Word: ehrenburg
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When he was asked what he did during the Terror of the French Revolution, the aristocrat Emmanuel Sieyes replied, "I survived." If Soviet NoveMst llya Ehrenburg were asked about his own activities during the 20-year Stalinist terror, he might well give the same answer. Considering that just about every eminent Russian writer and artist was exiled, executed or hounded to suicide by the paranoid dictator, Ehren-burg's survival is one of the most remarkable literary achievements of modern times...
...Ehrenburg claims it was pure chance; others say he made a deal with Stalin...
...Stalin's chief propagandist and heaped praise on his boss. After the war, though a Jew himself, he aided Stalin's ferocious purge of Soviet Jews by ridiculing Jewish solidarity and calling Israel a "laughable dwarf caoitalist state." After Stalin's death, Ehrenburg led the fight for freer artistic expression, and his 1954 novel, The Thaw, gave the new literary movement its name. In his Memoirs, which have been running, off and on, in the Soviet press since 1960, he has tried to present an unbiased picture of the recent Russian past. It is a gallant...
Corruption of a Caraboid. This second volume of memoirs (the first carried Ehrenburg from his Moscow childhood through World War I) deals largely with writers and artists, good, bad and indifferent, whom Ehrenburg met in the capitals of Western Europe in the interwar years. Ehrenburg seems almost under a compulsion to mention as many as possible, as if to atone in some slight way for their "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives. His portraits are touching, affectionate, anecdotal, but he scrupulously avoids discussing the writers' ideas. Only obliquely does he hint that many of the Russian writers were...
...Ehrenburg is equally vague about himself. He expresses few of his own thoughts, has scarcely any explanation for the abrupt shifts in his career. A confirmed skeptic in the 1920s, he was dubbed "the caraboid," the name of a beetle which ejects a fine stinging spray. In his early novels, Julio Jurenito and The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, Ehrenburg mocked Right and Left, capitalism and Communism (when Roitschwantz was republished in the U.S. in 1960, it was much to his embarrassment). But in the 1930s, he became a militant Communist, began cranking out "social realism" clinkers that glorified...