Barbu was an informal envoy to the United States during the late 1960s, visiting the influential exiled scholar Mircea Eliade at his home in Chicago, unsuccessfully calling for his return, and vouching for a "magnificent reception" to his home country (in order to mark the potential image coup). He was several times elected to the Great National Assembly, until the plagiarism scandal prevented him from being again proposed for the office. In 1977, Barbu won the Herder Prize, which permitted him to offer his protégé Tudor a scholarship year in Vienna. Plagiarism scandal and Săptămâna In 1979, România Literară published a special section in which it placed side by side a text from Incognito and one taken from a translated work by the Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky; the two sections were considered virtually identical. The ensuing scandal animated the literary world, and has often been cited as a reference for similar and more recent controversies. Speaking at the time, Barbu dismissed the accusations as character assassination. During the 1970s and '80s, he notably launched verbal attacks against Romanian intellectuals who had defected the country, as well as against writers who were critical of the regime (the latter included Paul Goma, whom, in 1977, he called "a non-entity"). Barbu's polemic articles were often obscene in tone, and their message offered Ceauşescu a nationalist support which Vladimir Tismăneanu has identified as "chauvinistic". By 1980, Tudor's editorials in Săptămâna drew complaints from members of the Jewish-Romanian community; consequently, Barbu and Tudor came under the attention of the Securitate. According to Ziua, a Securitate file of the time reveals that the two had begun questioning the détente between Romania and the United States, contradicting official policy, and theorizing that the Most favored nation status, which Romania had just received, was actually harming the country (while arguing that data to prove this had been kept hidden by a Jewish plot). Many attacks focused on Monica Lovinescu, who was broadcasting anti-communist messages on Radio Free Europe — in one instance during 1987, Barbu used his column in Săptămâna to belittle the work of Eugen Lovinescu, a major literary critic who was Monica Lovinescu's father; this drew criticism from the Romanian Communist Party (of which Barbu was a member) and alarm from the Securitate, as it went against more restrained official guidelines regarding the works of Eugen Lovinescu. Post-Revolution After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Barbu and