Ilya Ehrenburg

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg

(born Jan. 27, 1891, Kiev, Ukr., Russian Empire — died Aug. 31, 1967, Moscow, Russian S.F.S.R., U.S.S.R.) Russian writer and journalist. Arrested as a youth for revolutionary activity, he moved to Paris. He worked as a war correspondent, then returned to write for Soviet newspapers. His first novel and best work was Julio Jurenito and His Disciples (1922). He soon embraced the Soviet regime, eventually becoming one of its most effective spokesmen in the West. The vehemently anti-Western The Fall of Paris (1941) was followed by The Storm (1946 – 47) and The Ninth Wave (1951 – 52). After Joseph Stalin's death, Ehrenburg's works, including The Thaw (1954) and his autobiography, People, Years, Life, 6 vol. (1960 – 66), turned critical of Stalin's heritage.

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The Soviet author Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg (1891-1967) is best known for his role as a man of letters throughout the first 50 years of Soviet history. He wrote more than 100 books and pamphlets, which range from lyric verse, to fiction, to journalism.

Ilya Ehrenburg was born on Jan. 27, 1891, in Kiev. He came from a middle-class Jewish family, and his father worked in a brewery. The rampant anti-Semitism of Kievan life at the turn of the century made a deep impression on young Ehrenburg. Throughout his life he engaged in the fight against racism. In 1896 Ehrenburg's family moved to Moscow, where Ilya entered the First Moscow Gymnasium. Although he was a poor student, he drew inspiration from Moscow life. Leo Tolstoy kept a townhouse next to the Ehrenburg home, and Maxim Gorky lived for a short while in the Ehrenburg house.

Ehrenburg's formal education ended in 1907, when he was expelled from the gymnasium for leading an anticzarist strike. He had been exposed at school to ideas of revolution and early leaned toward the Bolshevik ideology. Ehrenburg was arrested several times in 1907 and 1908 for radical writings, and he was finally exiled in 1908. His exile brought him to Paris in 1909, where he settled down in the emigre artists' colony.

The experiences of Ehrenburg in Paris from 1909 to 1917 and from 1924 to 1940 left an indelible impression on his life and art. His acquaintance with Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera introduced him to the avant-garde in the arts. His contacts among Russian emigres led him to reflect on the problems of Russia's historical destiny in the context of European civilization. During the 1910s Ehrenburg led the life of a literary bohemian, attending lectures at the Haute École des Études Sociales, working as a tourist guide and stevedore, and testing his talent as a writer. His first literary work was poetry, and he published a book of poems entitled Parisat his own expense in 1910. Ehrenburg spent much of World War I working as a correspondent for various Russian newspapers.

Ehrenburg had deep reservations about the Russian Revolution. He returned to Russia in 1917 after the February Revolution, working at various literary and journalistic jobs until 1921. Ehrenburg married in 1919, and he and his family left the Soviet Union in 1921, traveling about Europe until 1924, when they settled in Paris. In 1921 in Belgium, Ehrenburg wrote his most successful novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples. This satirical novel portrays the comical adventures of a Mexican as he confronts the absurdities of capitalist and socialist life in Europe and the Soviet Union.

From 1924 until his return to Moscow in 1940, Ehrenburg lived the life of a journalist and free-lance writer throughout Europe. Although he came to accept the role of the Soviet Union in world affairs and to praise the Soviet Union's opposition to fascism, Ehrenburg was hesitant about committing himself to life in the Soviet Union. In 1932 he became a regular correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. His duties as journalist took him to Spain in the 1930s, where he wrote about the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he was again in Paris, then occupied by German troops. His book The Fall of Paris (1942) presents an excellent account of the Occupation.

Ehrenburg returned to Moscow in 1940 with a worldwide reputation. He worked as a war correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Pravda throughout World War II. Ehrenburg's attitudes toward the unreasonable strictures placed on the Soviet writer by socialist realism were ambivalent until after the death of Stalin. In 1954, however, Ehrenburg published The Thaw, depicting the harm done to Soviet writing by the heavy hand of the Soviet bureaucracy. The title of this novel became the name of the liberal decade of the 1950s in Soviet literature. Ehrenburg further contributed to the thaw in Soviet literary policy with his memoirs, People, Years, Life, published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ehrenburg's memoirs are a valuable source of information for students of Soviet literature.

