Ehrenburg biography. Ilya Ehrenburg

Publications of the section Literature

Being Ilya Ehrenburg: the secrets of success

T alant, many friends, strange appearance, huge circulation ... We reveal the recipe for how to become the most European Soviet writer, "smoke a pipe, write novels and accept the world and ice cream with skepticism" together with Sofya Bagdasarova.

Live in Paris

A good boy from a Jewish family came to the French capital in 1908, right from prison, where he ended up for revolutionary proclamations. Mom was very afraid: in Paris there are many temptations, femme fatale, there he might go crazy. (And it was not in vain that I was worried: with the money sent by her, Ilya published the book "Girls, undress yourself" in a print run of 50 copies.) A fiery revolutionary arrived in Paris with a suitcase full of books. And the poet and translator Francois Villon remained to live in Montparnasse.

Ehrenburg returned to Russia after the February Revolution. But in 1921, he realized that he could not write outside the walls of Parisian cafes, and paper in Soviet Russia was difficult - and there waiters brought it. And again he settled in Paris. At the same time, to everyone's surprise, he retained Soviet citizenship. This evoked complex emotions among hungry emigrant writers.

“Nature has generously endowed Ehrenburg - he has a Soviet passport.
He lives with this passport abroad. And thousands of visas.
I don't know what kind of writer Ilya Ehrenburg is.
Old things are not good. "
Victor Shklovsky

In the 1930s, while still a Parisian, Ehrenburg traveled extensively. And he worked as a correspondent for Soviet newspapers. After the capture of France in 1940, he returned to the USSR and wrote the novel The Fall of Paris. And in the sixties he wrote his memoirs "People, Years, Life", in which he glorified that French period.

Chat with the greats

The Parisian cafe Rotunda was Ehrenburg's second home: there he met Apollinaire, Cocteau, Leger, Vlaminck, Picasso, Modigliani, Rivera, Matisse, as well as the emigrants Marevna, Chagall, Soutine, Larionov, Goncharova, Shterenberg and others. Ehrenburg's portraits of their work are scattered in museums around the world - and their names are abundantly scattered across the pages of his books.

“In 1948, after the Wroclaw Congress, we were in Warsaw. Picasso made my portrait in pencil; I posed for him in the room of the old hotel "Bristol". When Pablo finished drawing, I asked: "Already? .." The session seemed very short to me. Pablo laughed: "But I have known you for forty years ..."
Ilya Ehrenburg

His first famous novel, Julio Jurenito, was published with a foreword by Nikolai Bukharin. By the way, it was Bukharin who saved him in 1920, when Ehrenburg was arrested by the Cheka as an agent of Wrangel. Lenin, who had met him while still in exile, named him Ilya Lokhmaty. Hitler remembered Ehrenburg by his last name, branded him as a Stalinist court lackey and issued a personal order to catch him and hang him. Stalin quoted and praised Ehrenburg's text, which had been banned by the Soviet censorship.

His works were filmed by directors Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Kote Marjanishvili. When in 1935 the Soviet government wanted to organize an anti-fascist congress in Paris, Ehrenburg became its driving force: only he had a sufficient number of acquaintances among the intelligentsia of all of Europe. Once the surrealists, led by the writer André Breton, caught him at the Closerie cafe, and slapped him in the face for a critical article. During the Spanish Civil War, Ehrenburg went to the front with Hemingway more than once. Louis Aragon (Lily Brique's son-in-law), in his novel The Communists, described how Ehrenburg was arrested in 1940 but saved by the French Minister of the Interior. In general, the list of his acquaintances was endless.

Smoke your pipe and wear weird hats

The appearance of Ehrenburg, especially before he returned to the USSR and became an honored Soviet writer, with Stalin prizes, an apartment, a dacha and suits tailored in an atelier, was remembered.

“With a sickly, poorly shaven face, with large, overhanging, imperceptibly squinting eyes, heavy Semitic lips, with very long and very straight hair hanging in absurd braids, in a wide-brimmed felt hat, standing upright like a medieval cap, hunched over, with shoulders and legs turned inward, in a blue jacket sprinkled with dust, dandruff and tobacco ash, who looks like a man "who has just washed the floor", Ehrenburg is so "left-sided" and "Montparnasin" that his mere appearance in other quarters of Paris causes confusion and the excitement of passers-by. "
Maximilian Voloshin

His hats were unusual - but he was not chasing style, he was just sloppy. Once Alexei Tolstoy sent a postcard to a Parisian cafe, replacing Ehrenburg's name with "Au monsieur mal coiffe" ("Badly combed gentleman"). And the message was passed on to whoever needs it.

However, in the USSR, he shocked: he put on a beret, the habit of wearing which he picked up in Spain. Passers-by looked not at the famous writer, but at the strange hat. And at the front, as Marshal Baghramyan recalled, Ehrenburg wore a cap - but somehow it was not at all according to the regulations, and this was also striking.

He did not part with the pipe, we see them in many photographs and portraits. “The one who picks up the pipe must possess the rarest virtues: the dispassion of a commander, the silence of a diplomat and the equanimity of a sharper,” he wrote about himself. One of his best early books is also devoted to pipes.

Write bitingly

A convinced anti-fascist, after the start of the Great Patriotic War, he wrote the article "Kill!", Giving rise to the famous frightening slogan "Kill the German!" “See Paris and die” - this also came from Ehrenburg. And the nickname of the Khrushchev thaw comes from the title of his 1954 novel.

Boris Slutsky wrote that Ehrenburg “was almost a happy man. He lived as he wanted (almost). Did what he wanted (almost). He wrote what he wanted (almost). He said - this is already without "almost" what he wanted. " Ehrenburg's position was truly unique. In Europe he was considered a pro-Soviet writer, and in the USSR he was a "fellow traveler" and a rootless cosmopolitan. Among his awards were the Orders of Lenin, the Red Banner of Labor and the Legion of Honor. He was thrashed for skepticism and cheeky tone, but at the same time they were read to them. Ehrenburg died in 1967, but even today controversy continues around his name, he is branded a opportunist and is called a hero.

NB: What to read at Ehrenburg
"The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito" is the forerunner of Bender and Woland. An adventurous fantasy novel, in which there are predictions of the Holocaust and a nuclear bomb. Continuation - "Trust DE".
“The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitschvanets” - the adventures of a tailor from Gomel, unhappy and funny, like a soldier Švejk.
"Black Book" - evidence of the crimes of fascism. The book is stronger — and more documentary — than Diary of Anne Frank (which recently had a surviving adult co-author).
"Thirteen Tubes" is a series of short stories about favorite toys from its collection. In pursuit of: "The conditional suffering of the frequent one of the cafe" - a kind of guide to the haunted establishments of Europe.
"People. Years. Life ”- memories. They were scolded both for their attention to the repressed and for their silence about them.

The revolution. Emigration. Return

Ilya Ehrenburg was born on January 14 (26), 1891 in Kiev into a prosperous Jewish family. His father - Gersh Gershonovich (Gersh Germanovich, Grigory Grigorievich) Ehrenburg - was an engineer and merchant of the 2nd guild; mother - Hana Berkovna (Anna Borisovna) Ehrenburg (nee Arinstein, 1857-1918) - a housewife. In 1895, the family moved to Moscow, where his father got a job as director of the Khamovnichesky beer and honey brewery. From 1901 he studied at the 1st Moscow gymnasium together with N.I.Bukharin.

From 1905 he took part in revolutionary activities, joined the Bolsheviks. In January 1908 he was arrested, spent six months in prisons and released pending trial, but in December he emigrated to France. Gradually moved away from the Bolsheviks. In Paris he was engaged in literary activity, moved in the circle of modernist artists, published the collections Poems (1910), I Live (1911), Everyday Life (1913), a book of translations by F. Villon (1913).

In 1914-1917 he was a correspondent for the Russian newspapers Utro Rossii and Birzhevye Vedomosti on the Western Front. In 1917 he returned to Russia. Having negatively perceived the victory of the Bolsheviks (a collection of poems "Prayer for Russia", 1918), in 1921 he again went abroad.

In 1921-1924 he lived in Berlin, in 1922 he published a philosophical and satirical novel "The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Students ...", which gives an interesting mosaic picture of the life of Europe and Russia during the First World War and by its accuracy of prophecy. Leonid Zhukhovitsky wrote about this:

Decades later, Japanese writers and journalists tried to find out everything from Ehrenburg: where did he get information about the impending bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1922?

I. Ehrenburg was a propagandist of avant-garde art (“Still, it turns,” 1922). In 1923 he wrote a collection of stories "Thirteen Pipes" and the novel "Trest DE". Ehrenburg was close to the left circles of French society and actively collaborated with the Soviet press. Since 1923 he has been working as a correspondent for Izvestia. His name and talent as a publicist were widely used by Soviet propaganda to create an attractive image of the Stalinist regime abroad. Since the beginning of the 1930s, he constantly lived in the USSR and began to carry out in his works the idea of "the inevitability of the victory of socialism." Published the novels "Day Two" (1934), "Book for Adults" (1936).

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, Ehrenburg was a war correspondent for Izvestia; acted as an essayist, prose writer (collection of stories "Out of the Armistice", 1937; novel "What a Man Needs", 1937), poet (collection of poems "Loyalty", 1941). After the defeat of the Republicans, he moved to Paris. After the German occupation of France, he took refuge in the Soviet embassy.

The war period of creativity

I was told by people who deserve full confidence that in one of the large united partisan detachments there was the following paragraph of a handwritten order:
“After reading the newspapers, use them for raskurka, except for the articles by Ilya Ehrenburg.”
This is truly the shortest and most heart-rending review I have ever heard of.

K. Simonov Ev. Evtushenko

In 1940 he returned to the USSR, where he wrote and published the novel The Fall of Paris (1941) about the political, moral, historical reasons for the defeat of France by Germany in World War II.

During the Great Patriotic War he was a correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, wrote for other newspapers and for the Soviet Information Bureau. He became famous for his propaganda anti-fascist articles and works. A significant part of these articles, which were constantly published in the newspapers Pravda, Izvestia, Krasnaya Zvezda, were collected in the three-volume journalism Voina (1942-44). In 1942 he joined the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and was active in collecting and publishing materials about the Holocaust.

However, after the article "Enough!" In April 1945, Pravda published an article by GF Aleksandrov, head of the Propaganda and Agitation Directorate of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, "Comrade Ehrenburg simplifies."

Together with V.S.Grossman, he compiled the famous Black Book about the genocide of the Jewish people on the territory of the USSR.

Post-war creativity

After the war he released a dilogy - the novels The Tempest (1946-1947) and The Ninth Wave (1950).

In 1948, Hollywood released The Iron Curtain (directed by William Wellman, about the escape of the GRU ransomware Igor Guzenko and Soviet espionage). On February 21 of the same year, Ehrenburg in the newspaper "Culture and Life" publishes an article "Film Providers", written on the instructions of the Minister of Cinematography I. G. Bolshakov.

