Russia: Death of a Survivor

No one attempts to safeguard poets or artists; it is generally overlooked that, by the very character of their profession, a scratch may prove mortal.

And then you file slowly past a grave and throw a flower.

—Ilya Ehrenburg

For much of the prolific literary lifetime of the Russian who wrote those lines, the deceptively romantic tone overlay the steely facts of Soviet life.

The scratch of a pen that grated Stalin could prove mortal to its author, and Ilya Ehrenburg set out to safeguard himself from an early, flowered grave. Survive he did, earning the epithet of panderer and opportunist from his detractors. Ehrenburg survived not only the Revolution (he published his first books of poems while the Czar was still on his throne) but all the turns and terrors of successive Soviet regimes.

A deeply cultured, ironic man, he was clearly troubled by the compromises he made to stay safe. Once he wrote bitterly that “my life resembles a vaudeville act with many changes of costume, but I am not a ham. I am only trying to be obedient.” Perhaps the truest description of his prescription for survival was his simple admission that in his writing “I have told the truth, but not all the truth.”

Brink of Vows. Ehrenburg’s compromises came all the harder because he was, in many ways, a Western intellectual, steeped in European thought and experience; he knew what the world was like before Communism and beyond Stalin. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1891, he early migrated to Paris’ Left Bank and the bohemian life of a young poet trying to recapture in lyrical verse the “beauty of the vanished world” of medievalism.

Though a youthful convert to Marxism, he toyed for a time with Catholicism to the point of considering taking monastic vows. His first of several dozen novels—and perhaps his best —was the Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, a piquant, picaresque satire a la Voltaire of both Western capitalism and the Communist Revolution, still considered heretical in Russia.

Though he continued to live mainly in Western Europe until 1940, Ehrenburg craved official approval at home.

The result was a drab series of social-realist novels with such command-economy titles as his 1935 potboiler. Without Stopping for Breath. Then Ehrenburg reported the Spanish Civil War for Izvestia in vivid prose that made him Russia’s leading journalist.

He went on to use the same skills in covering the war with the Nazis. He helped deify Stalin, inspiring the Russian fighting men with such dispatches as one beginning: “I can hear the voice of Stalin day and night. . .”

With the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet political climate inevitably began to change—and Ehrenburg was the first to dramatize the fact. His novel, The Thaw, gave its name to the new era. It frankly dealt with Stalin’s purges and other heretofore taboo subjects, and helped open the way for the Evtushenkos and the Dudintsevs (Not By Bread Alone) to follow.

Senior Citizen. Thereafter, Ehrenburg was as ardent an advocate of greater freedom of expression within the Soviet Union as he had been an acquiescent promoter of Stalin. In one of the final chapters of his diffuse six-volume memoirs he even backtracked: the voice of Stalin he had once heard became ominous “noises on the stairs”—meaning the approach of the secret police. “If he just read the list of all his victims,” he said of the old dictator, “he would not have been able to do anything else.”

Khrushchev found Ehrenburg a little too outspoken and said so; but Ehrenburg, now a secure senior citizen of the Soviet literary establishment, with a five-room luxury apartment in Moscow filled with modern French art, paid no heed. Ehrenburg always insisted he had not bought his immunity under Stalin. “I lived in an era when the fate of man resembled not so much a chess game as a lottery,” he said. Last week, at the age of 76, the last lottery brought down the professional survivor: he died of a heart attack in Moscow.