Rubin Aron Ilyich (1888-1961)

Rubin Aron Ilyich (1888–1961), brother of I. G. Rubin, was a philosopher, literary scholar, and translator. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of St Petersburg University in 1911. Until 1931 he taught philosophy at Moscow University, but after his brother’s conviction in the well-known trial he was dismissed from all positions and for nearly twenty years earned his living by translation (he knew fifteen languages).

Author of more than 60 scholarly works and translations. Among Rubin’s translations are passages from Maimonides, translated from Hebrew (chapters from Moreh Nevukhim / Guide for the Perplexed), published in the appendix to S. N. Grigoryan’s book From the History of the Philosophy of Central Asia and Iran, 7th–12th Centuries (Moscow, 1960).

He was the author of many philosophical works and articles on Russian poets and writers that were never published in the Soviet Union. His article “Kant and Marx” was taken out of Moscow in 1960 by Professor A. Yasur of the University of Haifa, translated into Hebrew, and published in the journal Ba-Sha‘ar (No. 6, 1971) under the pseudonym Aharon Ben-Eliyahu.

The collection A. I. Rubin. Articles on Russian Poets. From the Philosophical Diary was published in 1985 (prepared for publication by Maria and Inna Rubin). The complete Philosophical Diary and the work Kant and Marx were first published in Russian in Israel in 1988.