After Stalin's death, he wrote the story "The Thaw" (1954), which gave the name to an entire era of Soviet history. In 1957, "French Notebooks" were published - an essay on French literature, painting and translations from Du Bellay. The author of the memoirs "People, Years, Life", which enjoyed great popularity among the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1960s - 1970s. Ehrenburg introduced the younger generation to many "forgotten" names, contributed to the publication of both forgotten (Tsvetaeva) and young (Slutsky, Gudzenko) authors. He promoted new Western art.

Died after a long illness on August 31, 1967. About 15,000 people came to say goodbye to the writer.

Buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.

Essays

The collected works of Ilya Ehrenburg in 5 volumes were published in 1951-1954 by the State Publishing House of Fiction.

The next collection, more complete, in nine volumes, was published by the same publishing house in 1962-1966.

Awards and prizes

Stalin Prize, First Degree (1942) - for the novel The Fall of Paris (1941)
Stalin Prize, First Degree (1948) - for the novel Tempest (1947)
International Stalin Prize "For Strengthening Peace Among Nations" (1952)
two Orders of Lenin
Order of the Red Banner of Labor
Order of the Red Star
Legion of Honor

Membership in organizations

Vice-President of the SCM since 1950. Member of the USSR Armed Forces since 1950.

A family

The first wife (1910-1913) - translator Katerina (Ekaterina) Ottovna Schmidt (1889-1977, Sorokin's second marriage). Their daughter, a translator of French literature, Irina Ilinichna Ehrenburg (1911-1997), was married to the writer Boris Matveyevich Lapin (1905-1941). After the tragic death of her husband, she adopted and raised a girl:

Second wife (since 1919) - artist Lyubov Mikhailovna Kozintseva (1900-1970), sister of film director Grigory Mikhailovich Kozintsev, student of Alexandra Exter (Kiev, 1921), Robert Falk, Alexander Rodchenko. Since 1922 she has participated in exhibitions in Berlin, Paris, Prague, Amsterdam .. About 90 of her paintings and graphic works are kept in the Department of Private Collections of the Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin.

Famous phrase

I. Ehrenburg owns the famous words: "To see Paris and die."

Bibliography

1916 - Poems about the Eves
About the vest of Semyon Drozd, M., 1917
1918 - Prayer for Russia
Fire. Gomel, 1919
The face of war. Sofia, 1920; Berlin, 1923
Incredible stories. Berlin, 1922
1922 - The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito
And yet it turns. Berlin, "Helikon", 1922
Six novellas about easy ends. Berlin, 1922
1923 - The life and death of Nikolai Kurbov
1923 - Thirteen pipes
1923 - Trust “D. E. "
1924 - Love of Jeanne Ney
1925 - Ravach
1926 - Summer 1925
1927 - In Protochny lane
1928 - White coal or Werther's Tears
1928 - The stormy life of Lazik Roitschvanets (published in the USSR in 1990)
1928 - Time Visa
1929 - Conspiracy of Equals
1931 - United Front (not published in Russia)
1933 - Day two
1934 - Protracted denouement
1936 - Book for adults
1941 - Fall of Paris
1942-1944 - War
1947 - The Tempest
1950 - The Ninth Wave
1954 - Thaw
1974 - Chronicle of Courage. Publishing house "Soviet writer", Moscow, 1974 (Publicistic articles of the war years) Hardcover, 384 p., Circulation 30,000 copies. (price 64 kopecks)
Collected Works. ZIF.

Date of Birth: Place of Birth: A place of death: Awards and prizes:

Ilya Grigorievich (Girshevich) Ehrenburg(January 14 (27), 1891, Kiev - August 31, 1967, Moscow) - Soviet writer, poet, translator from French and Spanish, publicist and public figure, vice-president of the Supreme Council of Ministers, deputy of the USSR Supreme Council since 1950, twice winner of the Stalin Prize first degree (1942, 1948); laureate of the International Stalin Prize "For Strengthening Peace Among Nations" (1952).

Biography

The revolution. Emigration. Homecoming

During the Great Patriotic War he was a correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, wrote for other newspapers and for the Soviet Information Bureau. He became famous for his propaganda anti-fascist articles and works. A significant part of these articles, which were constantly published in the newspapers Pravda, Izvestia, and Krasnaya Zvezda, were collected in the three-volume journalism Voina (1942-44). Since 1942 he entered the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and was active in collecting and publishing materials about the Holocaust.

Together with Vasily Grossman, he created the famous Black Book about the Holocaust in the USSR.

Post-war period of creativity

After the war, he published the novel "The Tempest" (1946-1947; Stalin Prize, first degree; 1948).

Ehrenburg's position among Soviet writers was peculiar - on the one hand, he received material benefits, often traveled abroad, on the other hand, he was under the control of the special services and often even received reprimands. Equally ambivalent was the attitude of the authorities towards Ehrenburg in the era of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. After Stalin's death, he wrote the story "The Thaw" (1954), which gave the name to an entire era of Soviet history. In 1957, "French Notebooks" were published - an essay on French literature, painting and translations from Du Bellay. The author of the memoirs "People, Years, Life", which enjoyed great popularity among the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1960s - 1970s.

Died after a long illness on August 31, 1967. About 15,000 people came to say goodbye to the writer.

Buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.

Essays

Collected works of Ilya Ehrenburg in 5 volumes was published in 1952 by the State Publishing House of Fiction.

The next collection, more complete, in nine volumes, was published by the same publishing house in 1962-1966.

A family

First wife (1910-1913) - Katerina (Ekaterina) Ottovna Schmidt(1889-1977) (in Sorokin's second marriage), translator.
Their daughter - Irina Ilyinichna Ehrenburg(1911-1997), translator of French literature, was married to the writer Boris Matveyevich Lapin (1905-1941).
After the tragic death of her husband, she adopted and raised a girl:

He brought a girl Fanya from the war, in front of whom the Germans shot her parents and sisters in Vinnitsa. The older brothers served in the Polish army. An old man managed to hide Fanya, but since this was associated with a great risk, he told her: "Run, look for the partisans." And Fanya ran.
Ehrenburg brought this girl to Moscow precisely in the hope of distracting Irina from her grief. And she adopted Fanya. At first, everything was rather difficult, since the girl spoke poor Russian. She spoke in some monstrous mixture of languages. But then she quickly mastered Russian and even became an excellent student.
Irina and Fanya lived in Lavrushinsky; the poet Stepan Shchipachev lived there with his son Victor. Fanya met Viktor while still in the writers' pioneer camp; the half-child romance continued in Moscow and ended in marriage. Mom entered the philological faculty at Moscow State University, but quickly realized that it was not hers, and, having entered the medical school, she became a doctor. The marriage did not last long - three years. But I still managed to be born.

Second wife since 1919 - Lyubov Mikhailovna Kozintseva(1900-1970), artist, student of Alexandra Ekster (Kiev, 1921), in Moscow at VKHUTEMAS with Robert Falk, Alexander Rodchenko, sister of film director Grigory Mikhailovich Kozintsev. Since 1922 she has participated in exhibitions in Berlin, Paris, Prague, Amsterdam. About 90 of her paintings and graphic works are kept in the Department of Private Collections of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. A.S. Pushkin.

Famous words

I. Ehrenburg owns the famous words: "See Paris and Die".

"evil cosmopolitan"

A bloody struggle against cosmopolitanism began in the USSR. Ehrenburg also got into the stream of "exposure" ...
I managed to get into the "historical" writers' meeting and save the transcript of the speeches.
The speakers who spoke were spiteful and unprincipled. The writers of the "middle" generation were especially bold: Sofronov, Gribachev, Surov3, V. Kozhevnikov; critic Ermilov.
Anatoly Surov on the podium with oiled hair:
"I propose that Comrade Ehrenburg be expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers for cosmopolitanism in his works."
Nikolay Gribachev:
"Comrades, a lot has been said here about Ehrenburg as a prominent and almost outstanding publicist. Yes, I agree, during the Patriotic War he wrote articles necessary for the front and rear. But in his multifaceted novel" The Tempest "he buried not only the main character Sergei Vlakhov, but took the life of all Russian people - positive heroes. The writer deliberately gave preference to the Frenchwoman Mado. The conclusion involuntarily suggests itself: let the Russian people die, and the French enjoy life? I support comrades Surov, Ermilov, Sofronov that a citizen Ehrenburg, who despises everything Russian, cannot have a place in the ranks of "engineers of human souls", as the brilliant leader and wise teacher Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin called us. "
On the podium there is another "soul-loving engineer", "the cannibalist of the century" - Mikhail Sholokhov:
"Ehrenburg is a Jew! The Russian people are alien to him in spirit, he is absolutely indifferent to his aspirations and hopes. He does not and never loved Russia. The pernicious West, mired in vomit, is closer to him. I believe that Ehrenburg is unjustifiably praised for his journalism of the war years. Weeds and burdocks in the literal sense of the word are not needed by military, Soviet literature ... "
I watched I.G. Ehrenburg. He sat quietly in the far corner of the hall. His gray eyes were half-closed, it seemed that he was dozing. The presiding, subtle virtuoso of verbal battles Alexei Surkov gives the floor to the writer for "repentance".
Ilya Grigorievich leisurely walked towards the stage. He took a leisurely sip of the cooled tea. With myopic eyes, he looked around the hall where his former "associates" were. Ragging ash-gray hair, leaning slightly, he quietly but distinctly said: “You just, with the shameless harshness of which evil and very envious people are capable, condemned to death not only my novel The Tempest, but made an attempt to mix it with Ashes all my creativity. Once in Sevastopol a Russian officer came up to me. He said: "Why are the Jews so cunning, for example, before the war, Levitan painted landscapes, sold them to museums and private owners for a lot of money, and in the days of the war instead of the front got a job as an announcer on the Moscow radio? "In the footsteps of an uncultured chauvinist officer, an uncultured academician-teacher walks along. Undoubtedly, every reader has the right to accept this or that book, or to reject it. Let me give a few readers' reviews. I am not talking about them for this , in order to beg your forgiveness, but in order to teach you not to throw clods of dirt at human faces. Here are the lines from a letter from the teacher Nikolaevskaya from distant Verkhoyansk: my husband and three sons died. I was left alone. Can you imagine how deep my grief is? I read your novel The Tempest. This book, dear Ilya Grigorievich, helped me a lot. Trust me, I'm not the age to lavish compliments. Thank you for writing such wonderful works. "And here are the lines from the letter of Alexander Pozdnyakov:" I am a disabled person of the first group. In his native St. Petersburg he survived the blockade. In 1944 he was admitted to the hospital. The legs were amputated there. I wear prostheses. It was difficult at first. He returned to the Kirovsky plant, where he began working as a teenager. Your "Tempest" was read aloud in the evenings, during lunch breaks and smoke breaks. Some pages were re-read twice. The Tempest is an honest, truthful novel. There are workers at the factory who fought against fascism in the ranks of the heroic French Resistance. You wrote what happened, and for that we bow to you. "After a meaningful pause, Ehrenburg said:" Let me finish my speech with another letter, the most dear of all the readers' reviews I have received over the past thirty years. It is concise and will take you very little time. "
There was silence. The most zealous fell silent. Photojournalists who entered the hall illegally prepared cameras. They stopped paying attention to them. There was a sensation in the air. Suppressing a malicious smile, Ehrenburg, slowly, began to read:
"Dear Ilya Grigorievich! I have just read your wonderful Tempest. Thank you for it. Respectfully I. Stalin."
What was happening in the hall! Those same writers-"cannibals" engineers who had just scolded Ehrenburg with their last words and were ready to unanimously vote for his expulsion, now applauded him without any shame. By nature, the writer was not one of those people who allow themselves to step on their heels.
On the podium, Alexei Surkov:
“Comrades! Summing up this important and instructive meeting for all of us, I must say with all frankness and frankness that the writer and outstanding journalist Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg really wrote a wonderful book. He was always at the forefront of our fronts in the struggle for socialist realism. with you we must condemn the speakers here. "The storm" of Ehrenburg is the conscience of the times, the conscience of our generation, the conscience and the sign of the era ... "
For the novel "The Tempest" Ilya Ehrenburg received the Stalin Prize of the first degree. Throughout his life, the writer remained faithful to Stalin ...

