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Being Ilya Ehrenburg: the secrets of success

Talent, many friends, strange appearance, huge circulation... We reveal the recipe for becoming the most European Soviet writer, "smoking a pipe, writing novels and accepting the world and ice cream with skepticism" together with Sofia Bagdasarova.

Live in Paris

A good boy from a Jewish family came to the French capital in 1908, straight from prison, where he ended up for revolutionary proclamations. Mom was very afraid: in Paris there are many temptations, fatal women, where he can go crazy. (And it was not in vain that she was worried: with the money she sent, Ilya published the book “Girls, undress yourself” in a circulation of 50 copies.) An ardent revolutionary arrived in Paris with a suitcase full of books. And the poet and translator Francois Villon remained to live in Montparnasse.

Ehrenburg returned to Russia after the February Revolution. But in 1921, he realized that he could not write outside the walls of Parisian cafes, and it was tight with paper in Soviet Russia - and there it was brought by waiters. And he settled back in Paris. At the same time, to everyone's surprise, he retained Soviet citizenship. This caused complex emotions in hungry emigrant writers.

“Nature generously endowed Ehrenburg - he has a Soviet passport.
He lives with this passport abroad. And thousands of visas.
I don't know which writer Ilya Ehrenburg is.
Old things are not good."

Viktor Shklovsky

In the 1930s, while remaining a Parisian, Ehrenburg traveled extensively. And he worked as a correspondent for Soviet newspapers. After the capture of France in 1940, he returned to the USSR and wrote the novel The Fall of Paris. And in the sixties he wrote his memoirs "People, Years, Life", in which that French period was glorified.

Connect with the greats

The Parisian cafe "Rotonde" was Ehrenburg's second home: there he met Apollinaire, Cocteau, Léger, Vlaminck, Picasso, Modigliani, Rivera, Matisse, as well as emigrants Marevna, Chagall, Soutine, Larionov, Goncharova, Shterenberg and others. Portraits of Ehrenburg by their work are scattered in museums around the world - and their names are abundantly scattered on the pages of his books.

“In 1948, after the Wroclaw Congress, we were in Warsaw. Picasso made my portrait in pencil; I posed for him in the room of the old Bristol Hotel. When Pablo finished painting, I asked: “Already? ..” The session seemed very short to me. Pablo laughed: "But I've known you for forty years..."

Ilya Erenburg

His first famous novel, Julio Jurenito, came out with a foreword by Nikolai Bukharin. By the way, it was Bukharin who saved him in 1920, when Ehrenburg was arrested by the Cheka as an agent of Wrangel. Lenin, who met him while still in exile, called him Ilya Shaggy. Hitler remembered Ehrenburg by his last name, denounced him as a Stalinist court lackey, and issued a personal order to catch him and hang him. Stalin quoted and praised Ehrenburg's text, which was banned by Soviet censorship.

His works were filmed by directors Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Kote Marjanishvili. When in 1935 the Soviet authorities wanted to arrange an anti-fascist congress in Paris, Ehrenburg became its driving force: only he had a sufficient number of acquaintances among the intelligentsia of all Europe. Somehow, the surrealists, led by the writer Andre Breton, caught him at the Closeri cafe and whipped him in the face for a critical article. During the Spanish Civil War, Ehrenburg traveled to the front with Hemingway more than once. Louis Aragon (son-in-law of Lily Brik) in his novel The Communists described how Ehrenburg was arrested in 1940, but he was saved by the French Minister of the Interior. In general, the list of his acquaintances was endless.

Smoke a pipe and wear weird hats

The appearance of Ehrenburg, especially before he returned to the USSR and became an honored Soviet writer, with Stalin Prizes, an apartment, a dacha and suits sewn in an atelier, was memorable.

“With a sickly, badly shaved face, with large, hanging, imperceptibly squinting eyes, heavy Semitic lips, with very long and very straight hair hanging in awkward braids, in a wide-brimmed felt hat, standing upright like a medieval cap, hunched over, with shoulders and with his feet turned inside, in a blue jacket sprinkled with dust, dandruff and tobacco ash, having the appearance of a man “who has just washed the floor”, Ehrenburg is so “left-bank” and “montparnasse” that his mere appearance in other quarters of Paris causes confusion and excitement of passers-by.

Maximilian Voloshin

His hats were unusual - but he did not pursue style, but was simply sloppy. Once Alexei Tolstoy sent a postcard to a Parisian cafe, putting instead of the name of Ehrenburg "Au monsieur mal coiffe" ("Poorly combed gentleman"). And the message was passed on to whoever needed it.

However, in the USSR he shocked: he put on a beret, the habit of wearing which he picked up in Spain. Passers-by looked not at the famous writer, but at the strange hat. And at the front, as Marshal Bagramyan recalled, Ehrenburg wore a cap - but somehow not at all according to the charter, and this was also striking.

He did not part with his pipe, we see them in many photographs and portraits. “He who picks up the phone must possess the rarest virtues: the impassivity of a commander, the taciturnity of a diplomat and the equanimity of a cheater,” he wrote about himself. One of his best early books is also devoted to pipes.

