Vol. 46 No. 2 1979 - page 303

BOOKS
303
Communist-sponsored gathering of intellectuals ever brought off: the
international Writers' Conference against Fascism, held in Paris in
1935. As
Izvestia's
correspondent, he covered the Spanish Civil War,
partly in the company of Hemingway.
In
1940, Ehrenburg returned to
Russia for good. "The fall of Paris, " Nadezdha Mandelstam recalls in
H
ope A bandoned,
"was like a personal tragedy for him and made him
quite oblivious to the reign of terror also reigning in Moscow.
In
this
unfamiliar world, Ehrenburg was a changed person. " During World
War II, Ehrenburg did anti-German radio broadcasts of memorable
virulence and, as a journalist, accompanied the Red Army on its drive
toward Berlin.
After the war, Ehrenburg was one of the first Russians to raise a
critical voice. His novel
The Storm
(1947) had some bitter things to say
about Russian anti-Semitism.
In
1953, he began to publish articles on
the condition of Soviet literature and launched the first attack on the
doctrine of socialist realism, holding it directly accountable for the
mediocrity of Soviet writing. That same year, he wrote
The Thaw,
in
which he contrasts the hacks who conform
to
party dictates with an
artist who will not compromise despite official disfavor. From 1953 on,
Ehrenburg was the patron and defender of a more liberal policy in the
arts. The works of Babel and Tsvetayeva reappeared under his sponsor–
ship, while his own
Memoirs,
published in the early sixties, exposed a
generation of Russians to officially proscribed varieties of Western art
and literature.
Many Western critics have viewed Ehrenburg as an "official"
Soviet writer whose eminence is due more to a keen sense of which way
the wind was blowing than
to
his own literary merits, and as the author
of a (typically) self-exculpatory book of reminiscences. But this is being
rather too hard on Ehrenburg. Ehrenburg remained Mandelstam's
friend to the end, as Nadezdha Mandelstam attests in
Hope Against
HoPe;
and his polemics and activities from 1953 on (he died in 1967) in
defense of artistic freedom were acts of considerable courage.
Ehrenburg knew that his conformism had ruined him as an
artist-that knowledge pervades his
Memoirs.
But during the 1920s,
living mostly abroad, he was close to the most valuable artistic
tendencies of his time. The result was a range of work that included
daring, complex novels like
Julio Jurenito
(1921) and
The Life of the
Automobile
(1929), as well as such startling failures as the neo-Gorkian
novel set in the slums of Moscow,
Protochny Lane
(1926) and the
potboiler romance,
The Loves of Jeanne
Ney
(1924), on which Pabst
based his famous film starring Louise Brooks.
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