In 2021, renowned Russian sociologist and translator Boris Vladimirovich Dubin would have turned 75. Dubin was a connoisseur of European culture, literature, and poetry, a public intellectual, the author of several hundred works, and a laureate of numerous awards in Russia and abroad. Among Russian humanities scholars, he is best known as a sociologist at the Levada Center, working within the research paradigm of Yuri Levada.

To a broader audience, he is recognized as a first-class translator of poetry and prose from Spanish, French, English, Hungarian, and Polish. Many authors who shaped the essence of 20th-century European culture became accessible to Russian readers thanks to Boris Dubin.

His book of interviews is a document of the era and a valuable resource, offering insights into and interpretations of Russian reality and public consciousness in the 1990s and 2000s. It provides a panoramic view of late Soviet and post-Soviet history. In these interviews, Dubin's analytical language took shape, his precise and sharp diagnoses of the times evolved in his sociological research, and his translation intuitions were refined into an ethos and philosophy of translation.