Ilya Ehrenburg
Encyclopedia
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer
, journalist
, translator, and cultural figure.
Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a reporter in three wars (First World War, Spanish Civil War
and the Second World War). His articles on the Second World War have provoked intense controversies
in West Germany
, especially during the sixties.
The novel The Thaw gave its name to an entire era of Soviet cultural politics, namely, the liberalization after the death of Joseph Stalin
. Ehrenburg's travel writing also had great resonance, as did to an arguably greater extent his autobiography
People, Years, Life, which may be his best known and most discussed work. The Black Book, edited by him and Vassily Grossman, has special historical significance; detailing the genocide on Soviet citizens of Jewish ancestry, it is the first great documentary work on the Holocaust.
In addition, Ehrenburg wrote a succession of works of poetry.
, Russian Empire
, in a bourgeois family; his father was an engineer. Ehrenburg's family was not religiously affiliated; he came into contact with the religious practices of Judaism - originally the religion of the Ehrenburgs - only through his maternal grandfather. Ehrenburg never joined any religious denomination, in spite of his later flirtation with Catholicism. He learned no Yiddish, and understood himself as a Russian, and later as a Soviet citizen, while taking strong public positions against antisemitism. He wrote in Russian even during his many years abroad.
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 death during the Great Terror
of 1938.
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 Communist 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
, and Amedeo Modigliani
. Foreign writers whose works Ehrenburg translated included those of Francis Jammes
.
During the First World War, 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 storm of the winter palace to a 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
.
He wrote modernistic picaresque novel
s and short stories popular in the 1920s, often set in Western Europe ("Julio Jurenito", "Thirteen Pipes"). Ehrenburg continued to write philosophical poetry, using more freed rhythms than in the 1910s.
By the 1930s, 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. In 1939, he was a war journalist in the Spanish civil war
.
one of many Soviet writers, along with Konstantin Simonov
and Aleksey Surkov, who have been accused by some of
"[lending] their literary talents to the hate campaign" against Germans
during World War II
. His article "Kill" published in 1942 — when German troops were deeply within Soviet territory — became a widely publicized example of this campaign, along with the poem "Kill him!" by Simonov.
In "Kill", Ehrenburg wrote:
Soviet officers like Lev Kopelev
, who opposed such rhetoric, were accused of opposing Ehrenburg and "compassion towards the enemy". Ehrenburg himself was criticised by Georgy Aleksandrov
in a Pravda
article in April 1945, who called his views towards the Germans simplificating and an exaggeration as it has never been the purpose of Soviet policy to wipe out the German people. Ehrenburg fell in disgrace at that time and it is estimated that Aleksandrov's article was a signal of change in Stalin's policy towards Germany.
When Ehrenburg received letters from frontline soldiers accusing him of having
changed his position and of standing for softness towards Germans, he replied he had not changed his position, as he had always stood for "justice, not revenge".
Already in May 1942 he wrote: "The German soldier with weapon in hand is not a man for us, but a fascist. We hate him [...] When the
German soldier gives up his weapon and surrenders, we will not touch him with a finger - he will live."
Ehrenburg was a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
.
In 1942 Ehrenburg was a companion to Leland Stowe
, an American journalist who traveled to Soviet front lines. In his book They Shall Not Sleep published in the USA in 1944 Stowe describes his interaction with Ehrenburg.
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
. Just prior to publishing the book, however, Ehrenburg received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952.
Ehrenburg is well known for his writing, especially his memoirs ("People, Years, and Life"), 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 the one of Marina Tsvetaeva
. He was also active in publishing the works by Osip Mandelstam
when the latter had been posthumously rehabilitated but still largely unacceptable for censorship. Together with Vasily Grossman
, Ehrenburg edited The Black Book that contains documentary accounts by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust
in the Soviet Union and Poland. 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. Ehrenburg's memoirs were criticized by the more conservative faction among the Soviet writers, concentrated around the journal Oktyabr'
. For example, as the memoirs were published, Vsevolod Kochetov
reflected on certain writers who are “burrowing in the rubbish heaps of their crackpot memories.”
in Moscow
, where his gravestone is adorned with a reproduction of his portrait drawn by his friend Pablo Picasso
.
