His teachers at the Petrograd Institute of History and Philology included Lev Shcherba and Aleksey Shakhmatov, but Charles Bally's ideas influenced him the most deeply during his formative years.
[1] From the standpoint of linguistics, Vinogradov set out as a good-natured critic of the Russian formalists: he was on friendly terms with many of them.
Two years later, he was allowed to settle somewhat closer to the capital, in Mozhaysk, only to be exiled to Siberia after Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941.
The authorities heaped honors on him in profusion: he was elected into the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and was awarded the Stalin Prize (1951).
Vinogradov's rise to power cemented his followers (Sergey Ozhegov, Natalia Shvedova) into the dominant academic school of Soviet linguistics.