Word: ehrenburg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perhaps it is just because Ehrenburg was most successful as a journalist and public figure, not as a major creative writer, that Joshua Rubinstein's Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg is so consistently absorbing. Most lierary biographies are forced to make an exciting story out of lives containing little external incident, and as a result they either present a catalogue of mundane details or try to unearth some salacious, gossipy stories about their subject...
...Ehrenburg's life actually was as interesting as his writing; over six decades he came in contact with virtually every major political and cultural figure in Russia. Joshua Rubinstein is a historian, affiliated with Harvard's Russian Research Center, and this biography treats Ehrenburg as a historical figure, paying only moderate attention to his literary work. The result is a book that brings Ehrenburg vividly to life, even for those who have never read his novels, as well as skillfully illuminating the dark times in which he lived...
...title of the biography indicates, Ehrenburg's life is of so much interest precisely because his loyalties, his principles, are so hard to determine. He was a Jew who prospered during the anti-Semitic Stalin years, while other notable Jewish writers were judicially murdered; he was a poet and novelist who won the Stalin Prize while his personal friends Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel were sent to the gulag. Clearly, Ehrenburg was no beacon of conscience...
...fruitful collaboration with the regime is especially peculiar because Ehrenburg was an early and vocal anti-Bolshevik. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Kiev in 1891, he joined the Party in his teens but later quit in disgust at its intolerance and inability to understand art. Instead he lived as a Bohemian in Paris, making friends with Diego Rivera and Picasso. Even the Revolution didn't win him over to Communism; he returned to Russia in 1918, only to leave again three years later and write his first novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples...
...late 1920s, Ehrenburg was warming to the Communist regime, and in the mid-1930s he became the Izvestia correspondent in France, sealing his compromise with Stalinism. From then on his life became an excruciating balancing act, trying simultaneously to appease the Kremlin and make some small gains for what he believed in--artistic freedom and the rights of Jews, foremost among them...