He taught himself French and translated Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, a classic of modern sociology, into Russian. He started publishing internationally. He became a professor—not at the sociology department of Moscow State, which was no place for someone like him, but in the philosophy department of Russian Humanities University, a much smaller and far younger institution that did not have its own department of sociology. There he launched his own standing seminar, which, like Levada’s seminar in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, served to give young
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