Write scathingly

A staunch anti-fascist, after the start of the Great Patriotic War, he wrote the article “Kill!”, giving rise to the famous frightening slogan “Kill the German!”. "See Paris and die" - this also came from Ehrenburg. And the nickname of the Khrushchev thaw comes from the title of his 1954 novel.

Boris Slutsky wrote that Ehrenburg “was almost a happy man. He lived as he wanted (almost). He did what he wanted (almost). He wrote what he wanted (almost). He said - this is already without "almost" what he wanted. Ehrenburg's position was truly unique. In Europe, he was considered a pro-Soviet writer, and in the USSR, a "fellow traveler" and a rootless cosmopolitan. Among his awards were the Order of Lenin, the Red Banner of Labor and the Legion of Honor. He was smashed for skepticism and cheeky tone, but at the same time they were read to him. Ehrenburg died in 1967, but even today disputes continue around his name, he is branded an opportunist and called a hero.

NB: What to read by Ehrenburg
"The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito" - the forerunner of Bender and Woland. An adventurous fantasy novel that contains both Holocaust and nuclear bomb predictions. Continuation - "Trust D.E."
"The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwanets" - the adventures of a tailor from Gomel, unhappy and funny, like a soldier Schweik.
"Black Book" - evidence of the crimes of fascism. The book is stronger - and more documentary - than The Diary of Anne Frank (which recently found a surviving adult co-author).
"Thirteen Pipes" - a series of short stories about favorite toys from his collection. In pursuit: “Conditional suffering of a cafe frequenter” is a kind of guide to the cereal establishments of Europe.
"People. Years. Life" - memories. They were scolded at the same time for their attention to the repressed and for their silence about them.

Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg. Born on January 14 (26), 1891 in Kyiv - died on August 31, 1967 in Moscow. Russian Soviet poet, writer, publicist, journalist, translator from French and Spanish, public figure, photographer.

Ilya Ehrenburg was born on January 14 (26 according to the new style) January 1891 in Kyiv into a Jewish family.

Father - Gersh Gershanovich (Gersh Germanovich, Grigory Grigorievich) Ehrenburg (1852-1921), served as an engineer, was a merchant of the second guild (later the first guild).

Mother - Khana Berkovna (Anna Borisovna) Ehrenburg (nee Arinstein) (1857-1918), housewife.

He was the fourth child in the family.

Older sisters - Maria (1881-1940), Eugenia (1883-1965), Isabella (1886-1965).

Cousin - Ilya Lazarevich Ehrenburg (1887-1920), artist and journalist, participant in the Civil War.

Cousin - Natalya Lazarevna Ehrenburg (married Ehrenburg-Mannati) (1884-1979), collector, artist and teacher.

Cousins ​​(by mother) - a gynecologist Roza Grigorievna Lurie and a dermatovenereologist Alexander Grigoryevich Lurie (1868-1954), professor and head of the department of dermatovenereology at the Kyiv Institute for the Improvement of Doctors (1919-1949).

Cousin - Georgy Borisovich Ehrenburg (1902-1967), orientalist-sinologist.

His parents got married in Kyiv on June 9, 1877, then lived in Kharkov, where three daughters were born, and returned to Kyiv just before the birth of their son. The family lived in the apartment of the grandfather from the father's side - a merchant of the second guild Grigory (Gershon) Ilyich Ehrenburg - in the house of Natalya Iskra at Institutskaya Street No. 22.

In 1895, the family moved to Moscow, where his father received a position as director of the Joint Stock Company Khamovniki Beer and Honey Brewery. They lived on Ostozhenka, in the house of the Varvara Society in Savelovsky Lane, apartment 81.

Since 1901, he studied together with the 1st Moscow Gymnasium, where he studied poorly from the third grade and was left for the second year in the fourth. He left the gymnasium as a fifth grade student in 1906.

After the events of 1905, he took part in the work of the revolutionary organization of the Social Democrats, but did not join the RSDLP itself. In 1907 he was elected to the editorial board of the press organ of the Social Democratic Union of Students of Secondary Educational Institutions in Moscow.

In January 1908, he was arrested, spent six months in prison and was released pending trial, but in December he emigrated to France, lived there for more than 8 years. Gradually withdrew from politics.

In Paris, he was engaged in literary activity, rotated in a circle of modernist artists. The first poem "I went to you" was published in the journal "Northern Dawns" on January 8, 1910; ), "Poems about eve" (1916), a book of translations by F. Villon (1913), several issues of the magazines "Helios" and "Evenings" (1914). In 1914-1917 he was a correspondent for the Russian newspapers Utro Rossii and Birzhevye Vedomosti on the Western Front.

In the summer of 1917 he returned to Russia. In the autumn of 1918, he moved to Kyiv, where he lodged with his cousin, a dermatovenereologist at the local Jewish hospital, Alexander Grigoryevich Lurie, at 40 Vladimirskaya Street.

From December 1919 to September 1920, he lived with his wife in Koktebel, then from Feodosia he crossed by barge to Tiflis, where he obtained Soviet passports for himself, his wife and the Mandelstam brothers, with which in October 1920 they, together as diplomatic couriers, went by train from Vladikavkaz to Moscow.

