Ilya Ehrenburg Biography and List of Works

Prolific Russian writer and journalist who played as a link between Soviet and Westerns intellectuals before and after the Cold War. From the 1930s to the 1960s Ehrenburg was one of the most visible Soviet figures, who spent the second half of his life as a respected messenger of the Soviet state. Without being a member of the Communist Party, he was appointed in the most influential political functions. Ehrenburg published poetry, short stories, travel books, essays, and several novels, adapting his writings to Soviet political demands and avoiding conflicts, that destroyed many other writers and artist.

"How can the folk in tropics dwelling,
Where roses in December grow
Where people hardly know the spelling
Of the words like 'blizzard' and 'ice floe,'
Where even azure, even pleasant,
Above the sails a silken sky,
Since time primordial to the present,
The selfsame summer soothing the eye.
How can they even for a twinkling,
In a slumber, or in daydream learn,
How can they have the slightest inkling
Of what it means for spring to yearn,
Or how in freezing winter vainly,
When dour despondency holds sway
To wait and wait until ungainly
And massive ice gets under way."
(...)

Ehrenburg was born in Kiev, Ukraine, into a middle-class Jewish family. When he was five his parents moved to Moscow, where he grew up. Ehrenburg attended First Moscow gymnasium, but he was arrested in his early teens for revolutionary activities and excluded from the 6th grade. Among his close friends during these years was Nikolai Bukharin, the Russian revolutionary who was shot in 1938 during Stalin's terror. In 1908 Ehrenburg immigrated to Paris, where he began publishing poetry. His first collection of verse was published in 1910. In France he met such legendary figures as Picasso and Modigliani.

During WW I Ehrenburg was a war correspondent at the front. After returning to Russia, he lived in Kiev, Kharkov, Kerch, Feodossiia, and Moscow. He also travelled to Georgia with Osip Mandel'shtam. In 1919 Ehrenburg married Liubov' Kozintseva; they had one daughter. From 1921 to 1924 Enrenburg lived in Berlin. His first novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julia Jurenito and his Disciplines, appeared in 1922 and ridiculed the rhetoric and pretensions of both the capitalist and the communist systems. The work - a parody of the Gospels - was in many ways controversial: it was blasphemous toward Christianity; it attacked socialists, pacifists, and all governmental organizations. The central character is a cynical prophet Julio Jurenito, whose seven disciples are thrown in the global turmoil. The novel also includes authentic characters, such as Mayakovski, Picasso, Chaplin, Riviera, and Tatlin.

Julio Jurenito dies at the age of 33 in a provincial Russian town. He is a cynical prophet, an Antichrist, whose teachings are based on hatred, he promotes the destruction of beauty and all arts unless there is a Utilitarian purpose for their products. His involvement in behind-the-scene plotting, somehow connected with the progression toward World War I and the Russian Revolution, never becomes clear. Among his seven disciples are such ethnic stereotypes as an American industrial entrepreneur, an easy-going Italian, a militaristic German, and a noble and naïve African. Ehrenburg himself is the first disciple and the author-narrator.

Ehrenburg's The Stormy Life and Lazar Roitschwantz (1928) was a version of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier of Svejk and Voltaire's Candide. The hero is a Jewish ghetto tailor whose adventures take him through a half a dozen countries and several prison. Lazar works as a rabbit breeder in Tula, rabbi in Frankfurt, police informer for Scotland Yard, film actor in Berlin, pioneer in Palestine, and painter in Paris. Ehrenburg's satirizes among others the phoney artists of the Quartier Latin and the speculators in the Weimar Republic. Out of Chaos (1934) was an apologia for Socialist Realism, and in Ne perevodya dykhania (1935) the writer accepted the official Communist policy in economic and political matters.

From 1925 to 1945 Ehrenburg lived in Paris, working as a foreign editor of Soviet newspapers, returning at intervals to the USSR. During the Spanish Civil War he wrote for the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia. In 1941 Ehrenburg returned to Moscow and worked as a war correspondent. He received the Stalin Price in 1942 and 1948, and the International Lenin Peace Prize in 1952. In 1946 he visited Canada and the United States. He was the Vice President of World Peace Council (1950-67) and a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from 1950. Ehrenburg died in Moscow on August 31, 1967. The last years of his life Ehrenburg devoted to his memoirs, which described the writers and artists he had known. He also campaigned to have published works by writers who had earlier been politically condemned by the regime.

The title of Ehrenburg's famous novel Thaw (1954-56, also: A Change of Season) referred to the period after Stalin's death and the mild de-Stalinization programme of Nikita Khrushchev, who was the secretary genetral of the Communist Party from 1953 to 1964. The novel's main character is Dmitrii Koroteev, a gifted engineer who is unhappily in love with Lena. She is married to Ivan Zhuravlev, the influential director of a factory. With the story of these three characters Ehrenburg interlinks lives of an opportunist painter and his counterpart, an old-guard communist and a Jewish doctor. Externally the story moves slowly, in the end Zhuravlev is called to the capital never to return again, but the lengthy inner monologues touch in passing with some taboo subjects of the Soviet history, including the arrest of Koroteev's stepfather in 1936 and the anti-Semitic hysteria in the early 1950s. The book secured Ehrenburg's place among the reformers, although he was better known as a supporter of the Stalinist regime.

For further reading: Il'ia Erenburg by T. Trifonova (1954); Ilya Ehrenburg by Anatol Goldberg (1984); Il'ia Erenburg by Aleksandr Rubashkin (1990); Ehrenburg by Michael Klimenko (1990); Ilya Ehrenburg by Julian L. Laychuk (1991); Il'ia Erenburg by Viacheslav Popov (1993); Tangled Loyalties by Joshua Rubenstein (1996) - SEE ALSO: Octavio Paz

STIKHI, (1910)