Ilya Ehrenburg was born in
Kiev in the
Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) to a
Lithuanian–Jewish family; his father was an engineer. Ehrenburg's household was not religiously observant; he came into contact with the religious practices of Judaism only through his maternal grandfather. Ehrenburg never practiced Judaism. He learned no
Yiddish, although he edited the
Black Book, which was written in Yiddish. He considered himself a Russian and, later, a Soviet citizen, and wrote in Russian even during his many years abroad. Ehrenburg also took strong public positions against
antisemitism, and left all his papers to Israel's
Yad Vashem. When Ehrenburg was four years old, the family moved to Moscow, where his father had been hired as director of a brewery. At school, he met
Nikolai Bukharin, who was two grades above him. The two remained friends until Bukharin's execution in 1938 during the
Great Purge. featuring
Diego Rivera,
Amedeo Modigliani and Ehrenburg at Rivera's atelier, 1916. It is titled "When will the war end?" In the aftermath of the
Russian Revolution of 1905, both Ehrenburg and Bukharin got involved in illegal activities of the
Bolshevik organisation. In 1908, when Ehrenburg was seventeen years old, the tsarist 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
Vladimir Lenin and other prominent exiles. But soon he left these circles and the party. Ehrenburg became attached to 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,
Jules Pascin, and
Amedeo Modigliani. Foreign writers whose works Ehrenburg translated included those of
Francis Jammes. During
World War I, 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.
Nikolai Gumilev, a famous symbolistic poet, wrote favourably about Ehrenburg's progress in poetry. In 1917, after the revolution, Ehrenburg returned to Russia. At that time he tended to oppose the Bolshevik policy, being shocked by the constant atmosphere of violence. He wrote a poem called "Prayer for Russia" which compared the
storming of the Winter Palace to rape. In 1920 Ehrenburg went to Kiev where he experienced four different regimes in the course of one year: the Germans, the Cossacks, the Bolsheviks, and the White Army. After antisemitic
pogroms, he fled to
Koktebel on the
Crimea peninsula where his old friend from Paris days,
Maximilian Voloshin, had a house. Finally, Ehrenburg returned to Moscow, where he soon was arrested by the
Cheka but freed after a short time. He became a Soviet cultural activist and journalist who spent much time abroad as a writer. He wrote
avant-garde picaresque novels and short stories popular in the 1920s, often set in Western Europe (
The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples (1922),
Thirteen Pipes). Ehrenburg continued to write philosophical poetry, using more freed rhythms than in the 1910s. In 1929 he published
The Life of the Automobile, a communist variant of the
it-narrative genre. In 1935, Ehrenburg attended the first International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which opened in Paris in June. He had written a pamphlet which said, among other things, that
surrealists shunned work, favouring
parasitism, and that they endorsed "
onanism,
pederasty,
fetishism,
exhibitionism, and even
sodomy".
André Breton — along with all fellow surrealists — felt insulted and accosted Ehrenburg on the street and slapped him several times, which resulted in surrealists being expelled from the Congress.
Poetry Ehrenburg's first published poem, "I walked toward you" (
Ya shyol k tebe), appeared in the journal
Severnye zori on 8 January 1910. His debut collection,
Stikhi ("Poems"), followed later that year. Over the next decade, he published several further collections:
Ya zhivu ("I Live," 1911),
Oduvanchiki ("Dandelions," 1912),
Budni ("Weekdays," 1913), and
Stikhi o kanunakh ("Poems on the Eve," 1916). In 1916, he also published Russian translations of
François Villon. His philosophical poetry of the 1920s, including the collection
Opustoshayushchaya lyubov ("Devastating Love," 1922), used freer rhythms than his earlier verse. During World War II, he returned to lyric poetry with
Vernost ("Fidelity," 1941). Ehrenburg continued to write poetry until his last years, though he became far better known for his prose and journalism.
Spanish Civil War and
Gustav Regler in Spain, 1937 As a friend of many of the European Left, Ehrenburg was frequently allowed by Stalin to visit Europe and to campaign for peace and socialism. He arrived in Spain in late August 1936 as an
Izvestia correspondent and was involved in propaganda and military activity as well as reporting. In July 1937 he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war, held in
Valencia,
Barcelona, and
Madrid and attended by many writers including
André Malraux,
Ernest Hemingway,
Stephen Spender, and
Pablo Neruda.
World War II soldiers in 1942 Ehrenburg was offered a column in
Krasnaya Zvezda (the
Red Army newspaper) days after the
German invasion of the Soviet Union. During the war, he published more than 2,000 articles in Soviet newspapers. He saw the
Great Patriotic War as a dramatic contest between good and evil. In his articles, moral and life-affirming Red Army soldiers faced off against a dehumanized German enemy. As a consequence, he is one of many Soviet writers, along with
Konstantin Simonov and
Alexey Surkov, who many have accused of "[lending] their literary talents to the
hate campaign" against Germans. Austrian historian
Arnold Suppan argued that Ehrenburg "agitated in the style of Nazi racist ideology", with statements such as: This pamphlet, titled "Kill", was written during the
Battle of Stalingrad. Ehrenburg later accompanied the Soviet forces during the
East Prussian Offensive and criticized the indiscriminate violence against German civilians, for which he was reprimanded by Stalin. Nazi propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels accused Ehrenburg of advocating the
rape of German women. However, Ehrenburg denied this and historian
Antony Beevor claims that it was a Nazi fabrication. In January 1945,
Adolf Hitler stated that "Stalin's court lackey, Ilya Ehrenburg, declares that the German people must be exterminated". After criticism by
Georgy Aleksandrov in
Pravda in April 1945, Ehrenburg responded that he never meant wiping out the
German people, but only German aggressors who set foot on Soviet soil with weapons, because "we are not Nazis who fight with civilians”. Ehrenburg fell into disgrace at that time and it is estimated that Aleksandrov's article was a signal of change in Stalin's policy towards Germany.