At the end of October 1920, Ehrenburg was arrested by the Cheka and released thanks to the intervention of N.I. Bukharin.

Having negatively perceived the victory of the Bolsheviks (as evidenced by his collection of poems "Prayer for Russia" in 1918 and journalism in the newspaper "Kyiv Zhizn"), in March 1921, Ehrenburg again went abroad.

Being expelled from France, he spent some time in Belgium and arrived in Berlin in November.

In 1921-1924 he lived in Berlin, where he published about two dozen books, collaborated in the New Russian Book, and together with L. M. Lissitzky published the constructivist magazine Veshch.

In 1922, he published the philosophical and satirical novel The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, which gives an interesting mosaic picture of the life of Europe and Russia during the First World War and the Revolution, but most importantly, a set of amazingly accurate prophecies.

Ilya Ehrenburg - "Julio Jurenito"

Ilya Erenburg was a promoter of avant-garde art. He was close to the left circles of French society, actively collaborated with the Soviet press - since 1923 he worked as a correspondent for Izvestia. His name and talent as a publicist were widely used by Soviet propaganda to create an attractive image of the Soviet Union abroad. Traveled a lot in Europe (Germany - 1927, 1928, 1930, 1931; Turkey, Greece - 1926; Spain - 1926; Poland - 1928; Czechoslovakia - 1927, 1928, 1931, 1934; Sweden, Norway - 1929; Denmark - 1929, 1933 ; England - 1930; Switzerland - 1931; Romania, Yugoslavia, Italy - 1934).

In the summer and autumn of 1932, he traveled around the USSR, was on the construction of the Moscow-Donbass highway, in Kuznetsk, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, which resulted in the novel Day Two (1934), condemned by critics.

In 1934, he spoke at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, on July 16-18, 1934, in order to find Osip Mandelstam, who was in exile, he visited Voronezh.

Since 1931, the tone of his journalistic and artistic works has become more and more pro-Soviet, with a belief in the "bright future of the new man." In 1933, the Izogiz publishing house published Ehrenburg's photo album My Paris in a carton and dust jacket made by El Lissitzky.

Ilya Ehrenburg owns the famous words: "See Paris and die".

After Hitler came to power, he became the greatest master of anti-Nazi propaganda. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, Ehrenburg was a war correspondent for Izvestia. He acted as an essayist, prose writer (collection of short stories Outside the Truce, 1937; novel What a Man Needs, 1937), poet (collection of poems Loyalty, 1941).

On December 24, 1937, he came from Spain to Moscow for two weeks, and on December 29 he spoke at a writers' congress in Tbilisi. On his next visit from Spain, his foreign passport was taken away from him, which was restored in April 1938 after Ehrenburg made two appeals to him, and in early May he returned to Barcelona. After the defeat of the Republicans, he returned to Paris.

After the German occupation of France, he took refuge in the Soviet embassy.

In 1940 he returned to the USSR, where he wrote and published the novel The Fall of Paris (1941) about the political, moral and historical reasons for the defeat of France by Germany in World War II.

From the first day of the Great Patriotic War, he began to actively resist the enemy on the propaganda front. He himself recalled June 22, 1941: “They came for me, they took me to Trud, to Krasnaya Zvezda, on the radio. I wrote the first military article. Do you have a military rank? I replied that there was no title, but there was a vocation: I would go where they were sent, I would do what they ordered.

During the Great Patriotic War, he was a correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, wrote for other newspapers and for the Soviet Information Bureau. He became famous for his anti-German propaganda articles and works, which he wrote about 1500 during the war. A significant part of these articles, constantly published in the newspapers Pravda, Izvestia, Krasnaya Zvezda, are collected in the three-volume journalism War (1942-1944).

In 1942, he joined the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and was active in collecting and publishing materials about the Holocaust, which, together with the writer Vasily Grossman, were collected in the Black Book.

Ilya Ehrenburg and Konstantin Simonov are the authors of the slogan "Kill the German!"(which was first heard in K. M. Simonov's poem "Kill him!"), which was widely used in posters and - as a headline - leaflets with quotes from Ehrenburg's article "Kill him!" (published 24 July 1942).

To maintain the effectiveness of the slogan, special headings were created in Soviet newspapers of that time (one of the typical titles was “Did you kill a German today?”), In which letters were published by Soviet soldiers about the number of Germans they killed and how they were destroyed.

Adolf Hitler personally ordered to catch and hang Ehrenburg, declaring him in January 1945 the worst enemy of Germany. Ehrenburg was nicknamed "Stalin's Home Jew" by Nazi propaganda.

Ilya Ehrenburg. Kill!

