Metadata: E. G. Etkind
Collection
- Country:
- Russia
- Holding institution:
- The National Library of Russia
- Holding institution (official language):
- Российская национальная библиотека. Отдел рукописей.
- Postal address:
- 91069, Russia, St. Petersburg, ul. Sadovaia, д. 18, main building
- Phone number:
- (812) 310-28-56
- Web address:
- http://www.nlr.ru
- Email:
- office@nlr.ru
- Reference number:
- F. 1317
- Title:
- E. G. Etkind
- Title (official language):
- ЭТКИНД Е. Г.
- Creator/accumulator:
- E. G. Etkind
- Date(s):
- 1893/1994
- Language:
- Russian
- German
- French
- English
- Hebrew
- Extent:
- 4,130 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Scope and content:
-
[The fonds was being processed when this description was written; information given is as of 30 November 2014.] Each of the fonds’ inventories features materials on Jewish history and culture; these may be provisionally divided into the following thematic groups:
1) Efim Etkind’s personal documents and materials on the history of his family, including, in op. 2, a selection of documents on the “E. G. Etkind case” (1974), including a record of a session of the academic council of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, and a KGB document that reports, and in particular, that Efim Etkind had composed a “Letter to Young Jews Aspiring to Emigrate,” which contained a “call to Jews not to depart for another country, but to stay and fight for their freedom and civil rights here (i.e., in the USSR)”; Efim Etkind’s statement to the academic council regarding a report by the “German Wave” radio station on his case; a note pertaining to the KGB document; letters addressed to Leonid Brezhnev, N. V. Podgornyi, and the University of Amsterdam; a subpoena connected with the case of the dissident M. R. Kheifets, subsequently a well-known Israeli writer and commentator; copies of publications on the Etkind case in the journal Posev (July 1974); a printed copy of the Chronicle of the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR (issue 9, New York, 1974) that contains articles titled “The Kheifets Case” and “Documents on the Etkind Case,” and also a report on administrative harassment of activists of the movement for Jewish emigration to Israel.
Housed in op. 4 is a certificate issued to I. G. Etkind by the Gomel’ Craftsmen’s Administration attesting that he was legally registered in a guild as master ropemaker no. 1 (1893); the fonds also has photographs of Efim Etkind and members of his family, etc.
2) Works by Efim Etkind: translations of literary works from various languages; critical articles and commentary, and materials used in writing them; notes and literary research, and memoirs; and in particular, op. 1 has manuscripts of Efim Etkind’s translations of Karl Gutzkow’s play Uriel Acosta (1954) and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Peace (1964), as well as of poetry by P. Mikhnia (real name: P. B. Shil’man) (1972); housed in op. 2 are typewritten and manuscript articles: “The Birth of a Master,” on the writings of Fridrikh Gorenshtein (Kontinent, № 18, 1979); “Osip Mandel’shtam: A Trilogy on the Century, 1922-1924-1931” (1982); etc. Op. 3 contains an autograph manuscript of an article for The Concise Literary Encyclopedia on M. A. Froman (Frakman; 1973-74) and an autograph rough draft of the memoir “Notes of a Non-Conspirator,” on the trial of Joseph Brodsky, the M. R. Kheifets case, and the public reprimands of 1946-47 (1975); op. 5 contains manuscripts of the articles “A Little ‘Dreyfus Affair’” (1985); “Paris Letters” on I. E. Babel’ (1986); “There Are No Two Truths. On the Soviet Publication of Vasilii Grossman’s novel Life and Fate” (1988); etc.
3) Correspondence of Efim Etkind, including, in op. 1, a letter to A. M. Finkel’ on translating Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (1966); op. 3 has letters from I. Milkis that discuss the reasons for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union (1975); from L. Pomerants on “anti-Zionist sentiment,” and on sending an article for the journal Posev (1978); from A. Radovskii, on an upcoming trip to the Sinai and his impressions of the Judaean desert (undated); from I. Z. Serman, on living and working in Jerusalem (1977-86); from Prof. Itamar Even-Zohar of Tel Aviv University, on organising conferences and symposia (1976-78); and from Jacqueline Soyart, on traveling in Israel (1988); op. 5 has letters from M. Ia. Vaiskopf requesting a recommendation for a position at Tel Aviv University (1991); from Fridrikh Gorenshtein, on how his work is perceived in the USSR, on a staging of his play The Child-Killer [Detoubiitsa], and on his work on other plays (1991); there is also correspondence with Vincent Frank-Steiner, president of the Anne Frank Fund, and with Eva Koralnik and Lucien Leitess regarding nominees for the fund’s Anne Frank Prize for Literature, on the awarding thereof to the author Ida Fink for A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, and Efim Etkind’s speech at a ceremony on this occasion in Amsterdam (1985); etc.
