23 December 1891] in Saint Petersburg – 17 July 1938 in Leningrad) was a Russian literary scholar.
He was a professor, social activist, and friend of Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as of Boris Pasternak and Fyodor Sologub.
One of his works, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, was believed to be written by his "co-thinker" Bakhtin, using his name to escape censorship.
This belief was raised during the 1970s in Russia but developed fully in Clark and Holquist's English biography of Bakhtin of 1984.
[2] Now, it is mostly believed that the work was written by Medvedev although influenced by Bakhtin's ideas.