“Here are excerpts from three letters found on dead Germans:

Manager Reinhardt writes to Lieutenant Otto von Chirac:

"The French were taken away from us to the factory. I chose six Russians from the Minsk region. They are much more enduring than the French. Only one of them died, the rest continued to work in the field and on the farm. Their maintenance costs nothing and we should not suffer from the fact that these beasts, whose children may be killing our soldiers, eat German bread. Yesterday I subjected to a light execution two Russian beasts, who secretly ate the skimmed milk destined for the wombs of pigs ... "

Mathias Dimlich writes to his brother Corporal Heinrich Zimlich:

"There is a camp for Russians in Leiden, you can see them there. They are not afraid of weapons, but we talk with them with a good whip ..."

A certain Otto Essmann writes to Lieutenant Helmut Weigand:

"We have Russian prisoners here. These types are eating earthworms on the airfield site, they throw themselves on the garbage can. I saw them eating weeds. And to think that these are people ..."

Slave owners, they want to turn our people into slaves. They take the Russians to their place, eat them up, drive them mad with hunger, to the point that, when dying, people eat grass, worms, and a filthy German with a rotten cigar in his mouth philosophizes: "Are these people? .."

We know everything. We remember everything. We understood that the Germans are not people. From now on, the word "German" is the worst curse for us. From now on, the word "German" unloads a gun. Let's not talk. Let's not get angry. We will kill. If you haven't killed at least one German in a day, your day is gone. If you think that your neighbor will kill a German for you, you have not understood the threat. If you don't kill the German, the German will kill you. He will take yours and torture them in his accursed Germany. If you can't kill a German with a bullet, kill a German with a bayonet. If there is a lull in your area, if you are waiting for a fight, kill the German before the fight. If you let a German live, the German will hang a Russian man and dishonor a Russian woman. If you killed one German, kill another - there is nothing more fun for us than German corpses. Don't count the days. Don't count miles. Count one thing: the Germans you killed. Kill the German! - this asks the old woman-mother. Kill the German! - it begs you child. Kill the German! - it screams native land. Don't miss. Do not miss. Kill!"

In the days when the Red Army crossed the state border of Germany, the Soviet leaders interpreted actions in Germany as the fulfillment of the liberation mission of the Red Army - the liberator of Europe and the German people proper from Nazism. And therefore, after Ehrenburg’s article “Enough!”, Published in Krasnaya Zvezda on April 11, 1945, a response article appeared by the head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks G.F. .

After the war, he released a dilogy - the novels The Tempest (1946-1947) and The Ninth Wave (1950).

In 1948, Hollywood releases the film The Iron Curtain, about the escape of the GRU cryptographer I. S. Guzenko and Soviet espionage. On February 21 of the same year, Ehrenburg published the article “Film Provocateurs” in the newspaper “Culture and Life”, written on the instructions of the Minister of Cinematography I. G. Bolshakov.

He was one of the leaders of the Peace Movement.

Ehrenburg's position among Soviet writers was peculiar: on the one hand, he received material benefits, often traveled abroad, on the other hand, he was under the control of special services and often even received reprimands. The attitude of the authorities towards Ehrenburg in the era of N. S. Khrushchev and L. I. Brezhnev was just as ambivalent.

After Stalin's death, he wrote the story "The Thaw" (1954), which was published in the May issue of the Znamya magazine and gave its name to an entire era of Soviet history.

In 1958, "French Notebooks" came out - an essay on French literature, painting and translations from J. Du Bellay. He is the author of the memoirs People, Years, Life, which were very popular among the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1960s and 1970s. Ehrenburg introduced the younger generation to many “forgotten” names, contributed to the publication of both forgotten (M. I. Tsvetaeva, O. E. Mandelstam, I. E. Babel) and young authors (B. A. Slutsky, S. P. Gudzenko).

He promoted the new Western art (P. Cezanne, O. Renoir, E. Manet, P. Picasso).

In March 1966, he signed a letter from thirteen figures of Soviet science, literature and art to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU against the rehabilitation of I.V. Stalin.

About 15,000 people came to say goodbye to the writer. He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery (site No. 7).

Personal life of Ilya Ehrenburg:

Was married twice.

First wife - Katerina (Ekaterina) Ottovna Schmidt (1889-1977, in Sorokin's second marriage), translator. They were married in 1910-1913.

The couple had a daughter, Irina Ilyinichna Ehrenburg (1911-1997), a translator of French literature, she was married to the writer Boris Matveyevich Lapin (1905-1941). After the tragic death of her husband, she adopted and raised the girl Fanya, whom Ilya Ehrenburg brought from the front. In front of Fani in Vinnitsa, the Germans shot her parents and sisters, her older brothers served in the Polish army. Some old man managed to hide Fanya, but since it was associated with great risk, he ordered her: "Run, look for the partisans." Ehrenburg brought this girl to Moscow precisely in the hope of distracting Irina from her grief. And she adopted Fanya.

Second wife - Lyubov Mikhailovna Kozintseva (1899-1970), artist, sister of film director Grigory Mikhailovich Kozintsev, student of Alexandra Exter, Robert Falk, Alexander Rodchenko, she was Ehrenburg's cousin niece. They married in August 1919.