4) Documents pertaining to conferences, symposia, and colloquia in which Efim Etkind took part, and in particular, in op. 2, materials from a 1978 colloquium in Paris on Franz Kafka, and a symposium in Paris on Osip Mandel’shtam (1982); op. 5 contains reports, talks, and other documents from a 1988 symposium on Osip Mandel’shtam in Bari, Italy; materials pertaining to the study of the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union, and to the organisation of the international symposium “Forty Years After,” including a work by S. Tamarchenko and Efim Etkind titled “The History of State Antisemitism and the Current Situation of Jews in the Soviet Union” (1989); an invitation to Efim Etkind from Lazare Prajs, director of the Centre Rachi, to take part in a colloquium of Jewish writers in Paris, with the colloquium program appended (1985); etc.
5) Materials of other persons collected by Efim Etkind, including, in op. 1, a typewritten translation by B. S. Aron and A. A. Averbakh of Lion Feuchtwanger’s play The Widow Capet (undated); reminiscences by M. A. Shneerson on Z. N. Ginzburg (which mentions the Pale of Settlement, a shul, the artist I. Levitan, etc.; 1980); typewritten copies of works by Fridrikh Gorenshtein: the novellas The Winter of ‘53 (1965) and Steps (1966), and Berdichev and other dramas; a copy of L. I. Lipkin’s poetry collection The Leader and the Tribe (this mentions the Po’ale Tsiyon party; and there are several poems on Jewish themes; 1952-78); of A. Voronel’s essays “On Soviet Jews” and “A Time to Gather” for the journal Jews in the USSR (1974); G. Geivin’s article “What Is Israel?” (1982-83); etc. Op. 4 has translations from the Yiddish by E. S. Papernaia of poems by Shike Driz (1967), and A. Bekov’s translation of letters from Sholom Aleichem’s novella Menakhem Mendl, with an appended preface by the translator (1968); translations from the German by S. Kruchkovskaia of Lion Feuchtwanger’s story “Faithful Peter,” and by L. M. Mirimova of chapters from Feuchtwanger’s novel Jephthah and his Daughter (undated); and also A. M. Belov-Ellison’s review of B. Gaponov’s Hebrew translation of The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin (1968); op. 5 contains a printed copy of the autobiography of the writer Andrei Sobol’ (real name: Iu. M. [I. M.] Sobol’) from the series Writers on Themselves (Berlin: Novaia russkaia kniga, 1922); biographical materials on Ilya Ehrenburg, and works about him by E. Berar and I. Rubinshtein (excepts), and correspondence on publishing these works; letters from E. Berar to Efim Etkind; etc. (1991); corrected proofs of Vasilii Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, with comments by the editor V. Filandrov (1980); reminiscences by S. S. Dubnova-Erlikh (Sophie Dubnow-Erlich) titled “From out of the Past: On Mikhail Vinaver” (1977); a typewritten copy of a dissertation submitted for the degree of doctor of philosophy to the senate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem by M. Ia. Vasikopf titled “The Ideological Bases of Gogol’s Plot Construction” (1990), and of S. Dudakov’s The History of a Myth: Antisemitic Literature of the 19th-20th c. in Russia (1991), with comments by Efim Etkind; materials of Shimon Markish, and in particular, a copy of an article titled “Passers-by. The Soviet Jew as Intellectual” (1978), and his dissertation submitted for the degree of doctor of sciences titled “Russian-Jewish Literature,” with comments by Efim Etkind, and a statement from Shimon Markish’s dissertation defense titled “Russian-Jewish Literature after the Second World War” (1980s); as well as a copy of an article by an unidentified author titled “Without Squinting (Notes of a Jew)” (1970s); etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- Efim Grigor’evich Etkind (1918-99) was a comparative philologist, researcher of Russian and foreign literature, translator, and translation theorist. He graduated from Saint Peter’s School (the Petrischule) and the Leningrad State University philology department (1941). In 1942 he volunteered to go to the front, where he served as a military