Best of the day

Four quarters of the way.

First creative achievements

Western European intermezzo

Before the war

At the beginning of the second world

It is difficult to find in the history of Russian culture of the last century a figure more controversial than Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg - a writer, publicist, public figure, a person who is simultaneously associated with the most diverse cultural, intellectual, political, moral (or immoral) circles that are opposite in their very essence. A poet by vocation, the author of beautiful lyric poetry, he became widely known not for his poetry, but for his novels and stories, which were actively discussed by critics and lovers of Russian prose already in the 1920s, both in the USSR and in emigration. Prose pushed aside the poetry of Ehrenburg so much that it was almost forgotten. A prolific and sophisticated prose writer, he eventually focused on journalism. Ehrenburg's articles became masterpieces of this genre, while in his own works of art he increasingly felt the pressure of modernity, political topicality and, as a result, the lack of time. Here's just one example. German troops entered Paris on June 14, 1940, and already in September Ehrenburg began writing the novel "The Fall of Paris", the first part of which was published in the spring of 1941. Quite natural haste did not allow Ehrenburg's novels to rest, "mature". A kind of mixture of genres arose: bright fictional journalism in articles, essayism and journalistic style in fiction. In the eyes of some readers and critics, this was a disadvantage, in the eyes of others it was an important advantage.

A man who brilliantly knew and appreciated literary and artistic modernity, perfectly familiar with the Western world, its norms and values, he, despite his undisguised European cultural predilections and his Jewishness, received from the Soviet authorities official permission to stay in Western Europe for a long time in the midst of a cold war, fanning Great Russian chauvinism and persecution of Jews in the USSR. He managed to get out of the water during all the campaigns of the Stalinist hunt for the intelligentsia, including the "Great Terror" of the second half of the 30s and the anti-Semitic campaign associated with the persecution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the "Doctors' Affair" after the war. Moreover, this Jew and cosmopolitan in his convictions and artistic tastes received the International Stalin Peace Prize in the midst of the unbridled anti-Semitic campaign in the USSR associated with the arrest of doctors.

Being under the invisible and very dangerous patronage of the "genius of all times and peoples", he never became a Stalinist in the full sense of the word, dared not to utter servile and shameful praises addressed to the dictator. David Samoilov, who called Ehrenburg "the extreme western flank of Stalinism", was hardly entirely fair. After all, just a few months after the death of the dictator, he wrote the story "The Thaw", the name of which entered not only the everyday lexicon, but also the tools of social scientists around the world in different directions as a definition of the new period of development in which the country entered. This definition is preserved to this day - after half a century.

Ehrenburg's creative activity was crowned by his memoirs "People, Years, Life" - a true chronicle of the era, an honest, albeit subjective story about the experience, an extremely valuable source for understanding the human comedy called history, which is read with unflagging interest.

Vladimir Vysotsky has a poem-song "Rope Walker" with the words:

Look - here he goes without insurance.

A tilt to the right - it will fall, disappear!

A tilt to the left is still impossible to save ...

But he must really need to get through

Four quarters of the way.

What Vysotsky said could be attributed to a huge number of people who survived Stalin's tyranny. But they were especially concerned with Ehrenburg.

One of the mysteries of Ehrenburg is that he was able to occupy such a high position in the official Soviet establishment without refusing at all, moreover, repeatedly emphasizing his Jewishness. Not only retaining his father's surname, but also never using pseudonyms, he, however, Russified his name and patronymic (he was registered at birth as Eliyahu Hirshevich), but this was done when there was still no smell of official anti-Semitism in the USSR (not it was then the USSR itself!), and only in order to facilitate communication.

The name, creativity, social activities of Ehrenburg - in the memory of several generations of Soviet citizens of the 20-60s. Ehrenburg was more closely connected with the tragic fate of the Jews during the Second World War, with their survival during the time of the outright rampant Soviet anti-Semitism, and the cowardly, disguised persecution of the carriers of the "fifth point" after the bloody dictator went into oblivion than any other Soviet public figure-Jew that relatively recent era. This connection will be discussed below, after a short story about the life and work of Ehrenburg until the end of the 30s.

First creative achievements

Eliyahu Ehrenburg was born in Kiev on January 14 (27), 1891 in the family of a mechanic, who five years later moved to Moscow, where he was appointed manager of a brewery. The boy managed to get a job in the First Gymnasium, which was considered one of the best in the ancient capital. He was the only Jew in his class and immediately felt what anti-Semitism was. He felt the hostility of many of his classmates, but at the same time, their strong domestic and cultural influence. Summer trips to his grandfather in Kiev, in a purely Jewish environment, to some extent supported the spirit of his ancestors, but gradually the Kiev holidays became "travels to an alien world", as he wrote decades later in his memoirs. Trips to Kiev turned out to be more and more rare also because Ilya's mother, who went to Germany for treatment, began to take him with her, and here he eagerly absorbed new, Western European impressions. Under the influence of three different cultural worlds - Russian, Jewish, Western European - Ilya became a cosmopolitan and rebel.

The high school student joined the Bolsheviks, was expelled from school, several times was subjected to short-term arrest. An indisputable influence on him in these years was exerted by his gymnasium friend Nikolai Bukharin, who later became one of the most prominent Bolsheviks, who, while fully retaining all the disgusting features of this caste, at the same time was much more educated than other party bosses.

In the end, his father obtained permission for young Ilya to travel abroad, and in 1908 he found himself for the first time in Paris, which remained his favorite city throughout his life. Ilya became a regular in the Latin Quarter, where he met many artists, musicians, and writers who rebelled against conservative art. Among them were those who soon became world famous, such as Amedeo Modigliani and Diego Rivera.

Ilya began to write poetry, tried to find an acceptable religious doctrine for himself (he even thought about leaving for a monastery), but soon gave it up. In 1910, the first poetry collection of Ehrenburg was published in Paris, after which, already in Russia, new volumes of poetry were published almost every year, attracting the attention of critics. During the First World War, the poet began to collaborate in the Russian press. On behalf of the newspapers "Birzhevye Vedomosti" and "Morning of Russia", he went to the Western Front. He developed a persistent aversion to war bloodshed in general, which after many years will again make itself felt, however, with a completely different moral and ideological coloring, during the Soviet-German war and after its end. Ilya Ehrenburg returned to Russia after the February Revolution, in July 1917. He became close to a young resident of Petrograd, Yekaterina, soon became the father of a charming daughter, Irina, but never married her mother. Ilya tried to observe the fateful events in Russia from the outside, but he perceived the Bolshevik coup purely negatively, called it a catastrophe for Russia, and tried to emigrate. Nothing came of this venture, and in 1918 Ehrenburg left for Poltava, where his mother was dying. After her death, in search of at least partly a peaceful place, he moved to Kiev, where many of his relatives lived.

But Ukraine during the civil war was by no means a quiet haven. Kiev often passed from hand to hand: Hetman Skoropadsky was replaced by the Petliurites, then by the Bolsheviks, in 1919 the power of Denikin's Volunteer Army was established, which was again replaced by the Bolsheviks, in 1920 the city was briefly occupied by the Poles. Each time the change of power was accompanied by robberies, murders, violence, beatings. Bloody Jewish pogroms were not uncommon. In the newspaper "Kiev Life" Ehrenburg wrote: "If Jewish blood healed, Russia would now be a flourishing country. But blood does not heal, it only infects the air with anger and strife. "

In Kiev, Ehrenburg married the artist Lyubov Kozintseva, whose work later largely influenced his artistic tastes. With great difficulty in 1920, Ilya and Lyubov moved to Moscow, and at the beginning of the next year, with the help of Bukharin, who had already become one of the strongest in this world, he procured a semi-fictitious direction on a business trip abroad, and with him a foreign passport.

Western European intermezzo

Once again in Western Europe (France, Belgium, Germany), Ehrenburg first tried his hand at prose art. Already in 1922, he published his first novel, the title of which would have taken, perhaps, ten lines, but which is known by the first words of its title "The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito". This philosophical work combined journalism with poetry, human relations were viewed against the background of general world chaos, the heroes were kind of masks, representing some kind of people, then a social stratum. Among the heroes was a person named Ilya Ehrenburg, who embodied the Jewish world.

One passage from "Jurenito" terrifiedly predicted the coming Holocaust in two decades. The novel said: “In the near future, solemn sessions of the destruction of the Jewish tribe will take place in Budapest, Kiev, Jaffa, Algeria and in many other places. The program will include, in addition to the traditional pogroms loved by the respected public, also restoration in the spirit of the era: burning Jews, burying them alive in the ground, spraying fields with Jewish blood and new techniques, such as: "evacuation", "cleaning from suspicious elements", etc. ., etc. The place and time will be announced separately. The entrance is free". It is simply astonishing - it seems that Ehrenburg read the Wannsee Protocol on the “final solution” of the Jewish question more than twenty years before it arose! Some critics consider "Jurenito" the best prose fiction of Ehrenburg, the pinnacle of his work.

The writer continued to create new stories, poems, and essays. In 1923, the novel "The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov" appeared, the hero of which loses his individuality, turns into a cog in the revolutionary mechanism and commits suicide as a result of the conflict between his romantic devotion to a woman and the harsh duties of a security officer. So Ehrenburg contributed to the artistic study of totalitarianism, following the example of Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel "We".