Lyubov Kozintseva - the second wife of Ilya Ehrenburg

Filmography of Ilya Ehrenburg:

1945 - Yugoslavia (documentary) - screenwriter
1965 - Martiros Saryan (documentary) - screenwriter
1976 - Ilya Ehrenburg (documentary)

Bibliography of Ilya Ehrenburg:

1910 - Poems
1911 - I live
1912 - Dandelions
1913 - Weekdays: Poems
1914 - Children's
1916 - The story of the life of a certain Nadenka and the prophetic signs revealed to her
1916 - Poems about eve
1917 - About Semyon Drozd's vest: Prayer
1918 - Prayer for Russia
1919 - Fire
1919 - In the stars
1920 - Face of War
1921 - Eves
1921 - Reflections
1921 - Incredible Stories
1922 - Foreign thoughts
1922 - About myself
1922 - Portraits of Russian poets
1922 - Devastating Love
1922 - Heart of Gold: Mystery; Wind: Tragedy
1922 - The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito
1922 - And yet she spins
1922 - Six stories about easy ends
1922 - Life and death of Nikolai Kurbov
1923 - Thirteen Pipes
1923 - Animal warmth
1923 - Trust "D. E." History of the death of Europe
1924 - Love of Jeanne Ney
1924 - Pipe
1925 - Jack of Diamonds and Company
1925 - Rvach
1926 - Summer 1925
1926 - Conditional suffering of a frequenter of a cafe
1926 - Three stories about pipes
1926 - Black crossing
1926 - Stories
1927 - In Protochny Lane
1927 - Materialization of fiction
1927-1929 - Collected works in 10 volumes
1928 - White Coal or Werther's Tears
1928 - The turbulent life of Lasik Roytshvanets
1928 - Stories
1928 - Pipe Communard
1928 - Conspiracy of equals
1929 - 10 HP Chronicle of our time
1930 - Time Visa
1931 - Dream Factory
1931 - England
1931 - United Front
1931 - We and them (together with O. Savich)
1932 - Spain
1933 - Second day
1933 - Our daily bread
1933 - My Paris
1933 - Moscow does not believe in tears
1934 - Protracted denouement
1934 - Civil war in Austria
1935 - Without taking a breath
1935 - Chronicle of our days
1936 - Four pipes
1936 - Frontiers of the Night
1936 - Book for adults
1937 - Outside the armistice
1937 - What does a person need
1938 - Spanish temper
1941 - Fidelity: (Spain. Paris): Poems
1941 - Captured Paris
1941 - Gangsters
1941 - Rabid Wolves
1941 - Cannibals. Way to Germany (in 2 books)
1942 - Fall of Paris
1942 - Bitterness
1942 - Fire on the enemy
1942 - Caucasus
1942 - Solstice
1942 - The bosses of Nazi Germany: Adolf Hitler
1942 - For life!
1942 - Basilisk
1942–1944 - War (in 3 volumes)
1943 - Freedom
1943 - German
1943 - Leningrad
1943 - "New order" in Kursk
1943 - Poems about the war
1946 - Tree: Poems: 1938–1945
1946 - Roads of Europe
1947 - Tempest
1947 - In America
1948 - Lion in the square
1950 - The Ninth Wave
1952–1954 - Collected works in 5 volumes
1952 - For peace!
1954 - Thaw
1956 - Conscience of peoples
1958 - French notebooks
1959 - Poems: 1938-1958
1960 - India, Greece, Japan
1960 - Rereading Chekhov
1961–1967 - People, Years, Life - (books 1–6)
1962–1967 - Collected works in 9 volumes
1969 - Shadow of the Trees
1974 - Chronicle of Courage. Publicistic articles of the war years
1990–2000 - Collected works in 8 volumes (To the 100th anniversary of the birth)
1996 - At the hour of death. Articles 1918–1919
2004 - Let me look back. Letters 1908–1930
2004 - On the plinth of history. Letters 1931–1967
2006 - I hear everything

ERENBURG Ilya Grigorievich (1891, Kyiv - 1967, Moscow), Russian writer, publicist, Soviet public figure.

Ehrenburg's father, a mechanic, broke with an orthodox family in his youth, but, "... being an unbeliever, he condemned the Jews who, to alleviate their lot, accepted Orthodoxy ...". Mother, Anna (Hanna) Arenstein (1857-1918), although she received a secular education, observed Jewish traditions. In 1896, the family moved to Moscow, where Ehrenburg's father received a position as a manager at a brewery. Entering the prestigious First Moscow Gymnasium, Ehrenburg first encountered manifestations of anti-Semitism on the part of classmates, which he later repeatedly recalled (Autobiography, 1926; Book for Adults, 1936; People, Years, Life, book 1st , 1960). In 1907, Ehrenburg was expelled from the sixth grade of the gymnasium for participating in the work of the youth Social Democratic (Bolshevik) organization (together with his school friend N. Bukharin). In 1908 he was arrested, spent eight months in prison, and was released on bail.