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, translator, and cultural figure.
Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a reporter in three wars (First World War, Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
and the Second World War). His articles on the Second World War have provoked intense controversies
in West Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
, especially during the sixties.
The novel The Thaw gave its name to an entire era of Soviet cultural politics, namely, the liberalization after the death of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
. Ehrenburg's travel writing also had great resonance, as did to an arguably greater extent his autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
People, Years, Life, which may be his best known and most discussed work. The Black Book, edited by him and Vassily Grossman, has special historical significance; detailing the genocide on Soviet citizens of Jewish ancestry, it is the first great documentary work on the Holocaust.
In addition, Ehrenburg wrote a succession of works of poetry.
Life and work
Ilya Ehrenburg was born in KievKiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
, Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
, in a bourgeois family; his father was an engineer. Ehrenburg's family was not religiously affiliated; he came into contact with the religious practices of Judaism - originally the religion of the Ehrenburgs - only through his maternal grandfather. Ehrenburg never joined any religious denomination, in spite of his later flirtation with Catholicism. He learned no Yiddish, and understood himself as a Russian, and later as a Soviet citizen, while taking strong public positions against antisemitism. He wrote in Russian even during his many years abroad.
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
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
, who was two grades above him; the two
remained friends until Bukharin's death during the Great Terror
Great Terror
Great Terror may refer to:* Reign of Terror , a period of extreme violence during the French Revolution, last weeks of which are sometimes referred to as the Red Terror or Great Terror...
of 1938.
In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1905
Russian Revolution of 1905
The 1905 Russian Revolution was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire. Some of it was directed against the government, while some was undirected. It included worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies...
, both Ehrenburg and Bukharin got involved in illegal activities of the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
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
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
and other prominent exiles. But soon he left these circles and the Communist Party. Ehrenburg became attached to the bohemian life in the Paris quarter of Montparnasse
Montparnasse
Montparnasse is an area of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail...
. He began to write poems, regularly visited the cafés of Montparnasse and got acquainted with a lot of artists, especially Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...
, and Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
. Foreign writers whose works Ehrenburg translated included those of Francis Jammes
Francis Jammes
Francis Jammes was a French poet. Coming from an ancient family, he spent most of his life in his native region of Béarn and the Basque Country and his poems are known for their lyricism and for singing the pleasures of a humble country life...
.
During the First World War, 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 storm of the winter palace to a 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
Koktebel
Koktebel , formerly known as Planerskoye, is one of the most popular resort townlets in South-Eastern Crimea. Koktebel is situated on the shore of the Black Sea about halfway between Feodosiya and Sudak and is subordinated to the Theodosia city municipality. It is best known for its literary...
on the Crimea peninsula where his old friend from Paris days, Maximilian Voloshin
Maximilian Voloshin
Maximilian Alexandrovich Kirienko-Voloshin was a Russian poet and famous Freemason. He was one of the significant representatives of the Symbolist movement in Russian culture and literature...
, had a house. Finally, Ehrenburg returned to Moscow, where he soon was arrested by the Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...
.
He wrote modernistic picaresque novel
Picaresque novel
The picaresque novel is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society...
s and short stories popular in the 1920s, often set in Western Europe ("Julio Jurenito", "Thirteen Pipes"). Ehrenburg continued to write philosophical poetry, using more freed rhythms than in the 1910s.
By the 1930s, 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. In 1939, he was a war journalist in the Spanish civil war
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
.
World War II
Ehrenburg was active in war journalism throughout World War II. As a consequence, he isone of many Soviet writers, along with Konstantin Simonov
Konstantin Simonov
Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov was a Russian/Soviet author, known especially as a war poet.-Early years:He was born in Petrograd. His mother was born Princess Obolenskaya, of a Rurikid family. His father, an officer in the Tsar's army, left Russia after the Revolution in 1917. He died in Poland...
and Aleksey Surkov, who have been accused by some of
"[lending] their literary talents to the hate campaign" against Germans
Anti-German sentiment
Anti-German sentiment is defined as an opposition to or fear of Germany, its inhabitants, and the German language. Its opposite is Germanophilia.-Russia:...
during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. His article "Kill" published in 1942 — when German troops were deeply within Soviet territory — became a widely publicized example of this campaign, along with the poem "Kill him!" by Simonov.
