Semyon Vengerov

His parents were of the few acculturated Russian Jews, and sent him to a Christian school, of which he once was expelled for refusing to kneel before an icon.

[1] He was the pater familias of an artistic clan that included his sisters Isabelle Vengerova, a co-founder of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and Zinaida Vengerova, a noted literary critic,[2][3] as well as nephew Nicolas Slonimsky, a Russian-American composer.

Vengerov also presided over an influential Pushkin seminar and the Russian Book Chamber (which he had helped found).

According to Mirsky, his works contain "a great mass of prefatory, commentatory, and biographical matter, most of which is more or less worthless".

[5] In Noise of Time, Osip Mandelshtam claimed that Vengerov had "understood nothing in Russian literature and studied Pushkin as a professional task".