In December 1908 he emigrated, living mainly in Paris, where he continued his revolutionary work, but by 1910 he retired from political life. In 1909–10 Ehrenburg published satirical magazines Quiet Family and Former People in Paris (sketches, poems, parodies, caricatures and caricatures of the life of the Russian Social Democratic colony in Paris, including V. Lenin). Under the influence of a meeting with Elizaveta Polonskaya, he began to write poetry, the first poem was published in the St. Petersburg magazine Northern Dawns (1910, No. 5). In the same year, the collection Poems was published in Paris, and then other collections: I Live (St. Petersburg, 1911), Dandelions (1912), Weekdays (1913), Children's (1914; the last three - Paris), evaluated by critics (V. Bryusov, M. Voloshin, N. Gumilyov), and later by Ehrenburg himself as student and stylistic. But already in 1913, V. Korolenko recommended A. Gornfeld to publish some of Ehrenburg's poems in the journal Russian Wealth. At the same time, Ehrenburg was engaged in translations (F. Jamm "Poems and Prose", Moscow, 1913; prose translated by Ekaterina Schmidt; "Poets of France. 1870-1913", Paris, 1914; F. Villon "Excerpts from the Great Testament", ballads and various poems”, M., 1916). Passion for the European Middle Ages, F. Jamm and other Catholic writers, friendship with M. Jacob led Ehrenburg to the decision to accept Catholicism and go to a Benedictine monastery, however, after experiencing a spiritual crisis (the poem "The Tale of the Life of a Certain Nadenka and the Prophetic Signs Shown to Her" , Paris, 1916) he did not convert to Christianity.

The First World War, with its victims and destruction, had a strong impact on Ehrenburg, aggravated his conflict with reality, and strengthened his inherent moods of skepticism and criticism. The collection "Poems on the Eve" (M., 1916, severely mutilated by censorship) is permeated with a sharp rejection of the war, "perishing Europe", the expectation of the collapse of the old world, a premonition of an impending cataclysm, and popular riots. Ehrenburg called the year 1916 a "violent eve." The collection was highly appreciated by V. Bryusov (“for Ehrenburg, poetry is not fun and, of course, not a craft, but a matter of life ...”), M. Voloshin and others.

In 1915–17 Ehrenburg was a correspondent for the newspapers Morning of Russia (M.) and Birzhevye Vedomosti (P.). The military correspondence of these years was later included in the book of essays The Face of War (Sofia, 1920).

In July 1917, Ehrenburg returned to Russia with a group of political emigrants. In September 1917, the Minister of War of the Provisional Government, A. Kerensky, appointed Ehrenburg as assistant military commissar of the Caucasian Military District, but Ehrenburg did not have time to go to the front. Ehrenburg did not accept the October coup even in the winter of 1917–18. in the Moscow newspapers “Monday of power of the people”, “Life”, “Vozrozhdeniye” published articles containing sharp criticism of the Bolsheviks (including V. Lenin, L. Kamenev, G. Zinoviev, etc.) and their policies. His perception of the "vileness and abomination" of the revolution was reflected in the book of poems "Prayer for Russia" (M., 1918), which lamented the past of Russia, the domes of its churches, and October 1917 was called a disaster. Ehrenburg was eager to leave Russia as soon as possible, "in order to save Russia for himself, the opportunity to live in it internally." However, at the end of 1918, he ended up in Kyiv, where he survived the leapfrog of the change of power, the bloody Jewish pogrom organized by the army of A. Denikin, and other horrors of the civil war. Here he married the artist Lyubov Kozintseva (1900–1970; sister of G. Kozintseva). In 1919 in Kyiv, Ehrenburg published a novel in verse "In the Stars" (illustrated by D. Rivera), a book of poems "In the Hour of Death", and in Gomel - a collection of poems "Fire". At the end of 1919, he moved to the Crimea, and in the spring of 1920 - to independent Georgia. With the help of the Soviet consul, in August 1920 he left for Moscow. Soon the Cheka was arrested and accused of being an agent of Wrangel, but then he was released. He worked in the theater department of the People's Commissariat of Education, directed children's theaters of the RSFSR. In 1920, his books of poems "In Paradise" and "Spanish Songs" were published in Moscow (both written by hand and reproduced in a small edition). With the support of N. Bukharin, Ehrenburg received a Soviet foreign passport, sent on a creative business trip, and in April 1921 left Russia.

At first he lived in Paris, but the French authorities did not allow him to live in the country, and he left for Belgium, and in the autumn of 1921 - to Berlin, where he lived until 1924. During this period, Ehrenburg published collections of poems "Reflections" (Riga, 1921 ), "Eves" (Berlin, 1921), "Foreign Reflections" (M., 1922), "Desolating Love" (Berlin, 1922), "Animal Warmth" (Berlin, 1923). These collections summed up the shocks experienced and described the birth of "another, great age", in relation to which the poet experienced "delight and horror", likening the revolution to a bloody tornado and comparing it with "devastating love" and "cleansing fire". In 1922, in Berlin, he published a philosophical and satirical novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples.... This work combines journalism with poetry, irony with skepticism. The world standing on the edge of the abyss, the chaos of war and revolution, is opposed by the iron, inhumane discipline of the post-revolutionary society of Soviet Russia. This is especially evident in the chapter "The Grand Inquisitor Beyond the Legend", which grotesquely describes the conversation between Julio Jurenito and V. Lenin in the Kremlin (by the way, the latter positively evaluated the novel).