In 1924 I. Ehrenburg visited the USSR, where he delivered lectures on literature and Western European culture. In the same year, he left for Paris, which remained, in fact, his place of permanent residence until 1940. Only occasionally, while retaining Soviet citizenship, he visited Moscow and other cities of the USSR. One after another, new books appeared - novels, collections of articles and even historical journalism - the book "Conspiracy of Equals", dedicated to the conspiracy in France at the end of the 18th century, organized by the utopian communist Gracchus Babeuf.

Jewish motives sounded in many of Ehrenburg's works. The essay "Fly in the ointment", published in 1927, attracted attention, in which he praised skepticism as the most important engine of the cultural development of society. Jews are skeptics, carrying a spirit of eternal doubt and search. That is why their contribution to world culture is so great, the writer reasoned. Jews were also the heroes of his next novels - "In Protochny Pereulok" and "The Stormy Life of Lazik Royteshvanets". It is interesting that the adventures of Lazik, his movements across the territory of the USSR were the background that allowed Ehrenburg not only to walk with a critical pen, but mockingly ridicule the most diverse carriers of Soviet realities - bureaucrats, judicial officials who commit reprisals to please the political conjuncture, and finally, writers and literary critics concerned about their own survival and seeking to get rich.

Pro-Soviet turn

Around the turn of the 20-30s, fundamentally new features were outlined in the socio-aesthetic positions of Ilya Ehrenburg, and over the next decade, fundamentally new features became stable. Ultimately, they boiled down to the fact that, while maintaining a certain spiritual and political autonomy, without embarking on the path of praising "socialist construction" and even more so the Soviet autocrat Stalin, Ehrenburg began to approve, albeit with reservations, the policy of the Soviet power structures, primarily on international arena. There is no doubt that this was by no means connected with violent bloody collectivization, and even less so with the whipping up of a regime of fear and obedience, which was increasingly being introduced into all spheres of life. The writer found opportunities to fix attention on those aspects that corresponded to his feelings and beliefs, while ignoring others that caused him dislike or disgust. Life taught him dexterous diplomacy and evasiveness.

Ehrenburg watched with deep concern how the Nazis were striving for power in Germany, how timidly the democratic parties retreated before their onslaught, how the population of this great country, which gave the world treasures of culture, increasingly finds itself at the mercy of the forces of darkness, the Middle Ages, and rabid anti-Semitism. If we add to this that Ehrenburg never got close to the Russian emigration in Western Europe, and the continuation of his reserved and critical line towards the USSR could close the road to his homeland, to which he gravitated, then the writer's choice becomes even more explainable. True, we, apparently, do not fully recognize all the internal motives of his decision. This topic, unlike others, is hardly touched upon in the memoirs "People, Years, Life". In the early 30s, the novels of the writer "United Front" and "Factory of Dreams" were published, in which Western capital was criticized, and then, after visiting the USSR in 1932, and. the novel "Day Two", dedicated to Soviet reality, which now appeared in a much more noble guise than in previous works.

The coming of the Nazis to power in Germany in January 1933 completed the transformation of Ehrenburg, turning him into a Soviet writer, the bearer of "socialist realism", although he continued to live in Paris.

His new orientation was documented in a letter to Stalin dated September 13, 1934 from Odessa. The letter proposed to change the nature of the pro-Soviet and pro-communist International Organization of Revolutionary Writers (IORP), turning it into an association of wide circles of foreign creative intelligentsia that opposed fascism and in support of the USSR. Note that following the communist propaganda, Ehrenburg understood the term “fascism” rather broadly, bringing under this heading not only the Italian regime of Mussolini, but also German National Socialism and other right-wing nationalist trends. In the letter, attention is drawn not only to its essence, but also to some speech patterns, and the very nature of the argumentation. The letter was supposed to look respectful, but not groveling, businesslike, but without unnecessary details. Having proved himself to be a good psychologist, Ehrenburg hoped that it was precisely this style that would appeal to Stalin, whose patronage he clearly counted on. And the risk, of course, was. After all, the letter was written not from abroad, but within the country. It is quite elementary that the “leader” could close the border for the writer, just as at the same time he closed the border back to England to Academician Kapitsa.

“I hesitated for a long time whether I should write this letter to you, your time is precious not only to you, but to all of us. If I nevertheless decided to write to you, it is because without your participation the issue of organizing the literatures of the West and America that are close to us can hardly be resolved. ” Naming the names of about 30 foreign writers who could enter the projected organization, Ehrenburg concluded his letter with the words: “Excuse me, dear Joseph Vissarionovich, that I took so much of your time, but it seems to me that apart from our literary field, such an organization will now be have a general political combat significance ”.

The effect of the writing was, apparently, even more significant than the writer expected. While improving his health in the south at this time, Stalin continued to delve into the affairs of his possession, working with tentacles stretched far beyond its borders. On vacation, he read Ehrenburg's letter, and already on September 23 wrote to Kaganovich, who was doing business in Moscow during the “leader's” vacation: “Read Comrade Ehrenburg's letter. He is right. It is necessary to eliminate the traditions of the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers - G.Ch.) in the MORP. It's necessary. Take on this business together with Zhdanov. It would be nice to expand the scope of the MORP: (a) the fight against fascism, (b) active defense of the USSR and put Comrade Ehrenburg at the head of the MORP. This is a big deal. Pay attention to this. " In other words, Stalin repeated the proposals made by Ehrenburg, called him a comrade and decided to entrust him, a non-party writer, with a high, essentially not only party, but also an international post. A few days later, Kaganovich's obsequious answer followed: "I completely agree with your proposal about the MORP and Ehrenburg." Ehrenburg's name was mentioned in a positive context in the following letters.

In the same year, Ehrenburg was included in the Presidium of the Board of the Union of Soviet Writers. As for the reorganization of the pro-communist MORP into a wider association under the leadership of Ehrenburg, nothing came of it - the writers of the West did not want to be harnessed to the cart, which the Soviet coachman clearly sought to drive. However, it was Ehrenburg who initiated two international congresses of writers in defense of culture, which took place in 1935 and 1937. in Paris and Madrid and wore a pronounced anti-Nazi coloration.

Before the war

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Ehrenburg went to that country as a war correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. He spent almost three years among the Spanish Republicans. Like Pravda correspondent Mikhail Koltsov, he showed courage, composure, and determination. Both journalists were often seen at the forefront, talking to Spanish fighters and soldiers of international brigades who had come to fight the rebels, the Italian and German invaders. Ehrenburg quickly mastered Spanish, and so much so that he could communicate even with peasants in remote areas of the country.

The passionate style of correspondence, permeated with hatred of reaction, fascism and Nazism, vivid images and reliable facts, brilliant language - all this brought Ehrenburg not only to the first row of Soviet journalism, but turned him into the No. 1 foreign correspondent, whose influence was felt throughout Western Europe. His articles under large headlines were reprinted by the most authoritative publications in many countries.

Ehrenburg left Spain in early March 1939, just a few days before rebel General Franco's troops entered Madrid. The Spanish cycle, both in thematic, genre and stylistic respects, largely predetermined the nature of Ehrenburg's journalism during the Soviet-German war.

When, in November 1938, a wave of devastating Jewish pogroms, called "Kristallnacht", took place in Germany, Ehrenburg, although he wrote at that time almost exclusively about Spain, raised his voice by publishing bright articles in "Izvestia" fascists ”and“ Legislation of pogromists ”.

Ehrenburg returned to Paris, already enjoying international fame. But immediately upon arrival, he received an official message through the Soviet embassy that, although he remained on the Izvestia staff and would receive a salary, his articles would no longer be published, and his book about Spain would not be published. This information, of course, upset the writer, but by no means surprised him. The 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks has just passed, at which Stalin, in his reporting report, uttered several phrases that sounded like commonplaces to many, but were perceived unequivocally by experienced political observers, including Ehrenburg - the Soviet dictator offers reconciliation to his German brother Hitler ... When, at the beginning of May 1939, a message appeared about the removal of the Jew M.M. Litvinov from the post of People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and the appointment to this post concurrently of head of government V.M. Molotov, it became completely clear to Ehrenburg that a Stalin-Hitler deal was being prepared. which happened on August 23 in the form of a Soviet-German non-aggression pact. Like all people, with the exception of a handful of bosses in Berlin and Moscow, Ehrenburg had no idea about the additional secret protocol signed at the same time that divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres, but subsequent events convinced him that a peace-loving pact alone was not a matter of limited.

At the beginning of the second world

The outbreak of World War II found Ilya Ehrenburg in France. Realizing that under the actual conditions, anti-Hitler prose could not count on publication in the USSR, he nevertheless began to prepare material for a new novel, this time dedicated to pre-war and military France, French Nazism and the struggle against it. So far, however, these were only rough sketches. The active and always busy Ilya Grigorievich was now suddenly out of work for a whole year. He watched with horror the deployment of joint aggressive actions by Germany and the USSR against Poland, further acts of seizure of independent European countries by both predators.

When on June 14, 1940, German tank columns entered the deserted Paris, declared an open city, Ehrenburg saw firsthand those whom he considered the greatest enemies of mankind. Although he was a Jew, he had no trouble - Ehrenburg was an official who possessed the passport of a state that was still friendly to Germany. For almost a month and a half, he watched the behavior of the occupiers in the defeated French capital. At the end of July, he left for the USSR by train, thus getting the opportunity, at least from the window of the carriage, to see Germany, shuddering in the enthusiastic orgasm of the winner.

Official Moscow seemed to be in a peaceful mood, but behind this external calmness there was a latent nervousness, fears that the successes of “our sworn friends” were too great and unexpected. The words about "sworn friends" Ehrenburg, as he later wrote, were pronounced in the Soviet capital many times by many people. In September 1940, the idea of a new novel, which was called The Fall of Paris, began to come true. The novel was sent in parts to the magazine "Banner", but the editorial staff of the writer was warned that the "authority", or in "higher circles" disapproved of his idea. This was the time he later called "partial disfavor".

But already at the beginning of 1941, it was replaced at first, so to speak, by "restrained mercy", and after it, and official recognition. The mood in the Kremlin offices was gradually changing, although with backtracking, the attitude towards Germany deteriorated. Molotov's recent November visit to Berlin has yielded no results. Stalin either spoke out in favor of containing Hitler, or expressed a desire to join the aggressive bloc of Germany, Italy and Japan. The editorial board of the "Banner" magazine was informed in the Central Committee that it could begin publishing "The Fall of Paris". When Stalin called Ehrenburg on April 24 and expressed satisfaction with what he had read, Ilya Grigorievich instantly turned into one of the patriarchs of Soviet literature. True, a separate edition of "The Fall of Paris" was published after the German attack on the USSR, but on April 24, all publishing houses reopened their doors before Ehrenburg. His poetry collection "Faithfulness" was hastily published, which, in particular, included poems dedicated to the tragic fate of European Jewry.