The 'Anti-Cosmopolitan' Campaign to
Soong Ching-ling and
Guo Moruo, April 1951 On 21 September 1948, at the behest of
Politburo members
Lazar Kaganovich and
Georgy Malenkov, Ehrenburg published an article in
Pravda which signified Stalin's absolute political break with Israel, which he had been supporting through enormous shipments of Czech arms. After this break with Israel, hundreds of Jews became targets of the so-called
anti-cosmopolitan campaign. The chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,
Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered, and many Soviet Jewish intellectuals were imprisoned or executed. Ilya Ehrenburg's name was high on a list presented to Stalin by the chief of police,
Viktor Abakumov, of people selected for arrest. He was accused of having "made attacks on Comrade Stalin" when talking to the French writer
André Malraux in Spain in 1937. While Stalin agreed to the arrests of most of the names on the list, he put a question mark by Ehrenburg's. It appears that Ehrenburg was allowed to continue publishing and travelling abroad to obscure the anti-Semitic campaign at home. During a press conference in London in 1950, attended by over 200 journalists, he was challenged about the fate of the writers
David Bergelson and
Itzik Feffer, and said that "If anything unpleasant had happened to them, I would have known", knowing that they were both under arrest. He was accused of informing on his comrades, but there is no evidence to support this theory. In February 1953, he refused to denounce the supposed
doctors' plot and wrote a letter to Stalin opposing collective punishment of Jews. In 1954, Ehrenburg published a novel titled
The Thaw that tested the limits of censorship in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. It portrayed a corrupt and despotic factory boss, a "little Stalin", and told the story of his wife, who increasingly feels estranged from him, and the views he represents. In the novel, the spring thaw comes to represent a period of change in the characters' emotional journeys, and when the wife eventually leaves her husband, this coincides with the melting of the snow. Thus, the novel can be seen as a representation of the thaw, and the increased freedom of the writer after the 'frozen' political period under Stalin. 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 the
Khrushchev Thaw. Ehrenburg is particularly well known for his memoirs (
People, Years, Life in Russian, published with the title
Memoirs: 1921–1941 in English), which contain many portraits of interest to literary historians and biographers. In this book, Ehrenburg was the first legal Soviet author to mention positively a lot of names banned under Stalin, including
Marina Tsvetaeva. At the same time he disapproved of the Russian and Soviet intellectuals who had explicitly rejected communism or defected to the West. He also criticized writers like
Boris Pasternak, author of
Doctor Zhivago, for not having been able to understand the course of history. Ehrenburg's memoirs were criticized by the more conservative faction among the Soviet writers, concentrated around the journal
Oktyabr. For example, when the memoirs were published,
Vsevolod Kochetov reflected on certain writers who were "burrowing in the rubbish heaps of their crackpot memories". In January 1963, the critic
Vladimir Yermilov wrote a long article in
Izvestia in which he picked up on Ehrenburg's admission that he had suspected that innocent people were being arrested in 1937 and 1938 but had "gritted his teeth" in silence. Yermilov alleged that this proved that Ehrenburg had been in a privileged position in those years but said nothing, when others, less privileged, had spoken out when they believed an innocent person had been arrested. Ehrenburg retorted that he had never been to a single meeting nor read a single article in which anyone had protested about the arrests, whereupon Yermilov accused him of having insulted a "whole generation of Soviet people". For the contemporary reader though, the work appears to have a distinctly
Marxist-Leninist ideological flavor characteristic of a Soviet-era official writer. He was also active in publishing the works by
Osip Mandelstam when the latter had been posthumously rehabilitated but still largely unacceptable for censorship. Ehrenburg was also active as a poet till his last days, depicting the events of
World War II in Europe, the Holocaust and the destinies of Russian intellectuals.
First Pablo Picasso Exhibition in the USSR in 1956 As
Pablo Picasso’s close acquaintance since 1914, Ehrenburg played pivotal role in organizing Picasso’s first ever exhibition in the USSR which opened on 21 October 1956 in
Pushkin Museum and three weeks later was transferred to the
Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Picasso’s first exhibition came as a profound shock for the Soviet people and seemed to move some geological layers in their minds, causing a tectonic shift in the attitudes to modern art. That exhibition emboldened young Soviet non-conformist artists in their search of art different from the Socialist Realism dogma. In 1960, four years after the 1956 exhibition, Ehrenburg helped to push through the Soviet censorship the first ever book on Picasso to be printed in the USSR, written by
Andrey Sinyavsky and Igor Golomshtok. The book “Pablo Picasso” contained a huge article written by Ehrenburg with his memories about meeting Picasso in Paris since 1914 and at the First International Peace Congress held in Paris in 1949, and Ehrenburg’s memories about the 1956 exhibition. The book “Pablo Picasso” contained more than 40 illustrations of Picasso’s main canvases to be first printed in the USSR and made a lasting impression on the Soviet general public and professional artists.
Death and legacy Ehrenburg died in 1967 of
prostate and
bladder cancer, and was interred in
Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where his gravestone is etched with a reproduction of his portrait drawn by his friend
Pablo Picasso. In 1968, Polish-American writer and journalist
S.L. Shneiderman published a Yiddish biography of Ehrenburg, whom he had met in interwar Paris and in Spain. In his biography, Shneiderman defended Ehrenburg from accusations of collaboration with Stalin in the destruction of Soviet Yiddish culture. ==English translations==