In Berlin, Ehrenburg contributed to the journals Russian Book (1921) and New Russian Book (1921–23), and also in 1922–23. together with E. Lissitzky he published the international magazine of contemporary art "Thing" (Russian, German, French). In 1922, Ehrenburg published the book "And yet it turns" (a manifesto in defense of constructivism in art). In the same year, "Six stories about easy ends" and a collection of short stories "Improbable stories" (I. Stalin praised one of the stories), dedicated to revolutionary and post-revolutionary changes, were published. Then the mystery “Heart of Gold”, the tragedy “Wind” (1922), the novels “The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov”, “Trust D.E.” were published. (both - 1923), "The Love of Jeanne Ney" (1924), a collection of short stories "Thirteen Pipes" (1923), the main motives of which are the conflict of duty and feelings, the opposition of man to society and criticism of capitalism, bourgeois morality, the collapse of European culture.

In 1924, Ehrenburg visited Moscow, where he published the book Jack of Diamonds and Company and gave lectures, and in the summer of that year he settled in Paris. The socio-psychological novels Rvach (1925) and In Protochny Lane (1927) show the contradictions of the NEP period. In 1928, the novel "The Stormy Life of Lazik Roytshvanets" was published in Paris about the life, adventures and death of a tailor from Gomel, whom Western critics called the "Jewish Schweik". Following the vicissitudes of his hero's life, Ehrenburg touches with mockery and sarcasm on all the main institutions of Soviet life: bureaucracy and courts, economics and literature. The novel was not published in the Soviet Union until 1989.

During this period, Ehrenburg published collections of articles, travel essays, publicist books, in which one can see a premonition of the onset of the era of reaction, fascism, bestial nationalism ("White Coal, or Werther's Tears", 1928; "Visa of Time", 1929, etc.). In August 1932, after a six-year absence, Ehrenburg visited the Soviet Union, where he visited the construction of the Moscow-Donbass highway and other grandiose construction projects of the first five-year plan. In the same year, Ehrenburg was appointed permanent foreign correspondent for the Izvestia newspaper. Impressed by this trip, Ehrenburg wrote the novel Day Two, which he published in Paris in 1933, and in Moscow in 1934. The novel, devoid of a clear storyline, is dedicated to the construction of a metallurgical plant in Kuznetsk. This book marked Ehrenburg's turn to Soviet problems and ideology, a revision of the position of the former skeptical attitude towards the Soviet experiment and the problem of creating a new person. It is no coincidence that the time of a radical change in the views of the writer (the beginning of the 1930s) coincided with the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany. With the coming to power of A. Hitler (1933), Ehrenburg's essays began to sound more and more clearly anti-Nazi, and sometimes even anti-German motives. This position merged hatred of fascism in general and Nazism in particular, and his attitude towards the German national character, about which he wrote quite critically in The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito. Proceeding from the conviction that the Nazi regime posed a danger to all neighboring states, in September 1934 Ehrenburg turned to Stalin with a proposal to expand the International Organization of Revolutionary Writers and turn it into an association of wide circles of intellectuals whose goal was to fight fascism and support the Soviet Union. Stalin reacted positively to Ehrenburg's proposal. In 1934, Ehrenburg, despite the fact that he lived in France, participated in the 1st Congress of Soviet Writers, where he played one of the central roles. Returning to Paris, Ehrenburg completed the novel “Without taking a breath” (Moscow, 1935), dedicated to socialist construction and written in the framework of socialist realism, which is obligatory for Soviet writers. During these years, Ehrenburg acted not only as a publicist, journalist (collection "Borders of the Night", 1936) and prose writer (memoirs "A Book for Adults", 1936; collection of short stories "Out of the Truce", 1937; novel "What a Man Needs", 1937 ), but was also an inspirer and active participant in the anti-fascist congresses of writers in defense of culture (Paris, 1935, Madrid, 1937).

During the Spanish Civil War, Ehrenburg was a war correspondent for the Izvestia newspaper (1936–39, intermittently). At the end of 1938, when a short-term propaganda campaign against the anti-Semitism of the “German fascists” was organized in the USSR after Kristallnacht, Ehrenburg, under the pseudonym Paul Joscelin, actively joined in it. In March 1939, after the defeat of the Republicans in Spain, Ehrenburg returned to Paris and continued to send correspondence castigating Nazism. However, already in April, he was informed by the editorial office of Izvestia that, although he continued to be on the editorial staff, his correspondence would not be published, and his book on the Spanish Civil War would also not be published. All this was due to a change in Soviet policy related to the preparation of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact (August 1939). In March 1940, the collection of poems "Fidelity" handed over to the publishing house by Ehrenburg was detained by censors. When Paris was occupied by German troops in June 1940, Ehrenburg, with the help of the Soviet embassy, ​​was sent to Moscow via Germany. In September 1940, Ehrenburg began work on the novel "The Fall of Paris" - about the reasons that led to the defeat and occupation of France. In January 1941, the first part of the novel with censored edits began to be published in the Znamya magazine. The position of the writer changed radically after a call from Stalin (April 24, 1941), who expressed satisfaction with the novel and promised support for its further publication (separate ed. 1942; Stalin Prize, 1942). On April 30, 1941, the collection "Fidelity" came out of print.

