Ilya Ehrenburg

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

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[edit] 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.

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. He a was prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

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.

He died in 1967 of prostate and bladder cancer, and was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where his gravestone is adorned with a a reproduction of his portrait drawn by his friend Pablo Picasso.

[edit] Literary References

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." 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".[1]

The French writer René Crevel killed himself the night of June 18, 1935. Crevel's suicide was in part due to the conflict between André Breton and Ehrenburg during the first "International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture". Breton, along with all fellow surrealists, had been insulted by Ehrenburg in a pamphlet which said, among other things, that all surrealists were pederasts. Breton slapped Ehrenburg several times on the street, which led to surrealists being expelled from the Congress. Crevel, who according to Salvador Dalí, was "the only serious communist among surrealists", spent a whole day trying to persuade the other delegates to allow surrealists back. However, Crevel was not successful and left the Congress at 11pm, totally exhausted.

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

[edit] References

  1. ^ Field, Andrew. The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Crown Publishers, Inc, New York (1977), ISBN 0-517-56113-1. 

[edit] External links