A Soviet Autobiography

People and Life 1891—1921.
by Ilya Ehrenburg.
Translated from the Russian by Anna Bostock and Yvonne Kapp. Knopf. 434 pp. $5.95.

Revolutions notoriously devour their makers. Generally their leaders are the dissident sons of the ruling establishment rather than members of the oppressed classes in whose name they struggle, and the awful logic of the revolution then dispatches them after their own defeated class into “the ash can of history,” to use one of Trotsky’s pet phrases.

No revolution followed this pattern more consistently than the Russian Communist uprising of 1917. Once in power, the proletarians turned with increasing brutality against the old revolutionaries, and particularly against those who had articulated the insurgent creed from their liberal middle-class ideology: the writers, artists, poets, and philosophers of Russia’s disaffected bourgeois intelligentsia. One by one, they were cowed into silence, driven into exile or to early suicide, imprisoned or put into labor camps, killed—and defamed after death.

A handful survived; some by “inner emigration” into politically innocuous activities, others by adjusting to the new masters. Of the latter, the most important is Ilya Ehrenburg, best known in the West for his novel The Thaw, which gave its name to the short period of partial relaxation after Stalin’s death. Having survived some very close calls, Ehrenburg last year reached his seventieth birthday and is now being lavishly honored. He has received the Order of Lenin, was recently hailed in Pravda as the “great” Soviet writer, and his biography-in-progress, “People, Years, Life”¹ has been appearing serially in the important literary magazine Novy Mir.

If Ehrenburg were a conformist pure and simple, his autobiography could be expected to amount to little more than an apology for his own life. Being neither simple nor pure, Ehrenburg has tried for considerably more; he attempts not only to exonerate himself but also to rehabilitate his whole generation. Writing with guilt and affection, he is trying to set up a memorial to his dead fellow intellectuals—to make some amends by passing on their buried ideals and dreams to the sons of the victorious proletarians.

The proletarians of course are still very much in the saddle, and the task Ehrenburg has set himself takes a great deal of finessing, an accurate eye for how far one can go without getting one’s head chopped off. A lifetime of maneuvering has made Ehrenburg a past master at this sort of thing. His stratagem is quite simple: he assumes the role of the detached bystander, the peripherally involved witness, and is thus in a position to report everything (well, not quite everything) without committing himself to anything. The virtue of this approach is that it keeps all lines of retreat open, its defect, that it never gets to the heart of events or, for that matter, to the heart of the writer.

Thus Ehrenburg finally remains a shadowy, two-dimensional figure. True, in the first three published volumes of the autobiography, he recounts the first forty years of his life at very considerable length: the idyllic middle-class Jewish childhood, his activities as a teen-age agitator, the poverty-stricken and exhilarating life as emigré poet in France from 1909 to 1917, his return to Russia and the role of Soviet bureaucrat, and a second period in Paris and Berlin in the 1920’s and 1930’s. But the wealth of surface detail does not quite conceal the lack of psychological depth, the rigid suppression of self-revelation. The events, public and private, that must have moved Ehrenburg most profoundly are either gingerly skirted or totally omitted.

This cautious method of his—and the fear behind it—are well exemplified by the understated explanation for his precipitate departure from Russia in 1921: “I had to convince myself that this was not just an ordinary revolt but the leap into the 20th century. . . . I was frightened by the thoughtless sacrifices, by the fierceness of the mob, and the simplification of the complex of world ideas. . . . Born yesterday, I loved yesterday’s wisdom.” Or, “I saw a progressive [i.e. Communist] society in which, for the sake of personal gain, friend betrayed friend, the wife deserted the husband, and the clever son blackened the name of his father.” And he compresses years of Stalinist terror into the bare sentences, “Many times in life I felt like a hunted animal, listening to the steps coming up the stairs or going into the elevator. That was a very unpleasant feeling.”

Even in personal matters he is oblique and evasive, in a most disturbing—or rather undisturbing—fashion. The birth of a daughter is mentioned in half a sentence, his marriage gets no more than a sentence. There is no mention of any relations with women and his friendships with men show a public face only.

Not all of this is a politically inspired reflex, of course. Part of it is doubtless a concession to the Russian prudery that has always remained untouched by our Western emphasis on knowing intimate details; and part of it may be a bow to the main Russian literary tradition which aims for the depiction of the social scene rather than for psychological analysis-in-depth. But the total effect is reinforcement of the discretion and evasiveness that have become second nature to Ehrenburg, whose hallmark is a literary style bland and detached, one forced to turn esoteric when it most wants to speak out. Of necessity Ehrenburg cultivates the light touch, hurries from topic to topic, and ends up with a collection of fragments. No intellectual development, no moral growth, is delineated. All that can be shown is indeed a disconnected series of “People, Years, Life”—as the self-conscious title proclaims.

