemlya (Land), a collection of his own poetry, was published in 1922.
In the same year, his article "A Survey of New Jewish Poetry" appeared in the Petrograd journal Parfenon.
He was arrested on February 14, 1938 (as part of a general purge of translators) and, despite an unusual and courageous campaign of support from such writers as Yury Tynyanov, Viktor Shklovsky, Konstantin Fedin. and Mikhail Zoshchenko, died in the Gulag.
He was close to the OPOYAZ group, and his apartment was a meeting place for writers and students of literature. "it may have been here that Vygotsky first met members of the formalist school and the acmeic poet Mandel"shtam, one of his favorite poets." Marietta Shaginyan wrote this description:.
