Efim Etkind (1918–1999)

Efim Etkind was born to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russia, a son of Grigori Etkind and Polina Spivak. He served with the Soviet Army as an interpreter in World War II, then returned to his studies at Leningrad University. There he earned an undergraduate degree and doctorate in philological sciences. He taught west European literature, French, and German at Leningrad Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, and in 1952 joined the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, where he rose to the rank of professor. He taught theory of translation, French and German literary history, and poetics. A renowned scholar, he wrote and translated numerous books. In the 1960s, he assisted and defended dissident poets and was punished by having his degrees and title of professor removed, and being expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union. He had no choice but to leave Russia, and in 1974, he moved to Paris, where he quickly became a professor and Docteur d'Etat at the Université de Paris. In France, he published an account of his ordeal, Zapiski nezagovorshchika (1977), translated into French as Un dissident malgre lui. He launched numerous scholarly projects, such as a new edition of Aleksandr Pushkin in French (1982) that earned him a special prize from the Academie française, and the two-volume Histoire de la litterature russe (1987, 1990). In 1986, he was awarded the title of Chevalier de Palmes Academiques in recognition of his invaluable services to French education.