Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (Russian: Илья́ Григо́рьевич Эренбу́рг, Russian pronunciation: [ɪˈlʲja ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲɪvɪtɕ ɪrʲɪnˈburk]), January 27 [O.S. January 15] 1891 (Kiev, Russian Empire) – August 31, 1967 (Moscow, Soviet Union) was a Soviet writer, journalist and propagandist, whose 1954 novel The Thaw gave its name to the Khrushchev Thaw.

Ilya Ehrenburg in 1943

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 Nicolai 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 Kiew 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 penisula 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 . 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."

Soviet Officers like Lev Kopelev, who opposed such rhetoric, were accused of opposing Ehrenburg and "compassion towards the enemy". Ehrenburg himself was criticised by Georgy Aleksandrov in a Pravda article in April 1945, 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.. 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". . His anti-German publication made his name notorious in post-war Germany even until the present day.

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.

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 . The novel gave its name to Khrushchev Thaw.

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 WW 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".

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

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