Sergey Sobolevsky was a Russian and Soviet classical philologist, translator, teacher, and professor. He was born in Moscow on August 25, 1864, and studied at the Fifth Moscow Gymnasium, graduating with a gold medal in 1882. He then entered Moscow University, where he completed his studies in 1886 with a degree in philology and a gold medal for a comparative study of Greek, Latin, and Russian verb tenses and moods.
Sobolevsky began teaching at Moscow University in 1887 and also taught Ancient Greek at two Moscow gymnasiums. After defending his master’s dissertation on the use of prepositions in Aristophanes in 1890, he became a privat-docent in classical philology. He defended his doctoral dissertation on selected aspects of Aristophanes’ syntax in 1892 and advanced through professorial appointments, becoming a full professor in 1899. In 1915 he received the title of distinguished professor. From 1907 he also taught Greek paleography at the Moscow Archaeological Institute, and from 1909 he taught Greek language and literature at the Moscow Theological Academy.
After the closure of Moscow University’s Faculty of History and Philology in 1921, Sobolevsky worked at the Research Institute of Language and Literature and taught ancient languages at Moscow literary courses. From 1934 he helped establish the classical department at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History and taught there for many years; from 1934 to 1942 he was also a professor at the First Moscow State University. He later returned to Moscow University as a professor of classical philology. From 1937 he worked at the Institute of World Literature, where he headed its classical department from 1948, and he also taught at the Moscow City Pedagogical Institute.
His books include studies of Aristophanes and textbooks and grammars of Ancient Greek and Latin. He translated works by Xenophon, Lysias, Isocrates, Aesop, Epicurus, and Plutarch, and prepared annotated editions of Julius Caesar and Terence. With G. F. Tsereteli, he published two albums of Greek manuscripts. Sobolevsky edited and contributed to multivolume histories of Greek and Roman literature and wrote the grammatical supplement to I. Kh. Dvoretsky’s Ancient Greek–Russian Dictionary. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1928. He died in Moscow on May 6, 1963.