Boris Vladimirovich Dubin (; 31 December 1946 – 20 August 2014) was a

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

sociologist, and a

translator Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''trans ...

for English, French, Spanish, Latin American and Polish literature. Dubin was the head of department of sociopolitical researches at the

Levada Center The Levada Center is a Russian independent, nongovernmental polling and sociological research organization. It is named after its founder, the first Russian professor of sociology Yuri Levada (1930–2006). The center traces back its history t ...

and the assistant to Lev Gudkov, editor-in-chief of the sociological journal Russian Public Opinion Herald published by the center. Additionally he was a lecturer of

sociology of culture The sociology of culture, and the related cultural sociology, concerns the systematic analysis of culture, usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a member of a society, as it is manifested in the society. For Georg Simmel, ...

at the

Russian State University for the Humanities The Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH; ), is a university in Moscow, Russia with over 25,000 students. It was created in 1991 as the result of the merger of the Moscow Urban University of the People (est. 1908) and the Moscow Sta ...

and the Moscow higher school of social and economic sciences.

Professional activities

Dubin was born into a family of physicians. He was closely connected with the poets of SMOG (Russian: СМОГ), whose poems were printed as a

Samizdat Samizdat (, , ) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual rep ...

. In the second half of the 1960s he visited the seminars of famous poets and translators such as

Arseny Tarkovsky Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky (; 27 May 1989) was a Soviet and Russian poet and translator. He was predeceased by his son, film director and screenwriter Andrei Tarkovsky. Biography Family Tarkovsky was born on 25 June N.S. 1907 in Yelisav ...

, David Samoylov and

Boris Slutsky Boris Abramovich Slutsky (; 7 May 1919 – 23 February 1986) was a Soviet Union, Soviet poet, translator, Great Patriotic War (term), Great Patriotic War veteran, major, and member of the Union of Soviet Writers, Soviet Union of Writers (1957). ...

. He graduated from the philological faculty of the

Lomonosov Moscow State University Moscow State University (MSU), officially M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University,. is a public research university in Moscow, Russia. The university includes 15 research institutes, 43 faculties, more than 300 departments, and six branches. Al ...

in 1970 with a speciality "Russian language and literature; French language". His reviews were published in the public press for the first time in 1970. From 1970 to 1985 Dubin worked for the Russian State Library and in the following three years until 1988 at the All-Union Book Chamber. In 1988—2004 he worked as an employee of the Russian Public Opinion Research Center VCIOM. In 2004 the core of VCIOM employees including Dubin, left the organization and helped to set up the

under the direction of

Yuri Levada Yuri Alexandrovich Levada (; 24 April 1930 – 16 November 2006) was a well known Russian sociologist, political scientist and the founder of the Levada Center. Scientific activity to 1988 In 1952 Levada graduated from the Philosophical fac ...

Translations

In 1970 Dubin co-operated with the publishing house "Fiction" (Russian: Художественная литература), later with "Progress and Rainbow (Russian: Прогресс и Радуга). The first publicized translation was some poems of

Théophile Gautier Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier ( , ; 30 August 1811 – 23 October 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and rema ...

(1972). The largest translation (into Russian) works were the Spanish song lyrics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance such as

John of the Cross St. John of the Cross (; ; né Juan de Yepes y Álvarez; 24 June 1542 – 14 December 1591) was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest, mystic, and Carmelite friar of ''Converso'' ancestry. He is a major figure of the Counter-Reformation in Spain, ...

Luis Ponce de León Luis is a given name. It is the Spanish form of the originally Germanic name or . Other Iberian Romance languages have comparable forms: (with an accent mark on the i) in Portuguese and Galician, in Aragonese and Catalan, while is archaic ...

Juan Boscán Almogáver Joan Boscà i Almogàver (, ; 1490 – 21 September 1542), was a Spanish poet who incorporated hendecasyllable verses into Spanish. Biography The exact date of birth for Boscà is unclear, but there is a consensus that he was born anywhere betw ...

Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Barreda González de Henao Ruiz de Blasco y Riaño (17 January 160025 May 1681) (, ; ) was a Spanish dramatist, poet, and writer. He is known as one of the most distinguished Spanish Baroque literature, poets and ...

Luis de Góngora Luis de Góngora y Argote (born Luis de Argote y Góngora; ; 11 July 1561 – 24 May 1627) was a Spanish Baroque lyric poet and a Catholic prebendary for the Church of Córdoba. Góngora and his lifelong rival, Francisco de Quevedo, are widel ...

and many more. Other famous writers whose verses and prose he translated were

Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume Apollinaire (; ; born Kostrowicki; 26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Poland, Polish descent. Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of the ...

