A translator of classics and witness to the prisoners of 1933
Arrested in October 1933 and held in Butyrka prison, the twenty-year-old Lyubimov met men seized in the crackdown on homosexuals, and decades later recorded them in his memoirs.
Born in Moscow and raised in Peremyshl in Kaluga province, Lyubimov was the grandson of a governor of Vologda and of a village schoolteacher. After the Moscow Institute of New Languages he joined the Academia publishing house, but in October 1933 he was arrested on political charges; in Butyrka prison he met men seized in the crackdown on homosexuals, and he then served three years of exile in Arkhangelsk. Afterwards he translated on commission for various publishers and joined the Union of Soviet Writers in 1942. His Russian versions of Don Quixote, Gargantua and Pantagruel, the Decameron and Madame Bovary made him a master of literary translation. His memoir Unfading Flower is used as a source for the prison experience of 1933. He died in 1992.
Also known as: Nikolai Liubimov
Activities and affiliations
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1933
Soviet Union state institutionsStaff member at the Academia publishing house
Literature and arts -
–1992
Literature and arts
Career Timeline
- 1930Finished secondary school in Peremyshl
- 1933Graduated from the Moscow Institute of New Languages; joined the Academia publishing house
- 1933.10Arrested on political charges and held in Butyrka prison
- 1933Three years of exile in Arkhangelsk
- 1942Joined the Union of Soviet Writers
- 1953–1954Published his translation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote
- 1961Published his translation of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel
- 1970Published his translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron
Related historical events
Translating world literature into Russian
Lyubimov brought major French, Spanish and Italian works to Russian readers, translating Cervantes, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Proust, Flaubert, Stendhal and Molière. His literary career also encompassed editing and memoir writing.
Butyrka prison and Unfading Flower
Arrested on political charges in October 1933, Lyubimov encountered men imprisoned during the Moscow anti-homosexual campaign. Writing his memoir in the 1970s, he connected the Izvestiia article on van der Lubbe of 10 September 1933 with the subsequent arrests.
He identified its pseudonymous author “Iur” as Karl Radek. Roldugina considers the attribution plausible but explicitly unsubstantiated; the recollection should be read with that limit in view.