Volume 32, Number 3 · February 28, 1985
Chameleon
By Michael Scammell
Ilya Ehrenburg: Revolutionary, Novelist, Poet, War Correspondent, Propagandist—The Extraordinary Epic of a Russian Survivor material by
by Anatol Goldberg, with an introduction, postscript, and additional Erik de Mauny
Viking, 312 pp., $17.95
What are we to make of Ilya Ehrenburg, the great survivor among Soviet writers? The list of his friends and contemporaries who were sent to Stalin's labor camps, took their own lives, or died in lonely exile reads like a Who's Who of twentieth-century Russian letters: Mayakovsky, Esenin, Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Babel, Bulgakov, Mandelstam, Olesha, Zabolotsky, and Tsvetayeva, to name only the most famous. The very fact of his survival in these circumstances is sufficient to raise suspicions, especially when considered along with Ehrenburg's vast output of generally conformist novels, poems, plays, articles, essays, and memoirs. Yet his reputation as a 'liberal' and a fundamentally honest man continues. Young (and not-so-young) dissidents I have spoken to remember him with respect, even with affection. Emigré critics appear to have a favorable opinion of him. Most impressive of all is the testimony of Nadezhda Mandelstam. For that cantankerous and exacting critic of the Soviet literary scene, Ehrenburg was 'always the odd man out among Soviet writers, and the only one I maintained relations with all through the years.' At his funeral in 1967, she noted, the faces of the crowd were 'decent and human ones,' showing that Ehrenburg was widely admired and had 'done his work well.'
Review, 3371 words
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