Emboldened, Ehrenburg began to express critical remarks about Germany, in particular the opinion that she was preparing an attack on the USSR. But this time, the official circles of his judgments were clearly not to the taste. Ehrenburg was given the anti-Semitic judgment of “one very high-ranking official”: “People of some nationalities do not like our foreign policy. It's clear. But let them save their feelings for the family. ” In his memoirs, Ehrenburg wrote that he did not know whose words they were, but most likely he hid the authorship. It can be assumed that V.M. Molotov was meant, since it was he who was the main conductor of Stalin's foreign policy. This assumption is supported by the fact that just at this time Ehrenburg asked for an appointment with Molotov in order to inform him of his views on the prospects of the war, but instead of the "stone ass", as Molotov was called even in high partocratic circles, he was received by Deputy People's Commissar S.A. Lozovsky. Already an elderly Jew, once a Menshevik, who later went over to the side of the Bolsheviks, Lozovsky, who miraculously escaped reprisals during the "Great Terror" (he will be the main defendant in a closed trial in the case of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and will be shot only a few months before Stalin's death ), was not the kind of figure who could somehow influence the nature of Soviet foreign policy. After listening to the arguments of Ehrenburg, he dispassionately said: "I personally am interested in this ... But you know that we have a different policy."

Vladimir Vysotsky has a poem-song "Rope Walker" with the words:

Look - here he goes without insurance.

A tilt to the right - it will fall, disappear!

A tilt to the left is still impossible to save ...

But he must really need to get through

Four quarters of the way.

What Vysotsky said could be attributed to a huge number of people who survived Stalin's tyranny. But they were especially concerned with Ehrenburg.

First creative achievements

Western European intermezzo

Pro-Soviet turn

Ehrenburg according to Ehrenburg
Shtarkman Anatoly 27.08.2007 12:43:24

"People, years, life". Ehrenburg according to Ehrenburg.

Many of my peers found themselves under the wheels of time. I survived - not because I was stronger or more perspicacious, but because there are times when a person's fate resembles a game of chess, not played out according to all the rules, but a lottery.

I would like to revive several fossils of the past with loving eyes; and to bring oneself closer to the reader: any book is a confession, and a book of memoirs is a confession without attempts to cover itself with the shadows of fictional characters.

So it is in life…. In search of the truth, people take two steps forward, one step back. Suffering, mistakes and boredom of life throw them back, but thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them forward and forward.

… And if a person changes his skin many times in one life, almost like costumes, then he still does not change his heart - his heart is one.

My father, being an unbeliever, condemned the Jews, who accepted Orthodoxy in order to facilitate their lot, and from an early age I realized that I should not be ashamed of my origin.

... Least of all I could imagine that in the book about my life I would have to devote so many bitter pages to the question that at the beginning of the century seemed to me a relic doomed to death.

... Will, perhaps, has become a burdensome property.

I wrote Jurenito when I was thirty, and I talked about that autumn when I was thirteen. I hadn’t heard of Ecclesiastes then, but I was desperate to throw more stones. The time of childhood was over - the fifth year was coming.

The gymnasium taught me a sense of camaraderie; we never thought whether the guilty person was right or wrong, we covered him with a friendly answer: Everything! Everything!

They say that sometimes a person does not recognize himself in the mirror. It is even more difficult to recognize yourself in the muddy mirror of the past. "

In 1907 I longed to become a drummer and trumpet player in order to write in 1957 "in the orchestra there are not only trumpets and drums ...".

I spoke of reconciliation, but I spoke irreconcilably about it.

I am least inclined now to try to justify or embellish my past. But here's the truth: I never dreamed of fame. Of course, I wanted my poetry to be praised by one of those poets I liked; but it was even more important for someone to read what had just been written.

Many of my past thoughts now seem to me to be wrong, stupid, ridiculous. But why I started writing poetry, it seems to me correct now.

We rarely went to theaters, not only because we had no money — we ourselves had to play in a long, tangled play; I don’t know what to call it - a farce, a tragedy or a circus review; perhaps the best definition for it, invented by Mayakovsky - "mystery - buff".

There are white nights when it is difficult to determine the origin of light, causing excitement, anxiety, interfering with sleep, favorable to lovers - is it evening or morning dawn? The mixing of light in nature does not last long - half an hour, an hour. And history is in no hurry. I grew up in a combination of double light and lived in it all my life - until old age….

It's amazing how any insult acts on a person, if it's new! Then he gets used to it. And he decisively gets used to everything: to poverty, to prison, to war.

No matter how hard the Birzhevye Vedomosti tried to give my articles a decent character, I felt that I hated the war.

I remembered his (Picasso) phrase: "Communism for me is closely linked with my whole life as an artist ...". The enemies of communism do not ponder over this connection. Sometimes it seems mysterious to some communists too.

I'm still lucky! In my life I have met some people who have shaped the face of the century. I saw not only fog and storm, but also the shadows of people on the captain's bridge.

I did not live well in Paris, and yet I love this city. I came here as a boy, but I knew then what to do, where to go. Now I am twenty-six years old, I have learned a lot, but I don’t understand anything else. Maybe I've lost my way? ...

I was like a lamb strayed from the flock that De Bellay wrote about: after all, when I left Russia, I was not even eighteen years old. As a cook, I was ready to learn to read and write; I asked everyone what was going on, but in response I heard one thing: "Nobody understands this ..."

Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy gloomily puffed on his pipe and told me: "Nasty, nothing can be understood, everyone is crazy ..."
Alexey Nikolaevich assured me that I looked like a Mexican convict.
Obviously, the "Mexican convict" turned out to be an ordinary Russian intelligentsia when checked ... I am not saying this in order to repent or make excuses: I want to explain my condition in 1917-1918. Of course, now I see everything much clearer, but there is nothing to be proud of here - everyone is strong in hindsight.

In 1821, the author of Julio Jurinito described the experiences of the character, referred to in the novel as Ilya Ehrenburg: “I cursed my mediocre device; one of two things: it was necessary to insert other eyes or remove those useless hands. Now under the window they are not doing it with brains, not with fiction, not with rhymes, no, they are making history with their hands ...

I cannot say that I have always shunned politics, or rather action: I started with underground work, then in adulthood, more than once found myself a participant in events; in later parts of my memoirs, political events will more than once obscure books or canvases. But in 1917 I turned out to be an observer, and it took me two years to realize the significance of the October Revolution. For history, two years is an insignificant period, but for human life it is a lot of troubled days, difficult thoughts and simple human pain.

... At forty-six years old, the line of life was much clearer to me than at twenty-six ... I knew that one had to be able to live with clenched teeth, that one should not approach events like dictation, only doing that, emphasizing mistakes, that the way to the future not a knurled highway.

There is a connection in the flow of forms, and classical designs are not afraid of modern masters. You can learn from Pushkin and Poussin. "Thing" (name of the magazine) of the past in the past, it calls to do the modern in the modern ...

Idols have outlived their days not only in religion, but also in art. Iconoclasm died along with the veneration of icons. But can the desire to say something new in a new way disappear from this?
... It is more worthy to write your own scribbles than to calligraphically rewrite the recipes of the past.
It seems to me that collective farmers, portrayed in the manner of the academic (Bologna) school, can please very few people and it is impossible to convey the rhythm of the second half of the twentieth century with the abundance of subordinate clauses that L.N. Tolstoy brilliantly used.

On Khreshchatyk, I heard the battle cry for the first time: "Beat the Jews, save Russia." They killed a lot of Jews, but they did not save their own, old Russia.

I still did not understand the whole meaning of the events, but, despite the various troubles of that time, I had fun

Our grandchildren will be surprised
Flipping through the pages of the tutorial:
"Fourteenth ... seventeenth, nineteenth ...
How did they live? .. poor, poor! .. "

There are memories that please, lift, you see impulses, kindness, valor. There are others ... They say in vain that time heals; of course, the wounds heal, but suddenly these old wounds begin to ache, and they die only with a person.

That winter I was sick and saw very few people - many friends did not want to meet with me: who was afraid, and who was angry - friendship is friendship, politics is politics.

Seeing Moscow again, I was amazed. In 1924, I wrote: “I don’t know what will come of this youth - builders of communism or Americanized specialists; but I am this new tribe, heroic and mischievous, capable of soberly studying and cheerfully starving, starving not like in student plays by Leonid Andreev, but in earnest, moving from machine guns to tutorials and back, a tribe that cackles in the circus and is menacing in sorrow, tearless and callous , alien to love and art, devoted to the exact sciences, sports, cinema. His romanticism is not in the creation of otherworldly myths, but in a daring attempt to make myths in reality, serially - in factories; such romanticism was justified by October and sealed with the blood of seven revolutionary years ”.
I was only ten or twelve years older than them, but the generational change was abrupt. My peers were Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Fedin, Mandelstam, Paustovsky, Babel, Tynyanov.

Recently I found in the library the half-decayed issue of the one-day literary newspaper Lenin, published on the day of Vladimir Ilyich's funeral.
My old words about the meaning of October, the opposition of Russia's difficult path to the spiritual impoverishment of the West, seem to me correct even now.

I was a young non-partisan writer; for some a "fellow traveler", for others - an "enemy", but in reality - an ordinary Soviet intellectual, who took shape in the pre-revolutionary years. No matter how they scolded us, no matter how they looked sideways at our early gray heads, we knew that the path of the Soviet people was our path.

It was hardly possible to foresee in 1924 that fascism, having migrated from semi-patriarchal Italy to well-organized Germany, would destroy 50 million souls and cripple the lives of several generations.

The hunchback Yuzik asks the old beggar:
“- So why were you, the teacher of Latin, thrown out into the street? One of two things - either you are right or they are.
- I was right. This is the past tense. They are right - this is the present. And children playing with rattles will be right: futurum ...

Protochny Lane did not resemble a rosearium in any way. And I, being a bristly man, but really not a pig, was tormented by the mud. I was often cold in the world; I was looking for cordiality, warmth. In summer, on the banks of the Moskva River, the ill-fated flowers of wastelands bloomed, trampled, littered with sewage - buttercups, dandelions. And I wanted to depict these flowers.
There is no need to argue with the past, but it is worth pondering over it - to check why the written pages so many times turned out to be paler, smaller than those that the author dreamed of on sleepless nights.

I understood all this not in 1926, but much later: a person studies until his death. P.494
In the book about my life, about the people I met, there are many sad, sometimes tragic outcomes. This is not a morbid fantasy of a lover of "black literature", but the minimum decency of a witness. You can redraw the film, you can persuade the writer to redo the novel. And the era cannot be repainted, it was big, but not pink ...

At the age of 17, I diligently studied the first volume of Capital. Later, when I was writing Poems on the Eves and working at night at the Vaugirard freight station, I came to hate capitalism; it was the hatred of the poet and the lumpen proletarian.

