ABSTRACT
N ikolai Mikhailovich Liubimov was a trans-lator, editor, essayist and writer. Prior to his arrest and subsequent three-year exile in the 1930s, Liubimov worked as an editor for a major Soviet publishing house Academia, and later, after World War II, he edited translations of the complete works of Victor Hugo, Prosper Mérimée and Alphonse Daudet for the Soviet publishing house Biblioteka Ogonek [Ogonek Library]. One of the most productive and influential Russian translators of the 20th century, Liubimov translated more than two dozen major novels and plays from French, Spanish, Italian, and German. His translations included Boccaccio’s Decameron, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Molière’s The Forced Marriage and The Would-be Gentleman. He also translated works of Prosper Mérimée, Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, Alphonse Daudet, Eugène Scribe, Friedrich Schiller, Romain Rolland, Marcel Proust and other major European writers. A member of the Writers’ Union for 50 years (1942-1992), he published numerous essays and memoirs devoted to the life and work of major Russian writers, such as Afanasii Fet, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Leskov, Vladimir Korolenko, Boris Pasternak, Eduard Bagritskii, and others. He also wrote several articles on the art of translation.