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Yet, notwithstanding these inhibitions, Ehrenburg accomplishes what he has set out to accomplish: the construction of a memorial to the ideals and friends of his youth. With infinite patience, sly cunning, and a coward’s courage he piles up, fragment by fragment, anecdote by anecdote, quote by quote, the images and passions of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. He intimates, insinuates, drops hints, makes ironical asides, asks disingenuous questions, tells funny, self-deprecating stories—and at the end of a thousand trivia and indirections a vision has accumulated of a past which, by implication, is an indictment of the present and a muted call for a different future.

Ehrenburg’s task is relatively easy so long as he sticks to his and his friends’ dreaming and scheming abroad—subjects to which the present Soviet leadership is not unduly sensitive. Right now, when others have dared to remove Stalin’s body from its mausoleum, it is probably not too awfully risky for Ehrenburg to describe pre-World War I Paris as a city with twenty newspapers of all political persuasions, with cabarets in which people sang satirical ditties deriding the President of the Republic and the Cabinet, where medical and physics students thought nothing of attending mass before going to classes, and where one could go around dressed as one liked, doing what one liked. But how strange, frightening, and desirable it all must sound to his young readers in Brest or Vladivostok.

And doesn’t Ehrenburg go way out pour épater le proletariat when he flaunts his friendships with great innovators of Western culture, men like Picasso, Leger, and Modigliani, whose work is still vilified in Russia as degenerate and decadent bourgeois art? He tells, rather touchingly, of the first Picasso exhibit in Moscow, some time in the late 50’s, when three thousand people crowded into the gallery, nearly causing a panic. “I said into the microphone, ‘Comrades, you have waited for this twenty-five years, wait another twenty-five minutes.’. . . Somebody gave me a pair of scissors and it seemed to me that I was cutting not a ribbon but a curtain behind which Pablo stood.”

And along with bringing to life by his anecdotes some of the artists of the West who till now have been abstract symbols of artistic corruption in the Soviet Union, he also tries to shed light on their concepts and theories—possibly for the first time in the experience of many of his readers. Using non-Marxist language, he explains Leger’s mechanical people by the artist’s belief that the modern sense of aesthetics is bound to the machine; supporting Modigliani’s distortions, he remarks that a picture is not an anatomical atlas, and he recalls Picasso’s explanation that Negro sculptors change the expected proportions of heads and bodies because they have a different concept of the proportions. About Picasso’s “Guernica” he writes: “What is realism? Is the painter realistic who tries to portray the drama of Hiroshima by painstakingly painting the sores on the bodies of a dozen wounded? Doesn’t reality demand a different, more generalized approach which reveals not an isolated episode but the essence of the tragedy?”

I have quoted Ehrenburg at some length in order to convey the note of defiance with which such things—the small change of introductory art classes in our colleges—have to be said in the Soviet Union. He goes even further: he takes the occasion to get off some caustic attacks on socialist realism and—more dangerous for him—party dictatorship over art. For the first, just two observations among many: “It seems to me that kolkhozniki drawn in the manner of the academic school cannot make anybody happy and that one cannot convey the rhythm of the second half of the 20th century by means of the flow of subordinate clauses used so felicitously by Leo Tolstoy”; and—outright heresy, this—“What counts in art is form not content.” As to party control over the arts, he is more circumspect but still quite unequivocal. He complains about the monopoly of a single school of thought in the plastic arts and he quotes the former Commissar of Art, Lunacharsky, to the effect that “The Commissar must not influence art.”

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When, however, he brings his memoirs back from Parisian exile to the Soviet scene and Russian comrades we find him considerably more cautious; for despite the current regime’s own slow and partial movements in the direction of rehabilitating some former martyrs, this is still exceedingly dangerous territory. To be sure, Ehrenburg stays away not only from his friends’ political ideas but from their artistic programs as well: which is a great pity, for some of their unorthodox ideas, such as their protest against realistic allegory, have recently been taken up, tentatively and with hesitation, by the more courageous among the younger generation.

Instead, he limits himself here to the purely personal. He has a veritable obsession for names; he mentions a host of writers and artists, many of them completely obscure figures lost in the purges of the 20’s and 30’s: and he sets down their names with the intensity of an Orthodox Jew reciting the kaddish.

