Word: rubinstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...Ehrenburg's biographer, it is perhaps to be expected that Rubinstein becomes his advocate, trying to acquit him of the moral taint of collaboration. Rubinstein's thesis is a reasonable and, for the most part, well-supported one: namely, that Ehrenburg used his public image as "a harsh spokesman for Soviet interests" as "a cover to pursue his ultimate goal: to challenge the limits of Soviet censorship, revive Russia's connection to European culture, and restore to living memory the names and works of those whom Stalin first killed and then erased from history...
This means that, while he didn't dare speak out on behalf of persecuted writers like Babel, Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova during the Stalin years, Ehrenburg worked assiduously to resurrect their reputations in the more lenient Khrushchev period. As Rubinstein documents, Ehrenburg used his position as the Soviet writer best known to the Western intelligentsia in order to blackmail the censors: he would repeatedly announce the publication of a controversial book or article, then protest that its failure to appear due to censorship would reflect badly on the Soviet regime in the West...
...Still, Rubinstein often seems too quick to give his subject the benefit of the doubt. In the book's final pages, he mentions the Prague Spring uprising which took place 1968, one year after Ehrenburg's death, and comments offhandedly that it was "a cause Ehrenburg surely would have supported." Rubinstein seems to have forgotten his own account of how, during the similar 1956 revolt in Hungary, Ehrenburg was dispatched to a foreign writers' conference to defend Khrushchev's brutal intervention against criticism, a job he performed without complaint. True, Ehrenburg was no fawning Stalinist; but to imply that...