Born in Saint Petersburg in 1891 to a Jewish family, Zhirmunsky was a professor at universities in Saratov and Leningrad, and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
His critique of the ahistorical nature of formalism, in the introduction to his translation of Oskar Walzel′s Die künstlerische Form des Dichtwerkes (1919) helped speed the end of Russian formalism's initial phase, as critics began to accommodate their work to the developing ideology of the Soviet regime.
Though originally trained in German Romanticism, he started to research the epics of the Asian people of the Soviet Union after he was settled in Tashkent following the evacuation of Leningrad.
This research created a foundation that allowed Yeleazar Meletinsky to make his considerations on the relations between myth and epos.
[1] In April 1948, Zhirmunsky was among the scholars and critics who recanted their supposed "comparativism" and "Veselovskyism" in Andrei Zhdanov′s purge of that year.