His father was a typographic worker in his youth, and in the Russian Civil War he was a commissar in the First Cavalry Army.

[1] Dubrovin graduated from high school, and during World War II he worked as a turner at a defence plant then volunteered for the infantry.

He graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in 1958 and became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1957.

[1] He won the all-union competition for best patriotic work, organised by DOSAAF, and became a diploma winner of the USSR Ministry of Defence literature prize [ru] in 1972.

He was the recipient of the Sergei Korolev Gold Medal [ru] for poetry about astronautics, the Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Silver Medal, laureate of the Republican Prize of the Turkmen SSR for the book Дыхание границы ("Breath of the Border") (1957).