In "Kill", Ehrenburg wrote:
"Here are excerpts from three letters found on dead Germans.
Inspector Reinhardt wrote to Lieutenant Otto Schirach: "[...] I have found six Russians in the area. They last far longer than Frenchmen. Only one of them has died. [...] Their upkeep costs nothing and we must not tolerate that these animals, whose children are possibly killing our children right now, get to eat German bread. Yesterday I whipped lightly two Russian beasts who secretly drunk up skim milk meant for pigs [...]"
A certain Otto Essmann wrote to Lieutenant Helmut Wiegand: "We now have some Russian prisoners of war. These fellows feed on worms by the airstrip and throw themselves at buckets of dirty water. I have seen them eating weeds. It is hard to believe that these are human beings..."
Slavers - they would like to enslave our people. They take some Russians home, mistreat them, make them lose their wits by hunger, to the point that they eat grass and worms, and then a repulsive German with a stinking cigar can philosophise: "Are these perhaps human beings?"
We know everything. We remember everything. We have understood: Germans are not human beings. Henceforth the word German means to us the most terrible curse. From now on the word German will trigger your rifle. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day. If you think that instead of you, the man next to you will kill him, you have not understood the threat. If you do not kill the German, he will kill you. If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German before combat. If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another - there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill."
Soviet officers like Lev Kopelev
Lev Kopelev
Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev was a Soviet author and a dissident.- Biography :...
, who opposed such rhetoric, were accused of opposing Ehrenburg and "compassion towards the enemy". Ehrenburg himself was criticised by Georgy Aleksandrov
Georgy Aleksandrov
Georgy Fedorovich Aleksandrov Georgy Fedorovich Aleksandrov Georgy Fedorovich Aleksandrov (22 March 1908 (Old Style), Saint Petersburg - 7 July 1961 (New Style, Moscow) was a Marxist philosopher and a Soviet politician.-Childhood and education:...
in a Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
article in April 1945, who called his views towards the Germans simplificating and an exaggeration as it has never been the purpose of Soviet policy to wipe out the German people. Ehrenburg fell in disgrace at that time and it is estimated that Aleksandrov's article was a signal of change in Stalin's policy towards Germany.
When Ehrenburg received letters from frontline soldiers accusing him of having
changed his position and of standing for softness towards Germans, he replied he had not changed his position, as he had always stood for "justice, not revenge".
Already in May 1942 he wrote: "The German soldier with weapon in hand is not a man for us, but a fascist. We hate him [...] When the
German soldier gives up his weapon and surrenders, we will not touch him with a finger - he will live."
Ehrenburg was a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed on Joseph Stalin's order in Kuibyshev in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities...
.
In 1942 Ehrenburg was a companion to Leland Stowe
Leland Stowe
Leland Stowe was a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist noted for being one of the first to recognize the expansionist character of the German Nazi regime.- Biography :...
, an American journalist who traveled to Soviet front lines. In his book They Shall Not Sleep published in the USA in 1944 Stowe describes his interaction with Ehrenburg.
Postwar writings
In 1954, Ehrenburg published a novel titled The Thaw that tested the limits of censorship in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. It described a corrupted and despotic factory boss, a "little Stalin" (although his support for Stalin never wavered). The boss's wife could not bear to stay with him and left the despot during the spring thaw that gave her courage. In August 1954, Konstantin SimonovKonstantin Simonov
Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov was a Russian/Soviet author, known especially as a war poet.-Early years:He was born in Petrograd. His mother was born Princess Obolenskaya, of a Rurikid family. His father, an officer in the Tsar's army, left Russia after the Revolution in 1917. He died in Poland...
attacked The Thaw in articles published in Literaturnaya gazeta
Literaturnaya Gazeta
Literaturnaya Gazeta is a weekly cultural and political newspaper published in Russia and Soviet Union.- Overview :...
