Ilya Ehrenburg

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Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (Russian: Илья́ Григо́рьевич Эренбу́рг, pronounced [ɪˈlʲja grʲɪˈgorʲɪvɪtɕ ɪrʲɪnˈburk]), January 27 [O.S. January 15] 1891 (Kiev, Ukraine) – August 31, 1967 (Moscow, Soviet Union) was a Jewish Soviet propagandist, writer and journalist whose 1954 novel The Thaw gave name to the Khrushchev Thaw.

1 Life and work
2 Literary References
3 References
4 External links

Life and work

Ehrenburg was a revolutionary as a teenager, a disenchanted poet in his youth, writing Catholic poems despite his Jewish background, a follower of Lenin on arrival in Paris, who then became an anti-Bolshevik and sensitive journalist.

Later he returned to Russia where he was hired to write Soviet propaganda, while occasionally defending his views with boldness against Stalin or government mouthpieces. Ehrenburg was a public figure during his time. He a was prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

Ehrenburg is well known for his literary writing, especially his memoirs, which contain many portraits of interest to literary historians and biographers. Together with Vasily Grossman, Ehrenburg edited The Black Book that contains documentary accounts by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and Poland.

He died in 1967 of prostate and bladder cancer, and was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where his gravestone is adorned with a a reproduction of his portrait drawn by his friend Pablo Picasso.

Literary References

Apparently Alan Furst - considered by many America's premier writer of espionage fiction - found much of Ehrenburg's life and work so riveting that he modeled the central character in his 1991 novel "Dark Star" ISBN 0375759999 on the Russian writer. Addressing the degree to which fact and fiction sometimes overlap, Furst said, "(a particular character) was modeled on a number of people, although I've written about many people who did exist. Andre Szara in "Dark Star", for example, is based on the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg" (Boston Globe interview, June 4, 2006). Six weeks later, in another interview, his comments were rather more qualified: "None of my characters are meant to be representations of real people. But in fact, in "Dark Star," the lead character is a Russified Polish Jew, a foreign correspondent for Pravda. So are we talking about Ilya Ehrenburg? Not really. But he's like that." Finally, we're left to decide if that's a yes or a no.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote of him: As a writer he doesn't exist, Ehrenburg. He is a journalist. He was always corrupt.^[1]