The senselessness of the system. I am glad that I realized this and thought it over on the threshold of the thirties. One of the most bitter trials for me was the end of 1937, when I came directly from Teruel to Moscow.

In 1931 I felt that I was at odds with myself.

In 1931, I realized that the fate of a soldier is not the fate of a dreamer and that I need to take my place in the battle formation. I did not give up what was dear to me, I did not renounce anything, but I knew that I would have to live with clenched teeth, learn one of the most difficult sciences - silence.

In the summer and autumn of 1932, I traveled a lot around the Soviet Union.

I said that the metal of Kuznetsk helped our country to defend itself during the years of the fascist invasion.

I called my story "Day Two". According to biblical legend, the world was created in six days. After reading the last page, Babel said "done."

Having arrived in the Soviet Union for several weeks, he immediately made friends with our directors, said: “What kind of Lewis Milestone am I? I am Lenya Milstein from Chisinau.

I realized that Hitler's victory was not a lonely, isolated event. The working class was everywhere disunited, exhausted by the fear of unemployment, bewildered, tired of both promises and newspaper squabbles.

In an article for Izvestia I wrote: “Will our grandchildren understand what it meant to live at the same time as the Nazis? It is unlikely that anger, shame, passion will remain on the yellow half-rotted leaves. But, perhaps, on the high noon of another century, full of sun and greenery, silence breaks in for a minute - this will be our voice.

Recalling some Moscow impressions, all these ovations and sweeping accusations, I wrote in The Book of Adults: “I know that people are more difficult, that I myself am more difficult, that life did not start yesterday and will not end tomorrow, but sometimes you have to be blind, to see. "

The "Adult Book" was first printed; then they decided to release it as a separate edition; published for a long time - it was 1937, when the care of the trees was left not to gardeners, but to lumberjacks. Whole pages were removed from the book with names that became objectionable.

Perhaps, in 1935, I took up the story of my life too early: I didn’t know enough both people and myself, sometimes I took the temporary, the accidental, as the main thing. Basically, I still agree with the author of the "Book for Adults", but the war in it is described not by a veteran, but by a middle-aged, middle-aged man who travels to the front in a dark war room and draws himself the upcoming battles.

It is difficult for me now to describe Spain in the distant spring (1936): I stayed in it for only two weeks, and then for two years I saw it bloody, tortured, I saw those nightmares of war that Goya did not dream of; heaven intervened in the strife of the earth; peasants still fired from hunting rifles, and Picasso, creating "Guernica" already had a presentiment of nuclear madness.

In Escalone, in Malpique, in the vicinity of Toledo, I saw peasants enthusiastically repeating: "Earth!" The old men on donkeys raised their fists, the girls carried the kids, the guys fondled the old, nondescript rifles.

The French Pyrenees have long seemed like a wall behind which another continent begins. When the grandson of Louis 14, the French king, ascended to the Spanish throne, exclaimed in delight: There are no more Pyrenees! the same inscriptions “Death to fascism!”, and on the train, frightened townsfolk had familiar conversations about how to curb idlers.France was inspired by the example of Spain.
I was happy with everyone: after Spain - France! It is now clear that Hitler will not be able to bring Europe to its knees. Our cause wins - the revolution goes on the offensive. "These thoughts have not yet been clouded by either the loss of loved ones and friends, or the trials we faced. I remember the spring of 1936 as the last easy spring of my life.

In the first months of the Spanish war, I devoted little time to my duties as a correspondent for Izvestia. I was repulsed by the role of an observer, I wanted to help the Spaniards in some way.

The first Soviet ambassador M. And Rosenberg arrived in Madrid…. Marsel Izrailevich has long been dead: he became one of the victims of arbitrariness. People were knocked out….

It is difficult to imagine the first year of the Spanish war without M.I. Koltsov. For the Spaniards, he was not only a famous journalist, but a political advisor. In his book "Spanish Diary" Mikhail Efimovich vaguely mentions the work of the fictional Mexican Miguel Martinis, who had more freedom of action than the Soviet journalist. Once he confessed to me: “You are the rarest species of our fauna - a“ non-fired sparrow. ”In general, he was right - I became a fired one later.

The speeches of many Soviet writers surprised and alarmed the Spaniards, who told me: we thought that you had generals with the people in the twentieth year of the revolution. But it turns out that you have the same thing as we have ... "I tried to calm the Spaniards, although I myself did not understand anything.

An unpleasant story happened to me, which I could not unravel: in the spring of 1939, a fee was transferred to my name from Moscow to Spanish writers - they were going to leave, some to Mexico, some to Chile. There were nine or ten writers, and that was quite a large sum. When I announced my income for the past year, I certainly did not put down the money transferred to the Spaniards. In early 1940, the police raided the Northern Europe bank; checked translations, office books. It turned out that I had hidden from the tax office the fees for Spanish writers and money for a truck for Spain, purchased back in 1936. They demanded an amount that I had never held in my hands.

On May 24, I received a call from the Minister of Public Works, de Monzi, whom I had previously met. De Monzi was one of the first French people to visit the Soviet Union ... I asked why the government continues the war against the communists, why it is turning workers against itself - there are almost more spies than workers in the military factories. De Monzi did not remain silent, said that thirty thousand communists were arrested, that the Minister of Justice, the socialist Serrol, refuses to transfer them to the regime of political prisoners .... We were silent. De Monzi put the phone down, got up and, without looking at me, said: "If the Russians sell us the planes, we can hold out. Will the Soviet Union really benefit from the defeat of France? Hitler will go to you .... We ask for one thing: sell us the planes. We decided to send Pierre Cat to Moscow. You know him - this is your friend. Do not think that everything went easily, many objected .... But now I am talking to you not only on my own. Inform Moscow .... If they don’t sell planes to us, through for a month or two the Germans will occupy France. "

In March 1938 I listened anxiously to the elevator: then I wanted to live; like many others, I had a suitcase ready with two changes of linen. In March 1949, I did not think about linen, and I was almost indifferent to waiting for the denouement. Maybe because I was no longer forty-seven, but fifty-eight - I had time to get tired, old age began. Or maybe because all this was a repetition, and after the war, after the victory over fascism, what was happening was especially intolerable. We went to bed late - towards morning: the thought that they would come and wake up was disgusting.

In hindsight, everyone is strong. In the spring of 1949, I didn’t understand anything. Now that we know something, it seems to me that Stalin was able to mask a lot. A. Fadeev told me that the campaign against the "group of anti-patriotic critics" was launched at the direction of Stalin. And a month or a month and a half later, Stalin gathered the editors and said: "Comrades, the disclosure of literary pseudonyms is unacceptable - it smells of anti-Semitism ..."

A few years later, a journalist in Israel made sensational and revelations. He claimed that while in prison, he met the poet Fefer, who allegedly told him that I was guilty of reprisals against Jewish writers. Some Western newspapers picked up the slander. They had one reason: "He survived, then a traitor."

Never in my life have I considered silence a virtue, and in this book talking about myself, about my friends, I confessed how difficult it was at times for us to remain silent.

When I look back, 1952 seems to me very long and at the same time dull; this is probably due to the way I lived then.

On January 30, the newspapers arrived at noon. I unwillingly unrolled Pravda. "Towards a new rise in the oil industry." "The decline of French foreign trade." Suddenly on the last page I saw: "The arrest of a group of pest doctors." TASS reported that a group of doctors who were responsible for the deaths of Zhdanov and Shcherbakov had been arrested. They confessed that they were going to kill Marshals Vasilevsky, Govorov, Konev and others. The newspaper said that most of those arrested were agents of the "international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization" Joint ", who received instructions through doctor Shimeliovich and" Jewish bourgeois nationalist Mikhoels. "The list of those arrested included famous doctors - three Russians, six Jews.

In the eyes of millions of readers, I was a writer who could go to Stalin and tell him that I did not agree with him on this point. In fact, I was the same "wheel", "cog", like my readers. I tried to protest. It was not my letter that decided the matter, but fate.

I'll end with a confession: I hate indifference, curtains on the windows, the harshness and cruelty of separation.

They criticized and will criticize not so much my book as my life. But I cannot start life over again. I was not going to lecture anyone, I did not set myself up as an example. Too often I talked about my frivolity, admitted my mistakes, to take up the role of the old reasoner. Moreover, I myself would willingly listen to a sage who is capable of giving answers to many questions that continue to torment me. I wanted to talk about my life, about the people I met: this can help some readers to think about something, to understand something.

Russian writer, poet, publicist, journalist, translator, public figure, photographer

Ilya Ehrenburg

short biography

Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg(January 26, 1891, Kiev - August 31, 1967, Moscow) - Russian writer, poet, publicist, journalist, translator from French and Spanish, public figure, photographer. In 1908-1917 and 1921-1940 he was in exile, from 1940 he lived in the USSR.

Ilya Ehrenburg was born in Kiev into a prosperous Jewish family, in which he was the fourth child and only son. His father - Gersh Gershanovich (Gersh Germanovich, Grigory Grigorievich) Ehrenburg (1852-1921) - was an engineer and merchant of the second guild (later the first guild); mother - Hana Berkovna (Anna Borisovna) Ehrenburg (nee Arinstein, 1857-1918) - a housewife. He had older sisters Manya (Maria, 1881-1940), Eugene (1883-1965) and Isabella (1886-1965). The parents got married in Kiev on June 9, 1877, then lived in Kharkov, where three daughters were born, and returned to Kiev just before the birth of their son. The family lived in the apartment of their father's grandfather - merchant of the second guild Grigory (Gershon) Ilyich Ehrenburg - in Natalya Iskra's house at 22 Institutskaya Street. In 1895, the family moved to Moscow, where his father got a job as director of the Joint Stock Company of the Khamovnichesky Beer and Honey Brewery ... The family lived on Ostozhenka, in the house of the Varvarinsky Society in Savelovsky Lane, apartment 81.

Since 1901, together with N.I.Bukharin, he studied at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium, where he studied poorly from the third grade and in the fourth grade he was left for the second year (he left the gymnasium as a fifth grade student in 1906).

Revolution. Emigration. Returns

When will the war end?
Drawing by Marevna, 1916, Paris.
From left to right - Rivera, Modigliani, Ehrenburg

After the events of 1905, he took part in the work of the revolutionary organization of the Social Democrats, but did not join the RSDLP itself. In 1907 he was elected to the editorial board of the publication of the Social Democratic Union of students of secondary educational institutions in Moscow. In January 1908 he was arrested, spent six months in prisons and released pending trial, but in December he emigrated to France, lived there for more than 8 years. Gradually withdrew from political activity.

