Books: A Curtain Half Lifted

MEMOIRS: 1921-1941 by Ilya Ehrenburg. 543 pages. World. $6.95.

When he was asked what he did during the Terror of the French Revolution, the aristocrat Emmanuel Sieyes replied, “I survived.” If Soviet NoveMst llya Ehrenburg were asked about his own activities during the 20-year Stalinist terror, he might well give the same answer. Considering that just about every eminent Russian writer and artist was exiled, executed or hounded to suicide by the paranoid dictator, Ehren-burg’s survival is one of the most remarkable literary achievements of modern times.

No one quite knows how he did it.

Ehrenburg claims it was pure chance; others say he made a deal with Stalin.

Certainly he was as nimble and tricky a performer on the teeter-totter board of Communist politics as the world has seen. He was unique in being allowed to live abroad most of the time between World Wars. Back in Russia during World War II, he was Stalin’s chief propagandist and heaped praise on his boss. After the war, though a Jew himself, he aided Stalin’s ferocious purge of Soviet Jews by ridiculing Jewish solidarity and calling Israel a “laughable dwarf caoitalist state.” After Stalin’s death, Ehrenburg led the fight for freer artistic expression, and his 1954 novel, The Thaw, gave the new literary movement its name. In his Memoirs, which have been running, off and on, in the Soviet press since 1960, he has tried to present an unbiased picture of the recent Russian past. It is a gallant and encouraging try, but unfortunately-thanks to a combination of Ehrenburg’s cautious memoament and official censorship-it only lifts the Iron Curtain half way.

Corruption of a Caraboid. This second volume of memoirs (the first carried Ehrenburg from his Moscow childhood through World War I) deals largely with writers and artists, good, bad and indifferent, whom Ehrenburg met in the capitals of Western Europe in the interwar years. Ehrenburg seems almost under a compulsion to mention as many as possible, as if to atone in some slight way for their “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives. His portraits are touching, affectionate, anecdotal, but he scrupulously avoids discussing the writers’ ideas. Only obliquely does he hint that many of the Russian writers were victims of Stalin, and by the time of their death thoroughly disgusted with Communism.

Ehrenburg is equally vague about himself. He expresses few of his own thoughts, has scarcely any explanation for the abrupt shifts in his career. A confirmed skeptic in the 1920s, he was dubbed “the caraboid,” the name of a beetle which ejects a fine stinging spray. In his early novels, Julio Jurenito and The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, Ehrenburg mocked Right and Left, capitalism and Communism (when Roitschwantz was republished in the U.S. in 1960, it was much to his embarrassment). But in the 1930s, he became a militant Communist, began cranking out “social realism” clinkers that glorified the Russian regime. His reasons are unconvincing: “I came to realize that a soldier’s fate is not that of a dreamer, and that one ought to take one’s place in the fighting ranks. I did not renounce what I held dear, nor did I repudiate anything, but I knew that I would have to grit my teeth and master that most difficult of disciplines-silence.” Roar of Cannon. Master it he did.

When one close friend after another was hauled off to his death during the bloody purges of the late 1930s, Ehrenburg never said a word. Nor does he offer a word of reproof today.

Ehrenburg is at his best when he is simply reporting what he saw. Assigned by Izvestia to cover the Spanish Civil War, he is sharp, biting, witty. He describes how the Anarchists, numbering in the tens of thousands, caused havoc in Republican ranks. Not believing in law, order or discipline, they confiscated all cash in areas they controlled, cut off all medical supplies on the grounds that “nature is a better healer.” Ehrenburg showed them Soviet films on proper revolutionary behavior, but the Anarchists laughed in all the wrong places.

Ehrenburg nevertheless shows flashes of awareness of his-and Communism’s -vast errors, and he promises to say more about Stalinism in future volumes.

“I shed the light of art too timidly, too meanly, too intermittently on this world that I was depicting. The crux lies not in the quality of such gifts as I have, but in spiritual hastiness, in the fact that we were blinded by tremendous events, deafened by cannonades, by roaring, by intensely loud music, so that at times we ceased to detect the nuances, hear the heartbeats, and so lost the habit of discovering that spiritual detail which is the living tissue of art.”