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PARTISAN REVIEW
FROM MODERNISM TO STALINISM
THE LIFE OF THE AUTOMOBILE. By lIya Ehrenburg.
Urizen Books,
Inc. $8.95.
Prompted in part by the interest of current Russian exile
literature, the West has begun to rediscover Russian modernist fiction
of the twenties and its most gifted exponents: Viktor Shklovsky,
Velimir Khlebnikov, and, oddly enough, Ilya Ehrenburg. Ehrenburg is
still remembered today as a cultural personality, but his novels are, for
the most part, forgotten. The recent republication of an early novel,
The Life of the Automobile,
reminds us that Ehrenburg, at his best,
was a surprisingly good writer.
Ehrenburg was born in Kiev in 1891
to
middle-class, assimilated
Jewish parents. Exiled by the Czarist government in 1908, he settled in
Paris, where for the next ten years he led a cosmopolitan life in the
company of such friends as Picasso, Modigliani, Leger, Aragon,
Pascin, and Max Jacob. On this return
to
Russia in 1918, Ehrenburg's
attitude toward the revolution was, at the least, ambivalent: "I enter–
tained many doubts" is the way he puts it in his
Memoirs.
The
maverick revolutionary Victor Serge recalls in his own
Memoirs
that,
in 1918, "a small volume by Ehrenburg (now on the run) was in
circulation; it was
A Prayer for Russia,
so ravished and crucified by the
revolution." At best, the Soviet government considered Ehrenburg to
be what Trotsky called a literary fellow-traveler.
In 1921, Ehrenburg left for Berlin. There he joined the Russian
exile community that, during the early twenties, would include Gorky,
Pasternak, Biely, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Shklovsky, Tsvetayeva,
Esenin, and the young Nabokov. He published nineteen books during
this decade-his best work and some of his worst as well. By the late
twenties, Ehrenburg's opposition
to
the Soviet government had waned
and, by the early thirties, he was
Izvestia's
correspondent in Western
Europe.
Ehrenburg was one of the many European intellectuals for whom
the rise of fascism in the 1930s effectively quelled scruples about the
Soviet regime. The accomodation made, Ehrenburg-who knew per–
sonally almost every important writer and artist of his period-was the
logical choice
to
be the chief organizer of the most successful