translator. After the war he defended his doctoral dissertation on the works of Emile Zola and taught at the First Leningrad Foreign Languages Pedagogy Institute. In 1949, in the course of the campaign against “cosmopolitanism,” he was fired for “methodological errors,” and departed for Tula, where he taught at the pedagogical institute. He returned to Leningrad in 1952, and in 1965 defended his habilitation thesis on stylistic issues of verse translation. He became a professor of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad in 1967. In 1964 he served as a defence witness in the trial of Joseph Brodsky, for which he was reprimanded by the Leningrad branch of the Union of Writers of the USSR, of which he had been a member since 1956. He openly supported Alexander Solzhenitsyn, assisting him in his work, and met and corresponded with Andrei Sakharov; and published pieces in samizdat form. In 1972-73 he took part in the preparation of the samizdat collected works of Joseph Brodsky. In 1974 he was expelled from the Union of Writers and stripped of his academic degrees; on the basis of a case fabricated by the KGB, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled from the USSR. He settled in Paris, where until 1986 he was a professor at University of Paris X-Nanterre. His writings were published in the émigré journals Kontinent, Sintaksis, Vremia i my, and Strana i mir. He prepared Vasilii Grossman’s novel Life and Fate for publication, and wrote a preface for it. Upon retiring from the university, he taught Russian literature at other institutions in France, as well as in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Great Britain. In the perestroika period, his academic degrees were restored to him, and he frequently travelled to Russia and appeared in the Russian press. His research works included “Poetry and Translation” (1963), “Russian Translator-Poets from Trediakovskii to Pushkin” (1973), “The Material of Verse” (1978); “An Art in Crisis: An Experiment in the Poetics of Poetic Translation” (1982), “There, Within: On Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry” (1996); “The ‘Inner Person’ and Outer Speech: Essays on the Psychopoetics of Russian Literature of the 18th-20th c.” (1998); and “The Divine Verbum. Pushkin as Read in Russia and in France” (1999). He was the editor of numerous anthologies of Russian translations of poetry, and of French and German translations of Russian poetry.
- Access points: persons/families:
- Aron, B. S.
- Averbakh, A. A.
- Babel’, I. E.
- Bekov, A.
- Belov-Ellison, A. M.
- Berar, E.
- Brezhnev, Leonid
- Brodsky, Joseph
- Byron
- Driz, Shike
- Dubnova-Erlikh, S. S.
- Dudakov, S.
- Etkind, E. G.
- Even-Zohar, Itamar
- Feuchtwanger, Lion
- Filandrov, V.
- Fink, Ida
- Finkel’, A. M.
- Frank-Steiner, Vincent
- Froman, M. A.
- Gaponov, B.
- Geivin, G.
- Ginzburg, Z. N.
- Gorenshtein, Fridrikh
- Grossman, V. S.
- Gutzkow, Karl
- Kafka, F.
- Kheifets, M.
- Koralnik, Eva
- Kruchkovskaia, S.
- Leitess, Lucien
- Levitan, I.
- Lipkin, L. I.
- Markish, Shimon
- Mikhnia, P.
- Milkis, I.
- Mirimova, L. M.
- Papernaia, E. S.
- Podgornyi, N. V.
- Pomerants, L.
- Prajs, Lazare
- Radovskii, A.
- Rubinshtein, I.
- Serman, I. Z.
- Shneerson, M. A.
- Sholem Aleichem
- Sobol’, Andrei
- Soyart, Jacqueline
- Tamarchenko, S.
- Vaiskopf, M. Ia.
- Vasikopf, M. Ia.
- Vinaver, Mikhail
- Voronel’, A.
- Subject terms:
- Antisemitism
- Civil rights
- Genealogy
- Jewish languages
- Jewish languages--Yiddish
- Law enforcement
- Legal matters
- Literature
- Literature--Novels, poetry, and plays
- Literature--Writers, poets, and playwrights
- Manuscripts
- Memoirs
- Migration
- Migration--Emigration
- Pale of Settlement
- Personal records
- Photographs
- Professions
- Professions--Scholars (secular), scientists, and academics
- State of Israel
- Zionism
- Zionism--Anti-Zionism
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds includes five inventories (op. 3 is in 3 parts) systematised by structure (op. 1-3, 5) and according to the structural-chronological principle (op. 4).
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
