Volume 4, Number 3 · March 11, 1965
Ilya Ehrenburg's Story
By Helen Muchnic
Memoirs: 1921-1941
by Ilya Ehrenburg
World, 543 pp., $6.95
The title of Ehrenburg's memoirs in the original Russian is People, Years, Life, a title intentionally disjointed to serve notice that his work is not to be taken as history, but only as a collection of memories, unsystematically recorded by a private individual. Implicitly, it is the first of many disclaimers interspersed throughout his narrative, from one at its very beginning—'I suppose it will be a book about myself rather than about my epoch…I am not an impartial chronicler'—to that toward the end of this second volume (the first came out in 1962), in which Ehrenburg attempts to explain his silence during the purge trials in Moscow: 'Even now I can write only what I have seen for myself…I cannot analyze the epoch nor present a large historical canvas.' The Russian edition of this book contains a brief preface, which does not appear in the English translation, where Ehrenburg once again underscores the 'extreme subjectivity' of his work: 'I want to emphasize once more that this book is the story of my life, of the search, the errors and the discoveries of a single individual' that makes 'no pretense whatever to giving the history of an epoch.' 'All books,' he had already said, 'are confessions, and a book of memoirs is a confession without any attempt to cloak oneself in the shadow of an invented hero'; and this too he now repeats: his book is not a chronicle, but a confession.
Review, 3462 words
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