Eugène Vinaver

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Eugène Vinaver (born Russian: Евгений Максимович Винавер, 1899-1979) was a French and British literary scholar.

Vinaver was born June 18, 1899 in Saint-Petersburg a son of Russian lawyer and politician Maxim Vinaver who emigrated to France in 1919. Eugene Vinaver studied in Ecole praticque where he was a pupil of Joseph Bedier. Since the late 1920s he lived in England. He received his Doctor's degree in the Oxford University in 1950.

In 1928, Eugene Vinaver founded in Oxford the Arthurian society, which published two volumes under the title Arthuriana (1929, 1930). This society was renamed Society for the study of the medieval languages and literatures. Arthuriana became Medium Aevum. In 1948 international Arthurian society was organized by Eugene Vinaver and Jean Frappier.

Eugene Vinaver published in 1947 a new edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur, based on a manuscript of XV century discovered in Manchester in 1934 and argued that Malory rather wrote an ensemble of autonomous tales.

He was a correspondent member of the British Academy and the Medieval Academy of America, a foreign member of Académie royale de langue et de littérature française of Belgium.

Vinaver died on July 21, 1979.