In Paris, he was engaged in literary activity, moved in the circle of modernist artists. The first poem "I walked to you" was published in the magazine "Northern Dawns" on January 8, 1910, published collections "Poems" (1910), "I live" (1911), "Dandelions" (1912), "Weekdays" (1913 ), "Poems about the Eves" (1916), a book of translations by F. Villon (1913), several issues of the magazines "Helios" and "Evenings" (1914). In 1914-1917 he was a correspondent for the Russian newspapers Utro Rossii and Birzhevye Vedomosti on the Western Front.

In the summer of 1917 he returned to Russia. In the fall of 1918 he moved to Kiev, where he lodged with his cousin, a dermatovenerologist at the local Jewish hospital Alexander Grigorievich Lurie at 40 Vladimirskaya Street. In August 1919 he married the niece of Dr. Lurie (his maternal cousin) Lyubov Kozintseva. From December 1919 to September 1920, together with his wife he lived in Koktebel with Maximilian Voloshin, then from Feodosia he crossed the barge to Tiflis, where he procured Soviet passports for himself, his wife and the Mandelstam brothers, with which they went together as diplomatic couriers in October 1920. by train from Vladikavkaz to Moscow. At the end of October 1920, Ehrenburg was arrested by the Cheka and released thanks to the intervention of N.I.Bukharin.

Having negatively perceived the victory of the Bolsheviks (a collection of poems "Prayer for Russia", 1918; journalism in the newspaper "Kievskaya Zhizn"), in March 1921 Ehrenburg again went abroad. Expelled from France, he spent some time in Belgium and arrived in Berlin in November. In 1921-1924 he lived in Berlin, where he published about two dozen books, collaborated in the "New Russian Book", together with L. M. Lissitsky published the constructivist magazine "Veshch". In 1922 he published the philosophical and satirical novel The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, which provides an interesting mosaic picture of the life of Europe and Russia during the First World War and the Revolution, but most importantly - a set of amazingly accurate prophecies. Leonid Zhukhovitsky wrote about this:

... I am still amazed by the completely fulfilled prophecies from "Julio Jurenito". Did you guess by chance? But was it possible to accidentally guess and German fascism, and its Italian variety, and even the atomic bomb used by the Americans against the Japanese. Probably, in the young Ehrenburg there was nothing from Nostradamus, Vanga or Messing. There was something else - a powerful mind and quick reaction, which made it possible to capture the main features of entire peoples and predict their development in the future. In the past centuries, for such a gift, they burned at the stake or declared insane, like Chaadaev.

I. G. Ehrenburg was a propagandist of avant-garde art (“And yet it turns,” 1922). In 1922, his last collection of poems, Devastating Love, was published. In 1923 he wrote a collection of stories "Thirteen Pipes" and the novel "Trest DE". Ehrenburg was close to the left circles of French society, actively collaborated with the Soviet press - from 1923 he worked as a correspondent for Izvestia. His name and talent as a publicist were widely used by Soviet propaganda to create an attractive image of the Soviet Union abroad. He traveled a lot in Europe (Germany - 1927, 1928, 1930, 1931; Turkey, Greece - 1926; Spain - 1926; Poland - 1928; Czechoslovakia - 1927, 1928, 1931, 1934; Sweden, Norway - 1929; Denmark - 1929, 1933 ; England - 1930; Switzerland - 1931; Romania, Yugoslavia, Italy - 1934). In the summer and autumn of 1932 he traveled across the USSR, was at the construction of the Moscow-Donbass highway, in Kuznetsk, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, which resulted in the novel "Day Two" (1934), condemned by critics; in 1934 he spoke at the First Congress of Soviet Writers. On July 16-18, 1934, in order to find Osip Mandelstam, who was in exile, he visited Voronezh.

Since 1931, the tone of his journalistic and artistic works has become more and more pro-Soviet, with faith in the "bright future of the new man." In 1933, the Izogiz publishing house published Ehrenburg's photo album “My Paris” in cardboard and dust jacket made by Ele Lissitzky.

After Hitler came to power, he became the greatest master of anti-Nazi propaganda. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, Ehrenburg was a war correspondent for Izvestia; acted as an essayist, prose writer (collection of stories "Out of the Armistice", 1937; novel "What a Man Needs", 1937), poet (collection of poems "Loyalty", 1941). On December 24, 1937, he came to Moscow from Spain for two weeks, on December 29 he spoke at a writers' congress in Tbilisi. On his next visit from Spain, his foreign passport was taken away from him, which was restored in April 1938 after Ehrenburg's two appeals to Stalin, and in early May he returned to Barcelona. After the defeat of the Republicans, he returned to Paris. After the German occupation of France, he took refuge in the Soviet embassy.

The war period of creativity

I was told by people who deserve full confidence that in one of the large united partisan detachments there was the following paragraph of a handwritten order:
“After reading the newspapers, use them for raskurka, except for the articles by Ilya Ehrenburg.”
This is truly the shortest and most heart-rending review I have ever heard of.
K. Simonov

Eug. Evtushenko.
Khreshchatytsky Parisian
I don't like stones in Ehrenburg,
even though you stone me with stones.
He, all our marshals are smarter,
led us in forty-fifth to victory.
The tank was named "Ilya Ehrenburg".
These letters shone on the armor.
The tank crossed the Dnieper or Bug,
but Stalin watched him through binoculars.
They did not let me in, after reading the newspaper,
Ehrenburg on hand-rolled cigarettes,
and the blackest envy of the leader
a little smoke from the pipe.
Novye Izvestia, January 27, 2006

In 1940 he returned to the USSR, where he wrote and published the novel The Fall of Paris (1941) about the political, moral and historical reasons for the defeat of France by Germany in World War II.

Later<22 июня 1941>They came for me and took me to Trud, to Krasnaya Zvezda, to the radio. I wrote the first military article. They called from PUR, asked to come in on Monday at eight o'clock in the morning, asked: "Do you have a military rank?" I replied that there is no rank, but there is a vocation: I will go wherever they send me, I will do what they are ordered to do.
- "People, Years, Life", Book IV

During the Great Patriotic War he was a correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, wrote for other newspapers and for the Soviet Information Bureau. He became famous for his anti-German propaganda articles and works, of which he wrote about 1500 during the war. A significant part of these articles, which were constantly published in the newspapers Pravda, Izvestia, Krasnaya Zvezda, were collected in the three-volume journalism Voina (1942-1944). In 1942 he joined the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and was actively involved in collecting and publishing materials about the Holocaust, which, together with the writer Vasily Grossman, were collected in the Black Book.

Ilya Ehrenburg and Konstantin Simonov are the authors of the slogan "Kill the German!" (first sounded in K. M. Simonov's poem "Kill him!"), which was widely used in posters and - as a title - leaflets with quotes from Ehrenburg's article "Kill him!" (published July 24, 1942). To maintain the slogan's effectiveness, special headings were created in Soviet newspapers of that time (one of the typical titles "Did you kill a German today?" Adolf Hitler personally ordered the capture and hang of Ehrenburg, declaring him in January 1945 the worst enemy of Germany. Nazi propaganda gave Ehrenburg the nickname "Stalin's Domestic Jew."

The sermons of hatred by Ilya Ehrenburg, which had already borne their first fruits in the East, the Morgenthau plan, that is, the plan of the alleged territorial "castration" of Germany and the demand for unconditional surrender, thwarted any attempts of the Germans to somehow come to an agreement and gave the resistance a very sharp and fierce character not only in Europe but also all over the world. The overwhelming majority of Germans saw no other way out for themselves but to fight. Even the outspoken opponents of the Nazi regime were now becoming desperate defenders of their homeland.
Walter Ludde-Neurath. End on German soil

In the days when the Red Army crossed the state border of Germany, in the Soviet elite, actions on German territory were interpreted as the fulfillment of the liberation mission of the Red Army - the liberator of Europe and the German people proper from Nazism. And therefore, after Ehrenburg's article "Enough!" ...

Post-war creativity

Ehrenburg's grave at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow

After the war he released a dilogy - the novels The Tempest (1946-1947) and The Ninth Wave (1950). One of the leaders of the Peace Fighters Movement.

In 1948, Hollywood released the film The Iron Curtain, about the escape of the GRU ransomware I. S. Guzenko and Soviet espionage. On February 21 of the same year, Ehrenburg in the newspaper "Culture and Life" publishes an article "Film Providers", written on the instructions of the Minister of Cinematography I. G. Bolshakov.

Ehrenburg's position among Soviet writers was peculiar: on the one hand, he received material benefits, often traveled abroad, on the other, he was under the control of the special services and often even received reprimands. Equally ambivalent was the attitude of the authorities towards Ehrenburg in the era of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.

After Stalin's death, he wrote the story The Thaw (1954), which was published in the May issue of the Znamya magazine and gave the name to an entire era of Soviet history. In 1958, "French Notebooks" were published - an essay on French literature, painting and translations from J. du Bellay. The author of the memoirs "People, Years, Life", which enjoyed great popularity among the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1960s - 1970s. Ehrenburg introduced the younger generation to many "forgotten" names, contributed to the publication of both forgotten (M. I. Tsvetaeva, O. E. Mandelstam, I. E. Babel) and young authors (B. A. Slutsky, S. P. Gudzenko). He promoted new Western art (P. Cezanne, O. Renoir, E. Manet, P. Picasso).

In March 1966, he signed a letter from thirteen figures of Soviet science, literature and art to the presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU against the rehabilitation of J.V. Stalin.

He died after a long illness from a massive myocardial infarction on August 31, 1967. About 15,000 people came to say goodbye to the writer.

He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy cemetery (plot No. 7).

Essays

Collected works of Ilya Ehrenburg in five volumes was published in 1951-1954 by the publishing house "Khudozhestvennaya literatura".

The next collection, more complete, in nine volumes, was published by the same publishing house in 1962-1967.

In 1990-2000, the publishing house "Khudozhestvennaya literatura" published the jubilee Collected Works in eight volumes.

Awards and prizes

Stalin Prize, First Degree (1942) - for the novel The Fall of Paris (1941)
Stalin Prize, First Degree (1948) - for the novel Tempest (1947)
International Stalin Prize "For Strengthening Peace Among Nations" (1952) - the first of only two laureates-Soviet citizens
two Orders of Lenin (April 30, 1944, 1961)
Order of the Red Banner of Labor
Order of the Red Star (1937)
Legion of Honor
medals

Membership in organizations

Vice-President of the SCM since 1950.
Member of the USSR Armed Forces since 1950 from Daugavpils, Latvian USSR.

