In a memoir written jointly with his wife, Raisa Orlova, the author and, later, dissident Lev Kopelev recalled their attempts to publish Western literature in the Soviet Union before their emigration, romantically portraying the struggle between the intelligentsia and the state that defined the translation and publication of foreign works:

Foreign literature in translation was eagerly consumed by Soviet readers; from the earliest days of the Soviet regime, it not only represented an ‘escape’ from ideologically correct socialist realism, but was also a desirable object of cultural consumption and a marker of the reader's highly-educated, cultured status. Among the educated youth especially, foreign literature represented the idealised world culture of which they wished to be a part, and was treated as high culture rather than entertainment. Translation also occupied an important place in Russian culture in terms of its significant influence on the development of Russian literary culture. The publication of translated works of Western authors was closely linked to the broader intercultural relationship between the Soviet Union and the West, ‘a particularly twentieth-century cross-cultural encounter, in which the insertion of ideological as well as cultural and economic comparisons shaped new and consequential calculations of superiority and inferiority between Russia and the West’.

The relationship between Russia and the world outside its borders, of which the status of translation is both a component and a reflection, has a long history and acquired new resonances and meanings in the twentieth century. For several centuries, the West has been a preoccupation of both Russian rulers and the intelligentsia; it has formed a vital component in the definition and construction of Russian and later Soviet identity.