how best to deal with "deiatel'"?

[Margarita Nafpaktitis]

Dear colleagues,
Has anyone come up with an effective way to render "deiatel'" -- I'm
particularly plagued by the phrases  "kul'turnyi deiatel'" and "Deiateli
Khudozhestvennogo Slova" (vis-a-vis Russian cultural life in the 1920s) --
into English?  For the second phrase, I've experimented with
"promoters"/"supporters" and don't absolutely hate it, but I haven't found
anything that works for the first (I've already rejected "activist" [too
edgy], "figure" [too static], "agent" [too contemporarily anthropological
and/or Cold War espionage-ical]).   The Bol'shoi tolkovovyi slovar' russkogo
iazyka published by the RAN Institut lingvisticheskikh issledovanii (2002),
even kind of fudges, by using a  word with the same root in the definition:
"Litso, proiavivshee sebia v kakoi-libo oblasti obshchestvennoi
deiatel'nosti."  (deiatelnost' - rabota, zaniatie kogo-libo v kokoi-libo
oblasti).

Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions!

Margarita

-- 
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
Margarita Nafpaktitis
Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Virginia
109 New Cabell Hall / PO Box 400783
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4783
Tel: (434) 924-3548 FAX: (434) 982-2744
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mn2t/home.html

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