In many cases, Ehrenburg does go beyond the mere dropping of these names. He tells anecdotes, funny and sad stories, he quotes from their works, recalls snatches of conversation, and openly displays affection; in so doing, he tries to revive his dead friends, to restore their human quality—they who till now have remained insubstantial phantoms or odious references in the Soviet Encyclopedia—at least to younger Soviet readers.

Clearly his intent is more aggressive when he recalls men like Essenin and Meyerhold, and the rest of the Revolution’s intellectual avant-garde who in the end became disillusioned with regime and party. They have been symbols of dangerous artistic tendencies and their works have remained unpublished for so long that even now, after their official rehabilitation, the very mention of their names in public seems like an act of breathless daring. And, in a sense, it is as daring as it seems, for to mention a Mayakovsky or a Meyerhold is to condemn, by implication, the mediocrities that have taken their places in the Soviet art world today.

Paradoxically, in attempting to humanize his old associates, he succeeds in diminishing them: he is, finally, afraid to discuss their ideas and artistic achievements, and thus is left with only the trivia of their personal histories. The falsification implicit in his method becomes very evident when he describes their deaths, which were almost invariably tragic; for he is forced to describe as individual misfortunes what were, in fact, inevitable consequences of a state-wide purge of all creative and independent spirits.

The cumulative effect of the “individual” tragedies is very depressing, especially in the case of the Jewish intelligentsia with whom Ehrenburg shared not only origins, upbringing, and the common attitudes of the outsider in society, but also the hardship of Russian anti-Semitism and repeated anti-Jewish purges by the Communist party apparatus. Men like Ossip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, cut down by Stalin in their prime, are treated with an affection as pure and intense as anything to be found in these memoirs. What Ehrenburg loves and mourns in these men is the innocence and the childlike incorruptibility of ghetto idealists, destroyed by a revolution that turned out to be hideously different from the messianic dreams of their youth. He calls Babel “my wise Rabbi, my teacher.” He speaks of his “almost superstitious love” for a Yiddish poet; referring to Mandelstam’s grim death, he exclaims in rare anguish, “Whom could such a poet hurt?” And the memory, unspoken but ever present, of the frantic propaganda services which he, Ehrenburg, rendered to the system and to the dictator who murdered his friends, puts a terrible load of guilt on these recollections.

Significantly enough, the one exception is Boris Pasternak. Ehrenburg praises him highly as a poet, but he maligns him as a man. What he acclaims in the others as other-worldliness and innocence, he condemns in Pasternak as egocentricity and self-exclusion from society; and he makes acid fun of Pasternak’s naivety—a character trait he finds so lovable in Mandelstam.

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More is involved here, it seems, than conformity to the official line, or professional jealousy, though both enter the picture. What sparks Ehrenburg’s resentment is that Pasternak’s course put his own into question. For both men tried to hand on the ideals of their youth to the next generation. Ehrenburg played it safe, compromised in order to survive and now justifies himself by telling part of the tale; whereas Pasternak refused to give in, kept his silence for decades, and finally, as it were with his last breath, told all without restraint. In doing so, he showed up not only the taint in Ehrenburg’s ethics but also the limitation of Ehrenburg’s tactic. For in the end, Pasternak accomplished fully and grandly what Ehrenburg is now trying to do cautiously and by half measures: Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago is indeed the great memorial to Russia’s lost intelligentsia, and for a short while it set Russia atremble with the echoes of the old ideas.

Yet, do we have the right to demand Pasternak’s special kind of heroism from Ehrenburg? During the last congress of the Communist party, the memoirs here under review were attacked from the rostrum by Mr. Kutchetov, the editor of the influential literary monthly October, in this indirect but unmistakable fashion: “We still have with us writers of melancholy memoirs who, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, rummage around in the garbage pails of their unreliable memories in order to drag to the light of day some decomposed literary cadavers and show them off as living things.”

Clearly, even in the comparatively relaxed climate of post-Stalinist Russia, it takes an unusual resilience and capacity for punishment to do what Ehrenburg is doing. For in trying to rehabilitate his own liberal, pre-revolutionary generation from official silence and defamation, he does more than write a testimony for the dead: he gives a message to the living. As I have said, the testimony is marred by evasion and omission, the message is heavily coded; it is there, nonetheless. We can only hope that the young people of Russia will not find it too hard to decipher.

Book Reviewers in this Issue

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¹ For this review, Mr. Frankel has based himself on the Russian text, and here translates the original title of the memoirs; also, all translations of excerpts are by him. Four parts of the memoirs have been serialized in Novy Mir: the first two have appeared in book form in Russia., and they are the two included in the Knopf volume. Knopf is planning future publication of the other two parts.—Ed.