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Foreign News: Towers in Babel

4 minute read
TIME

Even more impressive than Moscow’s skyscrapers is the vast edifice of phony literature which Stalin built around his life and works. When a novel or a play served his propaganda purposes, he boosted its sales to millions, made ruble millionaires out of his authors. A writer who had been critical, however, or one who merely failed to pay homage to the dictator, was. denied print, frequently banished to prison camp, sometimes executed. In walking the intellectual tightrope between these extremes, no Soviet writer has been more adroit than Ilya Ehrenburg.

Born in Moscow in 1891 of a well-to-do Jewish family, Ehrenburg was a poet of the long-haired kind before the revolution. During the civil war, he swung in behind Denikin’s White Guards and strongly attacked Communism in an early poem. Then, when it appeared that the Bolsheviks were there to stay, he flirted with Trotskyism, dropped it for Bukharinism, and finally in Paris, where in bohemian Montparnasse he kept a step ahead of the consequences of his earlier misjudgments, he became Stalin’s advocate.

Cynic as Hero. At the side of such intellectuals as Andre Gide, he praised Communism incessantly, but was careful not to join the Communist Party. He got a job as correspondent for Moscow’s Izvestia during the Spanish civil war, dutifully penned the Stalin line, but thought so little of it that, at the approach of World War II, he tried to get out of Europe by the Zionist route. Failing, he returned to Moscow by the Communist route and became one of Stalin’s favorite thunderers. Throughout World War II he poured an unceasing flow of hate against the Nazis and then, at war’s end, with no apparent effort, turned his rhetoric on “U.S. warmongers.” He won the Stalin Prize for literature in 1948, and the Peace Prize in 1952, waxed rich on royalties from books translated into 25 languages. In Moscow he has a fine apartment hung with French impressionist paintings, owns a country dacha and a villa on the Black Sea.

Ehrenburg’s eulogy of Stalin after the dictator’s death was more fulsome than any other. Yet, a few months later, he published a novel called The Thaw which Stalin would never have stood for. In The Thaw the Cynic, not the Idealist, is shown setting the tone of Soviet life, and for the first time in a Communist-printed work, explicit references are made to the melancholy effect on Soviet professional life of Stalin’s wide-sweeping 1936-38 purge: characters bemoan the disappearance of families and friends for crimes they did not commit. Last week the Congress of Soviet Writers, meeting for the first time in 20 years, found that The Thaw had them skating on very thin ice.

Rusty Clips. After years of servile writing, Soviet authors are groping for a new approach to literature. The party would have them go back to “socialist realism” (boy loves tractor), but the writers know how barren this field has become.

Yet none was brave enough to stand up for Ehrenburg’s lead as a critic of Soviet life. In fact, they rivaled one another in reviling him. Konstantin (Days and Nights} Simonov said that Ehrenburg’s book springs from “an alien ideological position.” Said Mikhail (And Quiet Flows the Don) Sholokhov, who has published no major work since the great purge: “You know that bullets that are in a clip of ammunition a long time—especially during a thaw (applause)—become rusty.

Maybe it is time to throw out all the old bullets and put in new ones (applause).

We won’t throw out the bullets that are still good, but we must clean them—with sand, if necessary.” The ever-adaptable Ilya Ehrenburg promised that his next novel would be “a step forward.”

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