Endre Ady Endre Ady (Hungarian: ''diósadi Ady András Endre,'' archaic English: Andrew Ady; 22 November 1877 – 27 January 1919) was a turn-of-the-century Hungarian poet and journalist. Regarded by many as the greatest Hungarian poet of the 20th centur ...

Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo ( ; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish literature, Spanish-language and international literatur ...

Octavio Paz Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1977 Jerusalem Prize, the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a ...

César Vallejo César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (March 16, 1892 – April 15, 1938) was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators ...

, José Lezama Lima,

Fernando Pessoa Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa (; ; 13 June 1888 – 30 November 1935) was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, and publisher. He has been described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th c ...

. His translations also included essays of writers such as

Susan Sontag Susan Lee Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on "Camp", Notes on 'Ca ...

Isaiah Berlin Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks ...

Maurice Blanchot Maurice Blanchot ( ; ; 22 September 1907 – 20 February 2003) was a French writer, philosopher and literary theorist. His work, exploring a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence on pos ...

Emil Cioran Emil Mihai Cioran (; ; ; 8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) was a Romanian philosopher, aphorist and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, style, and aphorism ...

Henri Michaux Henri Michaux (; 24 May 1899 – 19 October 1984) was a Belgian-born French poet, writer and painter. Michaux is renowned for his strange, highly original poetry and prose, and also for his art: the Paris Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenhei ...

Yves Bonnefoy Yves Jean Bonnefoy (24 June 1923, Tours – 1 July 2016, Paris) was a French poet and art historian. He also published a number of translations, most notably the plays of William Shakespeare which are considered among the best in French. He was a ...

, Philippe Jaccottet,

José Ortega y Gasset José Ortega y Gasset (; ; 9 May 1883 – 18 October 1955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and dictatorship. His philosoph ...

Julio Cortázar Julio Florencio Cortázar (26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984; ) was an Argentine and naturalised French novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenc ...

Giorgio Agamben Giorgio Agamben ( ; ; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and '' homo sacer''. The concept of biopolitic ...

. Dubin translated the works of several Polish authors like

Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, (; nom de guerre: Jan Bugaj; 22 January 1921 – 4 August 1944) was a Polish poet and Home Army soldier, one of the most well known of the Generation of Columbuses, the young generation of Polish poets, of whom several ...

Czesław Miłosz Czesław Miłosz ( , , ; 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish Americans, Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. He primarily wrote his poetry in Polish language, Polish. Regarded as one of the great poets of the ...

, Janusz Szuber and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki. He also wrote and translated the anthology "Space in other words: the French poets of the 20th century about an image in art". Besides his translations, Dubin published articles about the latest foreign literature and modern Russian poetry. Dubin is the winner of different awards for his essays and translations, some of the biggest include the award for "Window" (Russian: Иллюминатор) in 1995, A.Leroy-Beaulieu and M.Vaksmaher for translations from French into Russian, the Andrei Bely Prize for humanitarian researches in 2005 and the International award of Efim Etkind in 2006. Chevalier of The

Ordre national du Mérite The (; ) is a French order of merit with membership awarded by the President of the French Republic, founded on 3 December 1963 by President Charles de Gaulle. The reason for the order's establishment was twofold: to replace the large number of ...

(France, 2008).

Books by Boris Dubin

Recognition

Dubin is a winner of several essay and translation awards. He is a knight of the National Order of Merit (France, 2008). He is also a winner of the "Foreign Literature", "Znamya" and "Knowledge is Strength" magazines, the prize of the Ministry of Culture of Hungary, the Anatole Leroy-Bollier Prize (France-Russia), the Maurice Waxmaher Prize (France-Russia), the Efim Etkind Prize and the Andrei Bely Prize.

References and external links

Russian:
Борис Дубин в передаче «Школа Злословия»

Бориса Дубина на сайте Института европейских культур
Страница
Бориса Дубина на Федеральном образовательном портале

Бориса Дубина в Библиотеке Якова Кротова
Страница
Бориса Дубина на сайте «Ежедневного журнала»

Бориса Дубина на сайте «Стенгазеты»
Фотографии Бориса Дубина
в галерее «Лица русской литературы» English:

* ttp://www.stanford.edu/group/Russia20/volumepdf/dubin.pdf "Russian Intelligentsia between classics and mass culture" by Boris Dubin
Official Levada Website

– PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION:
The Russian attitudes and the opportunities to make a choice by Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin {{DEFAULTSORT:Dubin, Boris Soviet sociologists Russian sociologists Translators to Russian 1946 births 2014 deaths Knights of the Ordre national du Mérite Writers from Moscow 20th-century Russian translators