People and Life; Memoirs, by Ilya Ehrenburg

[p028] People and Life: Memoirs of 1891- 1917. By Ilya Ehrenburg. Mac- Gibbon & Kee, 21s. ‘Many of my contemporaries have found themselves under the wheels of time. I have survived—not because I was stronger or more far-seeing but because there are times when the fate of a man is not like a game of chess played according to rule but like a lottery.’ Ehrenburg was certainly lucky. Stalin’s monsters murdered people on a points system. Points were award- ed for being a party member, an intellectual, a Jew, prominent in the state apparatus and for long residence abroad. Anyone with five points out of five was practically certain of a death sentence; with four points there was a very high probability, with three a strong possibility. Ehrenburg’s score was four and luck must ‘have played a large part in his survival. Political acumen must have accounted for the rest. Ehrenburg will never be awarded the highest marks for courage. But his memoirs reveal, a little sur- prisingly, a very commendable honesty. There is a vivid picture of the hyper-sensitive, middle - class student drifting, with his generation, into the Bolshevik Party after the 1905 revolution. Forced to leave Russia, Ehrenburg moved to Paris. He immediately fell in love with the city and, in particular, with its bohemian fringe. The artists and revolutionaries who frequented the Rotonde argued and drank, painted, wrote poems, fell in love and con- tracted T.B. The intense, hungry, wasteful, creative and quintessentially romantic life fascinated Ehrenburg. The atmosphere of Paris in the Quartier Latin and around the Rotonde is beautifully conveyed in these memoirs. Rivera, Modigliani, Leger, Picasso, Lunarcharsky and countless others throng the pages. Ehrenburg has written novels and poetry but only in his journalism does his talent find full expression. This is essentially pre-1914 Paris of the bohemians seen by a journalist of genius. It also explains the man. Ebrenburg was committed prima- rily to art and incidentally to politics. That he excelled only in the art of journalism is beside the point. As an art critic he is responsive if not very profound. When the time came to sell himself to Stalin, Ehrenburg did so, with what compunction we may learn in a later volume. While writers were being murdered by the score Ehrenburg stayed silent. It was all he could do if he were not to join them in front of the firing squad. When Stalin and Zhdanov stifled the soul out of Soviet writing, Ehrenburg stayed silent, for the same reason. The moment it became possible to speak out he did so. Now, with his accustomed acumen, he gauges how- far it is expedient to go, and goes a little farther. The book is peppered with hints of colleagues done to death. It is a cautious defence of formalism, root- less cosmopolitanism and everything that is alive in contemporary Soviet culture. The translation, by Anna Bostock and Yvonne Kapp, is superb. . H.C,

[p029] BOOK REVIEWS Out of his depth