Ehrenburg was an urbane man, an extremely prolific writer, and a protector of the arts. He died in Moscow on Sept. 1, 1967.

Life and work

Ilya Ehrenburg was born into a Jewish family in Kiev as an engineer's son. When he was four years old, the family moved to Moscow. At school, he met Nikolai Bukharin, later member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1905, both of them got involved in illegal activities of the Bolshevik organisation. In 1908, when Ehrenburg was seventeen years old, the Tzarist secret police Okhrana arrested him for five months. He was beaten up and lost some teeth. Finally he was allowed to go abroad and chose Paris for his exile.

In Paris, he started to work in the Bolshevik organisation, meeting Lenin and other prominent exilants. But soon he left these circles and the Communist Party. Ehrenburg got attached by the bohemian life in the Paris quarter of Montparnasse. He began to write poems, regularly visited the cafés of Montparnasse and got acquainted with a lot of artists, especially Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, and Amedeo Modigliani. Foreign writers whose works Ehrenburg translated included those of Francis Jammes.

During the First World War, Ehrenburg became a war correspondent for a St. Petersburg newspaper. He wrote a series of articles about the mechanized war that later on were also published as a book ("The Face of War"). His poetry now also concentrated on subjects of war and destruction, as in "On the Eve", his third lyrical book. Nikolai Gumilev, a famous symbolistic poet, wrote favourably about Ehrenburg's progress in poetry.

In 1917, after the revolution, Ehrenburg returned to Russia. At that time he tended to oppose the bolshevik policy, being shocked by the constant atmosphere of violence. He wrote a poem called "Prayer for Russia" which compared the storm of the winter palace to a rape. In 1920 Ehrenburg went to Kiev where he experienced four different regimes in the course of one year: the Germans, the cossacks, the Red and the White Army. After antisemitic pogromes, he fled to Koktebel on the Crimea peninsula where his old friend from Paris days, Maximilian Volochin, had a house. Finally, Ehrenburg returned to Moscow where he soon was arrested by the Cheka.

He wrote modernistic novels popular in the 1920s, often set in Western Europe ("Julio Jurenito", "Thirteen Pipes"). Ehrenburg continued to write philosophical poetry, using more freed rhythms than in the 1910s.

By the 1930s, as a friend of many of the European Left, Ehrenburg was frequently allowed by Stalin to visit Europe and to campaign for peace and socialism. In 1939, he was a war journalist in the Spanish civil war.

World War II

Inside the USSR Ehrenburg frequently published pieces of the Soviet propaganda (often on issues related with the Western countries), while occasionally defending his views with boldness against Stalin or government mouthpieces. Ehrenburg was one of many Soviet writers, along with Konstantin Simonov and Aleksey Surkov, who "lent their literary talents to the hate campaign" against Germans during World War II.^[1] His article "Kill" published in 1942 — when German troops were deeply within Soviet territory — became a widely publicized example of this campaign, along with the poem "Kill him!" by Simonov.

In "Kill", Ehrenburg wrote:

"The Germans are not human beings. Henceforth the word German means to us the most terrible curse. From now on the word German will trigger your rifle. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day. If you think that that instead of you, the man next to you will kill him, you have not understood the threat. If you do not kill the German, he will kill you. If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German before combat. If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another - there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill."^[2]^[3]

Soviet Officers like Lev Kopelev, who opposed such rhetoric, were accused of opposing Ehrenburg and "compassion towards the enemy".^[4] Ehrenburg himself was criticised by Georgy Aleksandrov in a Pravda article in April 1945,^[5] who called his views towards the Germans simplificating and an exaggeration as it has never been the purpose of Soviet policy to wipe out the German people.^[6] When Ehrenburg received letters from frontline soldiers accusing him of having changed his position and of standing for softness towards Germans, he replied he had not changed his position, as he had always stood for "justice, not revenge".^[7]

