Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (Russian: Илья́ Григо́рьевич Эренбу́рг, Russian pronunciation: [ɪˈlʲja grʲɪˈgorʲɪvɪtɕ 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 lent its name to the Khrushchev Thaw.

Life and work

Ehrenburg was a revolutionary as a teenager, a disenchanted poet in his youth, writing Catholic poems despite his Jewish background, a follower of Lenin on arrival in Paris, who then became an anti-Bolshevik and sensitive journalist. "He lived in Paris for many years before and after the October Revolution, serving as a foreign editor of Soviet newspapers, returning at intervals to the USSR."

Wartime Propaganda

Later he returned to Russia where he was hired to write Soviet propaganda, 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 the German" published in 1942—when German troops were deeply within Soviet territory—became a widely publicized example of this campaign, along with poem "Kill him!" by Simonov. The article declared that Germans "are not humans." Soviet Officers like Lev Kopelev, who opposed such rhetoric, were accused of opposing Ehrenburg and "compassion towards the enemy". Ehrenburg himself was criticized by Georgy Aleksandrov in a Pravda article in April 1945, who called his views towards the Germans over-simplifying 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."

Ehrenburg a was 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

Ehrenburg is well known for his writing, especially his memoirs, which contain many portraits of interest to literary historians and biographers. Together with fellow journalist and writer, Vasily Grossman, Ehrenburg edited The Black Book, a collaborative effort by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) and members of the American Jewish community to document the anti-Jewish crimes of the Holocaust and the participation of Jews in the fighting and the resistance movement against the Nazis during World War II.

Ehrenburg and Grossman served as war reporters for the Red Army. Grossman's documentary reports of the opening of the Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps were some of the first eyewitness accounts—as early as 1943—of what later became known as the Shoah. His article The Treblinka Hell (Треблинский ад, 1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as a document for the prosecution.

In 1944–1945, based on their own experiences and on other documents they collected, Ehrenburg and Grossman produced two volumes under the title Murder of the People in Yiddish and handed the manuscript to the JAC. Copies were sent to the United States, Israel (then the British mandate of Palestine) and Romania in 1946, and excerpts were published in the United States in English under the title Black Book that same year. A handwritten manuscript of the Book is held at Yad Vashem.

The Book was partially printed in the Soviet Union by the Yiddish publisher Der Emes, however the entire edition, the typefaces, as well as the manuscript, were destroyed. First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians who worked as Nazi police officers. Then in 1948 the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. The collection of original documents that Ehrenburg handed down to the Vilnius Jewish Museum after the war was secretly returned to him upon the Museum's termination in 1948. The JAC was also disbanded, its members purged at the outset of the state campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitans," a Soviet euphemism for Jews. (See also the Doctors' plot).

A Russian-language edition of the Black Book was published in Jerusalem in 1980, and finally in Kiev, Ukraine in 1991.

The Thaw

In 1954, Ehrenburg published a novel titled The Thaw that tested limits of censorship in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Published in the literary journal Новый Мир (Novyi Mir, or New World), it revolved around three characters. One was factory boss, Ivan Zhuravlev. In a typical novel of Socialist Realism, this character would be the hero, but in Ehrenburg's novel he is corrupt and despotic–"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. The second, Vladimir Pukhov, is a government artist. He is contrasted with the third character, Saburov, who served not the government but the dictates of his conscience. While Pukhov enjoys some success, he compares himself to Saburov, who is true to the dictates of art. The novel does not follow the prescribed model of Socialist realism. The purported hero is a dishonorable character, and a poor reflection on the virtues of communism. The most sympathetic characters are not the ones who represent the virtues of Soviet society.

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.

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, famous founder of the Cubist art movement, Pablo Picasso.

Legacy

"Ehrenburg had a tangled record as a reformer and Soviet loyalist.... Although many of his friends disappeared in the purges, he managed to survive, returning to Moscow in 1941 and working as a war correspondent.... In retrospect, [The] THAW tends to honor the tenets of Stalinist culture more than it defies them." In fact, Ehrenburg's suggestion that a thaw had occurred in Soviet society after the death of Stalin seems more like prophecy than description. It was still too early in 1954 for a substantial shift in cultural policy, which would take place in fits and starts over the next decade until it would ultimately become attached to cultural policies of Nikita Khrushchev.

Ehrenburg received the Stalin Prize in 1942 and 1948, and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1952. He would also serve as a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet beginning in 1950.

Influence

Alan Furst—considered by many America's premier writer of espionage fiction—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). Six weeks later, in another interview, his comments were rather more qualified: "None of my characters are meant to be representations of real people. But in fact, in Dark Star the lead character is a Russified Polish Jew, a foreign correspondent for Pravda. So are we talking about Ilya Ehrenburg? Not really. But he's like that."

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 great writer's identity: Jew, Russian writer, and man of Western European culture.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Field, Andrew. The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Crown Publishers, Inc, New York (1977), ISBN 0-517-56113-1.
• Rubenstein, Joshua. Tangled Loyalties. The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg. 1st Paperback Ed., University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa (Alabama/USA) 1999, ISBN 0-8173-0963-2
• Scherstjanoi, Elke (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

External links

All links Retrieved January 19, 2009.

• The Black Book at jewishgen.org
• Long biography, includes quote above
• Article in The Columbia Encyclopedia
• Brief page on The Thaw
• Read Ehrenburg's interview with The Paris Review

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