Efim Etkind (1918-1999) was a Soviet philologist and literary historian who published more than 500 articles in academic journals. He was known for founding his own school of European poetry translation. He supported dissidents such as Joseph Brodsky, A. I. Solzhenitsyn and A. D. Sakharov in the 1960s and 1970s, was accused of anti-Soviet activity and eventually stripped of his academic degree and position. Unable to find other work, he was deported out of the USSR and emigrated to Paris, where he taught at the Université Paris-Nanterre until 1986.Efim Etkind (1918-1999) was a Soviet philologist and literary historian who published more than 500 articles in academic journals. He was known for founding his own school of European poetry translation. He supported dissidents such as Joseph Brodsky, A. I. Solzhenitsyn and A. D. Sakharov in the 1960s and 1970s, was accused of anti-Soviet activity and eventually stripped of his academic degree and position. Unable to find other work, he was deported out of the USSR and emigrated to Paris, where he taught at the Université Paris-Nanterre until 1986.

“This is one of my favorite books ever. By mere coincidence, it was written by my uncle. Worldly, ironic, and poetic, Barcelona Prose depicts extraordinary examples of dignity, solidarity and endurance. Efim and his friends wrote satires, mocked professors, laughed and loved in the worst years of the Stalinist terror. A dashing intelligence officer during World War II who, in disgrace after the war, wrote dissertations for Communist functionaries, Efim refashioned himself into a major Soviet cultural figure, and became a charismatic Parisian professor. In this book, Efim Etkind built a proper monument to the great – now dead – 'longing for a world culture', by far the best part of the Soviet legacy. This universally- informed but distinctly Russian-Jewish culture was produced by a vigorous army of translators and philologists, for whom Efim Etkind was a leader. Everyone who is interested in Soviet culture, Jewish history, and the ironic arts of survival, will cherish this book.”

– Alexander Etkind, Professor of History, European University Institute, Florence

“Etkind’s memoir reveals an unexpected layer to the vocation of a prominent Russian literary scholar in his non-scholarly employ. For a secular Jew such as Etkind who was not a member of the Communist Party, to live a bearable Soviet life involved learning many ‘evasive maneuvers’ to protect himself and his friends from becoming victims of the regime. In 1942 he volunteered for the Red Army and served in the Department of Intelligence as a translator and propagandist broadcasting to the enemy troops on two fronts. Comparing the Nazi and Soviet brand of anti-Semitism, Etkind suggests that until the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939 the Soviet bigotry was motivated more by class origin than by ethnicity, but that after that the rules for identifying the ‘enemies of the people’ changed, and from the start of the war through the anti-Jewish hysteria of 1948–53 it was the ethnic variety of persecution that ruled the day. His memoir contains several precious vignettes of a few Red Army officers for whom not all Jews were ‘over-educated bespectacled sissies.’ Most of his vignettes, however, are about those who despite their 'unfortunate-sounding' surnames were admitted into the ranks of the Soviet cultural elite and either grudgingly or wittingly promoted the superiority of the Soviet system. Along the way we learn about Etkind's close association with, and often dangerous actions on behalf of, a number of the country's most celebrated writers and thinkers, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Etkind writes about the moral compromises that the Jewish intelligentsia had to make often to serve an honorable cause, such as a publication of some prescribed text. Still, Etkind has little compassion for those who willingly collaborated with the regime and only belatedly, when the times allowed, renounced their faith in the infallibility of the Communist Party.

In conclusion I would like to point out that Etkind’s memoir is truly delightful reading. A literary scholar has applied his magisterial insights into poetics to his own narrative practice.”

“More than anything else, the memoiristic pieces in Barcelona Prose recount the scholar’s various encounters with the challenge of making moral choices (both his and others) in a heavily politicized environment… [P]erhaps most compelling about these essays, aside from the sharpness of remembered detail and the vividness of the different portraits, is that Etkind does not so much speak about his own moral choices, for the impression is consistently given that the choices were mostly second nature and not particularly agonized over, but about his witnessing of the moral choices of others…”

– From the Afterword by David Bethea, Professor Emeritus in Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison