In memory of Boris Dubin

“Having knowledge of cosmic dimensions, he did not allow himself to look down”

On August 20, the most talented person, the Scientist with all the capital letters, the translator, sociologist, culturologist Boris Vladimirovich Dubin, passed away. Many will now write what an amazing intellectual he was. They will write that he was the first to discover Borges for us, about how many languages ​​​​he knew and how amazingly he translated poetry, what a deep analyst he was, how he stood at the foundations of Russian sociology together with the late Yuri Aleksandrovich Levada … My first reaction is no, well just not him, please!

For seven years I had the opportunity to work together and communicate with Boris Vladimirovich at the All-Russian Public Opinion Center (then the Levada Center), and most importantly, to learn from him, not being afraid to look up from the bottom up with my mouth open in amazement … And we, then still young employees, did not have time to do so much , ask him how they didn’t have time to thank him for that amazing time when you could come into the next room and dejectedly admit that you don’t understand anything in this study about books and why Russians have this particular Russian-language novel was considered the greatest… “Boris had the authority of a man of culture, a rare intellectual generosity,” my former colleagues write on the website www.levada.ru. Yes! That’s what I’m talking about – having knowledge in various fields of science and culture of some simply cosmic dimensions, being a laureate of thousands of awards and a holder of various orders, a great scientist, Boris Vladimirovich never allowed himself to poke you with your ignorance, to look down on you, to reproach you for ignorance of some common truths. On the contrary, he was ready to immediately, right here, on his knee, immediately explain what you don’t understand, talk about what you don’t know, and mention what you don’t know. This is a rare property, this is an amazing gift. When I started working at Psychologies, I approached him several times for expert commentary or to write a column for us, which he willingly did, whether it was a discourse on what “fashionable literature” is, or an inference as to why we like watch television series. Boris Vladimirovich wrote for us about what a “real man” is, he believed that real men are those who are ready to take responsibility, and not shift it to others, who are honest with themselves and others, attentive to life and people, keeps his word and appreciates the deed. “They become more only when society really needs them,” he wrote. It was precisely such a real person that Boris Vladimirovich was, and how terrible it is to lose him now, when society desperately needs people like him.

Blessed memory, dear Boris Vladimirovich.

Natalia Kim, columnist for Psychologies

“He never said or wrote the obvious”

There are people with whom the very idea of ​​death somehow catastrophically does not fit. Boris Dubin is one of them. I was lucky to meet him in my student years, quite by accident – still, in fact, without knowing who he was. I sat in the library of foreign literature, deserted at the height of the winter holidays, and read a thick book by a strange Englishman of the XNUMXth century – a safely (and not unreasonably) forgotten traveler and seeker of new stylistic forms. “I have never seen a living person read this tediousness,” I suddenly heard in my ear. I was about to be offended for my Englishman – at that time I was very passionate about him – when suddenly I saw in the eyes of my uninvited interlocutor something completely different from typical expectations: not a desire to demonstrate my own learning and certainly not a desire to start a conversation, but a real , lively and passionate interest in the subject. The interest is so deep, sharp and, for all that, benevolent, that it was simply impossible not to respond to it.

Our then-conversation in the library buffet lasted two happy hours, and from an inspired, cheerful skirmish, smoothly flowed into a complete intellectual reconciliation. It did not become the beginning of friendship – after Boris Dubin and I met quite often, but for the most part in a formal setting: sometimes we just bowed, sometimes we argued during public discussions, sometimes we exchanged a couple of phrases. But after that long-standing meeting, I always knew what Dubin really was: in today’s lukewarm world, he – one of the very few – kept in his soul the fire of true high curiosity – scientific and human. He never said or wrote the obvious: each of his articles, each speech was imbued with a burning need to understand, to find the truth, to understand the essence. That is why his texts (for me, of course, Dubin’s works on the sociology of reading have always been the most important) possessed the property, rare for scientific articles, to provoke heated debates and arouse thought.

Dubin’s legacy has remained with us, and we, I am sure, will be re-reading and reworking it for a long time to come, internally continuing to argue, disagree, applaud and, most importantly, move further in the directions he has outlined. But how we will live without him, without his inner fire, without his curiosity and goodwill, without his unique ability to plunge into the very essence of familiar things and emerge from there with some new, unexpected knowledge – I don’t know. How to imagine a world without a man who was life itself – this we have yet to learn, and it will hardly be easy.

Galina Yuzefovich, literary critic

Books by Boris Dubin

L. Gudkov, B. Dubin “Intelligentsia” (Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 2009).

B. Dubin “Classics, after and next” (UFO, 2010).