Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya
Grigoryevich Ehrenburg, (b. Jan. 15 [Jan. 27,
New Style], 1891, Kiev, Ukraine, Russian
Empire—d. Aug. 31, 1967, Moscow), prolific
writer and journalist, one of the most effective
Soviet spokesmen to the Western world.
Born into a
middle-class Jewish family that later moved to
Moscow, Ehrenburg became involved as a youth in
revolutionary activity and was arrested in his
early teens. He emigrated to Paris, where he
began publishing poetry in 1910. During World
War I he was a war correspondent at the front,
returning to Russia in 1917. He experienced the
civil war in Ukraine and, between 1917 and 1921,
wavered between supporting and rejecting the
Bolsheviks. He returned to Europe, living in
France, Belgium, and Germany, and published his
first novel—generally considered his best
work—the philosophical-satirical Neobychaynyye
khozhdeniya Khulio Khurenito i yego uchenikov
(1922; The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio
Jurenito and His Disciples). By 1924, however,
his attitude had changed again, and he was
granted permission to return to the Soviet
Union. He participated in writers’ meetings and
other literary activities in Moscow, and soon
afterward was sent back to Europe, this time as
foreign editor of several Soviet newspapers.
Most of the period from 1936 to 1940 Ehrenburg
spent in Spain and France as war correspondent
for the newspaper Izvestiya. In 1941 he returned
to the Soviet Union, where his Padeniye Parizha
(The Fall of Paris)—a bitter attack on the
West—was published that year, winning the 1942
Stalin Prize.
Besides his
activities as a journalist and novelist,
Ehrenburg wrote poetry, short stories, essays,
travelogues, and memoirs. After his acceptance
of the Soviet regime, he adapted his writing to
Soviet literary demands and was successful in
avoiding the political purges that destroyed the
careers of many other writers and artists. In
1946–47 he won a second Stalin Prize with Burya
(The Storm), and in 1951–52 another major novel
was published, Devyaty val (The Ninth Wave).
Shortly after Joseph Stalin’s death Ehrenburg
produced the novel Ottepel (1954; The Thaw),
which provoked intense controversy in the Soviet
press, and the title of which has become
descriptive of that period in Soviet literature.
It dealt with Soviet life in a more realistic
way than had the officially approved literature
of the preceding period. In succeeding years he
devoted himself to promoting new and different
tendencies in writing. In his autobiography,
Lyudi, gody, zhizn (“People, Years, Life”),
Ehrenburg ranged over many topics (e.g., Western
art) and people (e.g., writers lost in the
purges of the 1930s) normally not considered
proper material for Soviet authors. This
attitude brought official censure upon him in
1963 when the “thaw” began to reverse. But
Ehrenburg survived and remained prominent in
Soviet literary circles until his death.