Ehrenburg was a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Ehrenburg fell in disgrace at that time and it is estimated that Aleksandrov's article was a signal of change in Stalin's policy towards Germany.^[8]

Postwar writings

In 1954, Ehrenburg published a novel titled The Thaw that tested limits of censorship in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. It described a corrupted and despotic factory boss (a "little Stalin"). The boss's wife could not bear to stay with him and left the despot during the spring thaw that gave her the courage. In August 1954, Konstantin Simonov attacked The Thaw in articles published in Literaturnaya gazeta, arguing that such writings are too dark and do not serve the Soviet state ^[1]. The novel gave its name to Khrushchev Thaw. Just prior to publishing the book, however, Ehrenburg received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952.

Ehrenburg is well known for his writing, especially his memoirs ("People, Years, and Life"), which contain many portraits of interest to literary historians and biographers. In this book Ehrenburg was the first legal Soviet author to mention positively a lot of names banned under Stalin, including the one of Marina Tsvetaeva. He was also active in publishing the works by Osip Mandelstam when the latter had been posthumously rehabilitated but still largely unacceptable for censorship. Together with Vasily Grossman, Ehrenburg edited The Black Book that contains documentary accounts by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and Poland. Ehrenburg was also active as poet till his last days, depicting the World War II events in Europe, the Holocaust and the destinies of Russian intellectuals.

Death

Ehrenburg died in 1967 of prostate and bladder cancer, and was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where his gravestone is adorned with a reproduction of his portrait drawn by his friend Pablo Picasso.

Literary References

The American espionage fiction writer Alan Furst found much of Ehrenburg's life and work so riveting that he modeled the central character in his 1991 novel Dark Star ISBN 0375759999 on the Russian writer. Addressing the degree to which fact and fiction sometimes overlap, Furst said, "(a particular character) was modeled on a number of people, although I've written about many people who did exist. Andre Szara in Dark Star, for example, is based on the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg" (Boston Globe interview, June 4, 2006).

Vladimir Nabokov wrote of him: "As a writer he doesn't exist, Ehrenburg. He is a journalist. He was always corrupt".^[9]

In Ilya Ehrenburg, Shneiderman described the threefold division of that writer's identity: Jew, Russian writer, and man of Western European culture.

References

^ ^a ^b Orlando Figes The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, 2007, ISBN 0-08050-7461-9, page 414.
^ (Text is found in Ilya Ehrenburg's book Vojna (The war) (Moscow, 1942-43)
^ Original text in Russian
^ Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever ("Хранить вечно"), 1976
^ Article in Russian original
^ Ehrenburg's answer (Russian)
^ Carola Tischler: Die Vereinfachungen des Genossen Ehrenburg. Eine Endkriegs- und eine Nachkriegskontroverse. In: Elke Scherstjanoi (Hrsg.): Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland. Briefe von der Front (1945) und historische Analysen. Texte und Materialien zur Zeitgeschichte, Bd. 14. K.G. Saur, München 2004, S. 326–339, ISBN 3-598-11656-X, p. 336-
^ Joshua Rubenstein: Tangled Loyalties. The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg. 1st Paperback Ed., University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa (Alabama/USA) 1999 (= Judaic Studies Series), ISBN 0-8173-0963-2
^ Field, Andrew. The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Crown Publishers, Inc, New York (1977), ISBN 0-517-56113-1.

External links

The Black Book at jewishgen.org
Tangled Loyalties, the 'definitive' Ehrenburg biography by Joshua Rubenstein at the book's home on the web
Long biography, includes quote above
Article in The Columbia Encyclopedia
Brief page on The Thaw
Marevna, "Homage to Friends from Montparnasse" (1962) Top left to right: Diego Rivera, Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, his wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, gallery owner Leopold Zborowski[1] [2]. Bottom left to right: Marevna, hers and Diego Rivera's daughter Marika, (Amedeo Modigliani), Moise Kisling.
Read Ehrenburg's interview with The Paris Review

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