The son of poet Vladimir Lifshitz, Loseff was born in Leningrad.^[2] He attended Leningrad's famous Saint Peter's School and graduated from the journalism department of the Leningrad State University.^[2]

Loseff immigrated to the U.S. in 1976.^[3] He earned a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan and became a professor of Russian literature at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a position he held until his death thirty years later.^[1] In his later years Loseff was a Russian-language radio personality and a prolific author, writing both poetry and non-fiction works on Russian literature.

Loseff died on May 6, 2009, in Hanover, NH.^[4]

• Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life
• Joseph Brodsky: The Art of a Poem (co-edited with Valentina Polukhina)
• Iosif Brodskii: Trudy i dni (co-edited with Petr Vail)
• On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature
• Poetika Brodskogo
• Brodsky's Poetics and Aesthetics (co-edited with Valentina Polukhina)
• A Sense of Place: Tsarskoe Selo and Its Poets (co-edited with Barry Scherr)
• Eight collections of poetry and prose in Russian.^[1]

• http://www.vavilon.ru/texts/prim/losev0.html
• http://www.rvb.ru/np/publication/02comm/10/07losev.htm
• Photographs of Loseff
• Book review of Loseff's biography of Joseph Brodsky.
• Interview with Loseff in Ogonyok magazine.
• http://levloseff.blogspot.com/
• "Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff" in Quarterly Conversation [1]