Leonid Volodarsky died. Obituary

At the age of 74, translator Leonid Volodarsky, an exemplary member of the seventies, who became one of the undoubted symbols of the eighties and nineties, died – and in general a surprisingly diverse person.

Unlike the scouts from the Soviet film, who were “know only by sight”, Leonid Volodarsky, well, as Levitan was in his time, the whole USSR knew only by voice as “a man with a clothespin on his nose.” The specific timbre of his voice, which since 1980 has sounded almost six thousand pirated video cassettes with masterpieces and dregs of world cinema, gave rise to a legend that, hiding from the organs, Volodarsky worked in precisely this specific way. The question about the clothespin got him so much that he was ready, in his own words, to “turn around and cut” in response to it, but restrained himself.

In fact, he owed his timbre to two broken noses as a result of an accident and, yes, a fight.

It was thanks to him that the Soviet people first saw, albeit on the “small screen” of VCRs, “Star Wars” and “Mel Brooks’ World History”, “Jaws” and “Terminator”, originally called Volodarsky “Killer Cyborg”.

If the personality of Volodarsky was limited only by his titanic role in the underground box office, this could have been stopped. But this brilliant intellectual, a hereditary philologist who spoke four European languages ​​like his mother tongue, was much more complex and interesting. As much as the 1970s and 1980s were more complex and interesting than all the clichés.

A foreign language graduate, he worked – well, or was listed – as a research assistant, first at the Institute for African Studies, and then at the Institute of the International Labor Movement. These divisions of the Academy of Sciences were a haven for serious scientists, and secret – and not very secret – dissidents, and liberal speechwriters Brezhnev and Andropov, and intelligence officers at rest or on a break.

As a literary translator, he will go down in history as the first to translate Stephen King’s nightmares into Russian. In the 10th issue of the magazine “Young Technician” for 1981, which came out, for a second, with a circulation of 1,884,500 copies, his translation of the story “Battle” appeared. Then there was something else on trifles, but by that time Volodarsky had already embarked on a different path. From the 1970s, he worked as a translator at closed screenings – up to screenings for members of the CPSU Central Committee – of foreign films that were not available in the Soviet box office. Well, he worked at the MIFF, of course.

Naturally, with the beginning of the era of video recorders, he could not help but attract the attention of the pioneers of the illegal video business and did not refuse their invitations. Sometimes his daily output reached five or seven films.

The legend that he always translated simultaneously and the first time is close to the truth, although not quite. A subtle connoisseur of cinema, the best films that he knew about, but did not see, Volodarsky did watch in advance.

Business then was quite artisanal. The translator had two video recorders in his apartment, with which he worked. Then specially trained people came and took away the finished cassette, which was then replicated. According to Volodarsky, he did not make “stone chambers” in this matter, but he provided himself with a more than worthy existence. Obviously, it became even more worthy when, after 1991, small underground workshops grew into factories with 200 or more VCRs working for dubbing.

The business was not only artisanal, but also dangerous. The translation itself did not conceal anything criminal in itself. But illegal entrepreneurship involving hired labor, that is, the labor of Volodarsky, threatened video pirates with real terms. In many cases of this kind, Volodarsky was never accused, only a witness. Even, as he clarified in one interview, a “professional witness”, whatever that means.

What was the secret of his invulnerability? Obviously, the level of trust that he enjoyed as a nomenklatura translator guaranteed him significant patronage and territory of not very secret freedom. A situation that perfectly characterizes the ambiguity of the era of late stagnation, the hypocrisy of the Soviet consumer society.

Objectively, underground translations of Volodarsky undermined the ideological monopoly of the Soviet government. But he himself remained an adamant patriot of the USSR until the end of his life.

However, Volodarsky had other, no less interesting connections. He was professionally interested in the history of intelligence, brilliantly versed in it, and even wrote a detective story about the intrigues of the CIA in Latin America. Intelligence responded to him in return. So, on December 20, 2010, he was a guest of honor on the Mayak radio broadcast dedicated to the Day of the Chekist, where he said that only 5% of the fighters of the invisible front, hand-to-hand intellectuals, become known, and the remaining 95% are classified forever. Moreover, he invited his friend, a veteran of the Vympel special forces detachment, Sergey Shestov, to the air. The fighters of the “Vympel” and “Cascade” he intimately-friendly called “pennants” and “stuntmen”.

Mikhail Trofimenkov