lIya
Ehrenburg
PEOPLE , YEARS AND LIFE
I
1.
The publication last winter of the first installment of Ehrenburg's mem–
oirs in
Navy
MiT
was the political and literary sensation of Moscow.
Ehrenburg's tortuous intellectua l career has earned him the reputation
of an arch double-dealer, denouncer and cynical opportunist. Now he
is
concerned with showing that this is perhaps an oversimplification.
Throughout his memoirs he reasserts in emphatic form his patently
"revisionist" ideas on literature and art for which he has fought since
Stalin's death.
This excerpt has been taken from a section of the memoirs in
which Ehrenburg reminisces about various artistic figures in the 'twen–
ties. In some ways it is the most extraordinary document to appear in
the Soviet press since Stalin's death. It throws open the whole question
of the true nature of Mayakovsky who, after Stalin's canonization of
him in 1935, was obligatorily regarded in the works of critics and in
textbooks as a "reinforced-concrete" proletarian poet. Ehrenburg shows
-as is obvious from Mayakovsky's lyrical work- that far from being
made of concrete, he was a vulnerable, sensitive, neurotic and in many
ways helpless person for whom the Revolution proved only a tragically
short-lived solution to his inner anguish.
For young Soviet intellectuals who have been reared on the myth
of Mayakovsky, as on many other myths about the avant-garde of the
'twenties, this comes as a sensation al revelation. Until now the only
real Mayakovsky was to be seen in the heroic bronze statue on Maya–
kovsky Square from which Ehrenburg, as he tells us, always averts his
gaze.
Ehrenburg has also given the young Soviet intellectuals a com–
pletely new idea of those avant-garde painters, like Malevich and Tat–
lin, who were closely associated with Mayakovsky, and who have long
been forbidden in the Soviet Union. For Stalin's inscrutable political
reasons, these painters were not permitted to enter into Soviet mythology,
but became "un-persons," cast out of Russian cultural history in the
'thirties, in order to make way for the socialist realist painters of the
type of Gerasimov. Now young people are being told that these painters
were an essential "link" in Russian artistic tradition. Ehrenburg's re-
