Word: ehrenburg
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...THAW (230 pp.)-Ilya Ehrenburg, with THE DEATH OF ART (31 pp.)-Russell Kirk-Regnery...
...hard not to be a bore about boredom. In Russia, it may be downright dangerous. This can be deduced from the sad experience of Ilya Ehrenburg, who normally leads a full, rich, happy life in the Soviet Union, with a luxurious apartment in Moscow, a dacha in the country, a villa in the south, a talented wife, and a rag-taggle of pedigreed dogs. But in his latest novel, published in Russia last year, Ehrenburg let on that life is a bit of a bore and wondered whether it is worth living at all. Whereupon his fellow workers in literature...
...could an old hand like Ehrenburg, who got a remarkable fan letter on the occasion of an earlier book ("I have enjoyed your novel very much.-J Stalin."), commit such a mistake? Well since Fan Stalin died, the word had got around somehow that it was all right to have novels with people in them again-just like Tolstoy. The New Neanderthalers in The Thaw-bureaucrats, engineers, state artists-are not exactly people, but sometimes Author Ehrenburg lets them wonder in a dull-witted way why they are not. Perhaps the Ice Age of Communism might some day thaw. Savchenko...
...intriguing fact that might give Ehrenburg trouble all over again: the book's U.S. publisher is Chicago's Henry Regnery, a man of marked anti-Soviet opinions-exactly the sort Ehrenburg means when he talks about imperialist hyenas. What is more, Regnery commissioned Fellow Hyena Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind) to explain in an accompanying essay why he has published the dreadful bit of work. Reason: this book shows perfectly that life itself "in the Revolutionary Utopia ... has faded away to this boredom with the present and this indifference to the future...
...nationwide food shortage. There were some other failures he did not have to point up: the first suggestion of relaxed control had been followed by the East German riots and by a ten-day strike of slave laborers in the Vorkuta prison camps. Attempts at "honest art," e.g., Novelist Ehrenburg's The Thaw, merely confused Soviet writers accustomed to writing propaganda, including Ehrenburg himself, and honesty in art was incomprehensible to painters of the approved anecdote...