From the first day of the Soviet-German war, Ehrenburg was published in the newspapers Krasnaya Zvezda, Pravda, Izvestia (the first publication after the break was June 26, 1941), Trud, etc., as well as in the front-line press. Ehrenburg's military journalism gained national and world fame. His sharp, revealing articles appealed to the conscience of the peoples, strengthened courage, hatred for the enemy, faith in victory. A written law was in effect at the fronts and in partisan detachments - part of the newspaper with orders of the Supreme Commander and portraits of Politburo members did not go to the fire, but there was also an unwritten law - Ehrenburg's articles also did not go to the fire. Only a small part of Ehrenburg's military journalism was included in the three-volume book "War" (M., 1942; the fourth volume was not allowed for publication in 1945), as well as in a collection of articles intended for the foreign press ("Chronicle of Courage", the second additional ed. - M., 1983). In 1942, Ehrenburg became a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and took an active part in the work of the Committee's Literary Commission. At the height of public recognition, Ehrenburg was again subjected to temporary disgrace when, at the end of the war, Soviet policy towards Germany changed. On April 14, 1945, the Pravda newspaper published an article by the head of the propaganda department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks G. Alexandrov “Comrade Ehrenburg simplifies”, in which the writer was accused of inciting hatred towards the German people, without taking into account the fact that there are progressive elements in it.

At the end of 1945, Ehrenburg visited Germany, published reports from the Nuremberg trials, and also visited several other Eastern European states (collections "Roads of Europe" and "Roads of Europe", both - M., 1946). In 1946, a collection of military poems "The Tree" was published. In the summer of 1946 Ehrenburg was sent to the USA with an official delegation. Articles about America were sharply critical and were written in the spirit of the beginning of the Cold War ("In America", Moscow, 1947). Even in the days of the war, the idea of ​​a multifaceted novel The Tempest (1946–47; Stalin Prize, 1948) arose. Pre-war conflicts, world war and other events of this tragic era are revealed in the novel through the fate of individual people. The plot of the novel The Ninth Wave (1951–52, separate edition - 1953) is connected with the storyline of The Tempest. Since 1948, Ehrenburg took an active part in the international pro-Soviet Movement in defense of peace (vice-president of the World Peace Council, laureate of the international Stalin Prize "For the strengthening of peace among peoples", 1952, etc.).

Ilya Grigoryevich Erenburg (1891-1967) was born into a Jewish family (his father was an engineer); spent his childhood in Kyiv, studied at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium, was expelled from the 6th grade for participating in a revolutionary circle. In 1908 he was arrested, released on bail and, without waiting for the trial, fled to France.

Disillusioned with the ideas of Bolshevism, he switched to literary studies. He made his debut in 1910 with a small book, Poems, published in Paris (according to M. Voloshin, works “skillful, but tasteless, with a clear bias towards aesthetic blasphemy”), and then almost every year he published collections in Paris in small editions at his own expense and sent them to Russia to acquaintances (“I live”, 1911; “Dandelions”, 1912; “Everyday life”, 1913; “Children's”, 1914).

Subsequently, he considered Poems about the Eves, 1916, to be the first "real" book. V. Bryusov, N. Gumilyov, S. Gorodetsky paid attention to the poems, they caused a lot of responses in criticism. A. Blok in 1918 in the article "Russian dandies" already mentions the "fashion for Ehrenburg."

During these years, I. Ehrenburg translated French and Spanish poetry, entered the circles of artistic bohemia in Paris (P. Picasso, A. Modigliani, M. Chagall, etc.). After the February Revolution, he returned to Russia, but met the October Revolution with hostility (the collection of poems Prayer for Russia, 1918, which reflected the then mood of the writer, was withdrawn from Soviet libraries).

He lived first in Moscow, then wandered around the south of the country, tried to earn a living by journalism (he wrote articles both friendly towards the revolution and counter-revolutionary).

In 1921, he went on a "creative business trip" to Berlin, keeping his Soviet passport, and most of his most significant prose works were created during the years of "semi-emigration" ("The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Students....", the novel "Rvach", the melodrama The Love of Jeanne Ney, the historical novel The Conspiracy of Equals, the collection of short stories Thirteen Pipes, and many others).

I. Ehrenburg's books were published simultaneously both abroad and at home. A long stay in Germany and France in such an exceptional position led to the fact that Ehrenburg was not completely considered "one of his own" either in the emigre environment or in Soviet Russia.

In 1918-1923, small poetry books by Ehrenburg continued to be published, but they did not arouse interest among critics and readers. I. Ehrenburg returned to writing poetry at the end of his life (part of his poetic heritage was published posthumously), and Ehrenburg was known to his contemporaries mainly as a brilliant publicist, novelist, author of the memoirs People, Years, Life.