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Ilya Ehrenburg
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Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (), (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.
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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.
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Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (), (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.
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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. Under the influence of Francis Jammes whose poems he translated into Russian, Ehrenburg's lyrical texts tended to a kind of catholic mysticism but he never converted to catholicism.
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. Nikolaj Gumilov, a famous symbolistic poet, wrote favourably about Ehrenburg's progress in poetry.
In 1917, after the revolution, Ehrenburg returned to Russia.
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.
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. He wrote:
"Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army."
and
"Now we understand the Germans are not human. Now the word 'German' has become the most terrible curse. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill a German, a German will kill you. He will carry away your family, and torture them in his damned Germany. If you have killed one German, kill another."
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 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". .
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, which contain many portraits of interest to literary historians and biographers. 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.
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). 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." Finally, we're left to decide if that's a yes or a no.
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.
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