Tomashevsky finished Gymnasium (high school) in 1908 but was unable to attend the Polytechnical Institute.
He received training in statistics and electrical engineering in Liège and Paris[1] and took classes at Sorbonne.
He started giving lectures on text analysis, literary theory, and the work of Pushkin at the State Institute of Art History, From 1924 he taught in the department of Russian literature at Leningrad University.
[2] Tomashevsky was involved in compiling the Ushakov Dictionary and supervised the first Soviet editions of Pushkin's and Dostoyevsky's collected works.
He wrote major works on versification, poetics, stylistics, text analysis, Pushkin studies, and French poetry.