The Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg has long seemed a significant, or at least a symptomatic figure. But significant or symptomatic of what? It is not merely that his career spanned from the first to the seventh decades of our century, with so many changes of fortune or direction, but also that he does not seem to have pulled the contradictions of his own personality together until the comparative and partial success of his last years. The late Anatol Goldberg’s quirky but often fascinating book reflects a rather similar disjunction, in a way which is helpful, if sometimes distracting, to our understanding of the issues involved.
Ehrenburg was, above all, a representative of the literary-political intelligentsia that is to be found in continental Europe, particularly Eastern and Central Europe. (It is not really matched by anything we have in the Anglo-Saxon countries, except as an import, like the Russian word “intelligentsia” itself.) He started in extreme youth as almost a caricature of the most avant-garde section of this intelligentsia and was known among the Bolsheviks as “shaggy Ilya.” Recruited into the party by Bukharin at the age of sixteen, he was soon arrested and spent some months in jail before the usual rich parents got him abroad, where he left the Party as a result of listening to Trotsky’s dogmatic views on literature. He never rejoined, but was later to pay at least lip service to aesthetic attitudes incomparably more dogmatic than Trotsky’s.
His exile was in Paris,