A family

First wife (1910-1913) - translator Katerina (Ekaterina) Ottovna Schmidt (1889-1977, Sorokin's second marriage).
- Their daughter, a translator of French literature, Irina Ilinichna Ehrenburg (1911-1997), was married to the writer Boris Matveyevich Lapin (1905-1941). After the tragic death of her husband, she adopted and raised a girl:

He brought a girl Fanya from the war, in front of whom the Germans shot her parents and sisters in Vinnitsa. The older brothers served in the Polish army. An old man managed to hide Fanya, but since this was associated with a great risk, he told her: "Run, look for the partisans." And Fanya ran.
Ehrenburg brought this girl to Moscow precisely in the hope of distracting Irina from her grief. And she adopted Fanya. At first, everything was rather difficult, since the girl spoke poor Russian. She spoke in some monstrous mixture of languages. But then she quickly mastered Russian and even became an excellent student.
Irina and Fanya lived in Lavrushinsky; the poet Stepan Shchipachev lived there with his son Victor. Fanya met Viktor while still in the writers' pioneer camp; the half-child romance continued in Moscow and ended in marriage. Mom entered the philological faculty at Moscow State University, but quickly realized that it was not hers, and, having entered the medical school, she became a doctor. The marriage did not last long - three years. But I still managed to be born.

Second wife (since 1919) - artist Lyubov Mikhailovna Kozintseva (1899-1970), sister of film director Grigory Mikhailovich Kozintsev, student of Alexandra Exter, Robert Falk, Alexander Rodchenko. Was I. G. Ehrenburg's cousin niece.
Cousin - artist and journalist, Civil War participant Ilya Lazarevich Ehrenburg (1887-1920), son of Kharkiv grain merchant Lazar Gershovich (Grigorievich) Ehrenburg, chemist, graduate of Kharkiv University (1882); with his cousin and his wife Maria Mikhailovna, the spouses Ehrenburg were friends during the period of their first emigration to Paris.
Cousin - collector, artist and teacher Natalya Lazarevna Ehrenburg (married Ehrenburg-Mannati, French Nathalie Ehrenbourg-Mannati; 1884-1979).
Cousins (maternal) - gynecologist Roza Grigorievna Lurie and dermatovenerologist Alexander Grigorievich Lurie (1868-1954), professor and head of the department of dermatovenerology at the Kiev Institute for Advanced Medical Studies (1919-1949).
Cousin - Georgy Borisovich Ehrenburg (1902-1967), orientalist-sinologist.

Famous phrase

I. Ehrenburg owns the famous words: “ See Paris and Die».

Estimates of contemporaries

He was a good writer and talented. But he had some kind of reconciliation, perhaps, with the Stalinist methods of management.
Nikita Khrushchev. Memories: Selected Fragments // Nikita Khrushchev; comp. A. Shevelenko. - M .: Vagrius, 2007 .-- 512 p .; silt

Bibliography

Stalin is the weekly newspaper of the 25th mixed international brigade. April 22, 1937. Ehrenburg's editorial

1910 - Poems - Paris
1911 - I live - SPb .: printing house of the partnership "Public Benefit"
1912 - Dandelions - Paris
1913 - Weekdays: Poems - Paris
1914 - Children's - Paris: Rirakhovsky's printing house
1916 - The story of the life of a certain Nadenka and the prophetic signs revealed to her - Paris
1916 - Poems about the Eves - M .: A. A. Levenson printing house
1917 - About the vest of Semyon Drozd: Prayer - Paris
1918 - Prayer for Russia - 2nd ed. "At the hour of death"; Kiev: "Chronicle"
1919 - Fire - Gomel: "Ages and Days"
1919 - In the stars - Kiev; 2nd ed. Berlin: "Helikon", 1922
1920 - Face of War - Sofia: "Russian-Bulgarian Book Publishing", 1920; Berlin: "Helikon", 1923; M .: "Abyss", 1924; "ZIF", 1928
1921 - Eves - Berlin: "Thought"
1921 - Reflections - Riga; 2nd ed. Pg .: "Burning bush"
1921 - Incredible Stories - Berlin: “S. Efron "
1922 - Foreign Thoughts - Pg .: "Bonfires"
1922 - About me - Berlin: "New Russian book"
1922 - Portraits of Russian poets. Berlin: The Argonauts; M .: "Pervina", 1923; M .: "Science", 2002
1922 - Devastating Love - Berlin: "Lights"
1922 - Heart of Gold: Mystery; Wind: Tragedy - Berlin: "Helikon"
1922 - The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito - Berlin: "Helikon"; M .: "GIKHL", 1923, 1927
1922 - Still it turns - Berlin: "Helikon"
1922 - Six stories about easy ends - Berlin: "Helikon"; M .: "Abyss", 1925
1922 - The life and death of Nikolai Kurbov - Berlin: "Helikon"; M .: "New Moscow", 1923
1923 - Thirteen Pipes - Berlin: Helikon; M .: "New Vekhi", 1924; M.-L .: "Novella", 1924
1923 - Animal heat - Berlin: "Helikon"
1923 - Trust “D. E. " The history of the death of Europe - Berlin: "Helikon"; Kharkov: "Gosizdat"
1924 - Love of Jeanne Ney - M .: ed. magazine "Russia"; M .: "Novella", 1925; M .: "ZiF", 1927; Riga, 1927
1924 - Tube - M .: "Krasnaya Nov"
1925 - Jack of Diamonds and Company - L.-M .: "Petrograd"
1925 - Rvach - Paris: "Knowledge"; Odessa: "Svetoch", 1927
1926 - Summer 1925 - M .: "Krug"
1926 - Conditioned suffering, a regular cafe - Odessa: "New Life"
1926 - Three stories about pipes - L .: "Surf"
1926 - Black Ferry - M .: "Giz"
1926 - Stories - M .: "Pravda"
1927 - In Protochny Lane - Paris: "Helikon"; M .: "Land and Factory"; Riga: "Gramatu draugs"
1927 - Materialization of science fiction - M.-L .: "Film printing"
1927-1929 - Collected works in 10 volumes - "ZIF" (only 7 volumes were published: 1-4 and 6-8)
1928 - White coal or Werther's Tears - L .: "Surf"
1928 - The stormy life of Lazik Roitschvanets - Paris: "Helikon"; the novel was published in Russia in 1990
1928 - Stories - L.: "Surf"
1928 - Pipe of the Communard - Nizhny Novgorod
1928 - Conspiracy of Equals - Berlin: "Petropolis"; Riga: "Gramatu draugs", 1932
1929 - 10 HP Chronicle of our time - Berlin: "Petropolis"; M.-L .: GIKHL, 1931
1930 - Time Visa - Berlin: Petropolis; 2nd add. ed., M.-L .: GIHL, 1931; 3rd ed., L., 1933
1931 - Dream Factory - Berlin: "Petropolis"
1931 - England - M .: "Federation"
1931 - United Front - Berlin: "Petropolis"
1931 - We and they (together with O. Savich) - France; Berlin: "Petropolis"
1932 - Spain - M .: "Federation"; 2nd add. ed. 1935; Berlin: "Helikon", 1933
1933 - Day Two - M .: "Federation" and at the same time "Soviet Literature"
1933 - Our daily bread - M .: "New Vehi" and at the same time "Soviet Literature"
1933 - My Paris - M .: "Izogiz"
1933 - Moscow does not believe in tears - Paris: "Helikon"; M .: "Soviet Literature"
1934 - Protracted denouement - M .: "Soviet writer"
1934 - Civil War in Austria - M .: "Soviet Literature"
1935 - Without catching his breath - Arkhangelsk: "Sevkrayizdat"; M .: "Soviet writer"; 5th ed., 1936
1935 - Chronicle of our days - M .: "Soviet writer"
1936 - Four pipes - M .: "Young Guard"
1936 - Boundaries of the Night - M .: "Soviet Writer"
1936 - A book for adults - M .: "Soviet writer"; M .: A / O "Book and Business", 1992
1937 - Out of the armistice - M .: "Goslitizdat"
1937 - What a man needs - M .: "Goslitizdat"
1938 - Spanish temper - M .: "Goslitizdat"
1941 - Loyalty: (Spain. Paris): Poems - M .: "Goslitizdat"
1941 - Captive Paris - M .: "Goslitizdat"
1941 - Gangsters - M .: "Goslitizdat"
1941 - Rabid Wolves - M.-L .: "Voenmorizdat"
1941 - Cannibals. The road to Germany (in 2 books) - M .: "Military Publishing House"
1942 - The fall of Paris - M .: "Goslitizdat"; Magadan: "Soviet Kolyma"
1942 - Cruelty - M .: "Pravda"
1942 - Fire on the enemy - Tashkent: "Goslitizdat"
1942 - Caucasus - Yerevan: "Armgiz"
1942 - Hatred - M.: "Military Publishing"
1942 - Solstice - M .: "Pravda"
1942 - The Leaders of Fascist Germany: Adolf Hitler - Penza: ed. gas. "Stalin's Banner"
1942 - For life! - M .: "Soviet writer"
1942 - Basilisk - OGIHL, Kuibyshev; M .: "Goslitizdat"
1942-1944 - War (in 3 volumes) - M .: "GIHL"
1943 - Freedom - Poems, M .: "Goslitizdat"
1943 - German - M .: "Military Publishing House"
1943 - Leningrad - L .: "Military Publishing House"
1943 - The fall of the Duce - M .: "Gospolitizdat"
1943 - "New Order" in Kursk - M .: "Pravda"
1943 - Poems about the war - M .: "Soviet writer"
1946 - Wood: Poems: 1938-1945 - M .: "Soviet writer"
1946 - On the Roads of Europe - M .: "Pravda"
1947 - Storm - Magadan: publishing house "Soviet Kolyma" and M .: "Soviet writer"
1947 - In America - M .: "Moscow worker"
1948 - Lion in the square - M .: "Art"
1950 - The Ninth Wave - M .: "Soviet Writer", 2nd ed. 1953
1952-1954 - Collected works in 5 volumes - M .: GIHL
1952 - For peace! - M .: "Soviet writer"
1954 - Thaw - in 1956 republished in two parts M .: "Soviet writer"
1956 - Conscience of peoples - M .: "Soviet writer"
1958 - French notebooks - M .: "Soviet writer"
1959 - Poems: 1938 - 1958 - M .: "Soviet writer"
1960 - India, Greece, Japan - M .: "Soviet writer"; 2nd ed. M .: "Art"
1960 - Rereading

Ehrenburg biography. Ilya Ehrenburg

Being Ilya Ehrenburg: the secrets of success

Live in Paris

Chat with the greats

Smoke your pipe and wear weird hats

Write bitingly

The revolution. Emigration. Return

The war period of creativity

Post-war creativity

Essays

Awards and prizes

Membership in organizations

A family

Famous phrase

Bibliography

Biography

The revolution. Emigration. Homecoming

Post-war period of creativity

Essays

A family

Famous words

"evil cosmopolitan"

Best of the day

First creative achievements

Western European intermezzo

Before the war

At the beginning of the second world

short biography

Revolution. Emigration. Returns

The war period of creativity

Post-war creativity

Essays

Awards and prizes

Membership in organizations

A family

Famous phrase

Estimates of contemporaries

Bibliography

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