, arguing that such writings are too dark and do not serve the Soviet state. The novel gave its name to the Khrushchev Thaw
Khrushchev Thaw
The Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and...
. Just prior to publishing the book, however, Ehrenburg received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952.
Ehrenburg is well known for his writing, especially his memoirs ("People, Years, and Life"), 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 the one of Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from...
. He was also active in publishing the works by Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets...
when the latter had been posthumously rehabilitated but still largely unacceptable for censorship. Together with Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist. Grossman trained as an engineer and worked in the Donets Basin, but changed career in the 1930s and published short stories and several novels...
, Ehrenburg edited The Black Book that contains documentary accounts by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
in the Soviet Union and Poland. 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. Ehrenburg's memoirs were criticized by the more conservative faction among the Soviet writers, concentrated around the journal Oktyabr'
Oktyabr'
Oktyabr may refer to:*Oktyabr, Azerbaijan, a village in Azerbaijan*Oktyabr', Osh, a village in Kyrgyzstan*Oktyabr', Jalal-Abad, a village in Kyrgyzstan*Oktyabr, Russia, name of several rural localities in Russia...
. For example, as the memoirs were published, Vsevolod Kochetov
Vsevolod Kochetov
Vsevolod Anissimovich Kochetov was a Soviet Russian writer and cultural functionary. He has been described as a party dogmatist and as a classic of socialist realism...
reflected on certain writers who are “burrowing in the rubbish heaps of their crackpot memories.”
Death
Ehrenburg died in 1967 of prostate and bladder cancer, and was interred in Novodevichy CemeteryNovodevichy Cemetery
Novodevichy Cemetery is the most famous cemetery in Moscow, Russia. It is next to the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, which is the city's third most popular tourist site. It should not be confused with the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg....
in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, where his gravestone is adorned with a reproduction of his portrait drawn by his friend Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
.
English translations
- The Tempering of Russia, Knopf, NY, 1944.
- European Crossroad: A Soviet Journalist In the Balkans, Knopf, NY, 1947.
- The Ninth Wave, Lawrence And Wishart, London, 1955.
- The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, Polyglot Library, 1960.
- A Change of Season, (includes The Thaw and it's sequel The Spring), Knopf, NY, 1962.
- Chekhov, Stendhal and Other Essays, Knopf, NY, 1963.
- The Second Day, Raduga Publishers, Moscow, 1984.
- Life of the Automobile, Serpent's Tail, 1999.
- The Fall of Paris, Simon Publications, 2002.
- The Storm, University Press of the Pacific, 2003.
External links
- Poems by Ilya Erenburg (English Translations)
- A poem in verse translation by Alexander Givental (UC Berkeley)
- The Black Book at jewishgen.org
- Tangled Loyalties, the 'definitive' Ehrenburg biography by Joshua Rubenstein at the book's home on the web
- Long biography, includes quote above
- Article in The Columbia Encyclopedia
- Brief page on The Thaw
- Marevna, "Homage to Friends from Montparnasse" (1962) Top left to right: Diego RiveraDiego RiveraDiego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...
, Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim SoutineChaim SoutineChaïm Soutine was a Jewish painter from Belarus. Soutine made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living in Paris....
, Amedeo ModiglianiAmedeo ModiglianiAmedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
, his wife Jeanne HébuterneJeanne HébuterneJeanne Hébuterne was a French artist, best known as the frequent subject and common-law wife of the artist Amedeo Modigliani.- Early life :...
, Max JacobMax JacobMax Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
, gallery owner Leopold Zborowskihttp://www.imageartsetc.com/stock-images/detail.asp?pid=1406 http://www.imageartsetc.com/stock-images/detail.asp?pid=1428. Bottom left to right: Marevna, hers and Diego Rivera's daughter Marika, (Amedeo Modigliani), Moise KislingMoise KislingMoise Kisling was a Polish painter.Born in Kraków, Austria-Hungary, he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Kraków, where he was encouraged to travel to the center for artistic creativity in the early 20th century, Paris, France.In 1910, Kisling moved to Montmartre and a few years later to...
.