NEW VERSION OF EARLY EHRENBURG SATIRE
By Brian Pearce
1958The NewsletterBrian Pearce Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Tue publishers Macgibbon and Kee, who a year ago rejected Dudintsev’s Not By Bread Alone on the grounds that it ‘would not have a sufficiently wide appeal’, have -just brought out a new English version of Ilya Ehren-burg’s. 1922 novel Julio Jurenito. (18s.)
‘The first English translation of this work appeared in New York in 1930; there have been French and German versions, and also a Spanish one, with an introduction by Bukharin.
‘Julio Jurenito’ is a fantasy about an adventurer who proclaims himself a sort of Messiah-in-reverse and goes around fostéring and. encouraging, in ‘the spirit of an_agent provocateur, all the worst tendencies in modern society, with a view to hastening its self-destruction.
Reminiscent both of Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ and of the last part of Anatole France’s ‘Penguin Island’, it-was characterized by the late D. S. Mirsky as ‘a serious and significant book, genuinely subversive and nihilistic’.
Laid inthe period just before and during the first world war, ‘Julio Jurenito’ is first and foremost a satire on militarism, together with sallies against big business, organized religion and so on. It is not, however, a critique of capitalism only.
In 1933 the writer of the article on Ehrenburg in the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia observed that: ‘The criticism of capitalism fin ‘Julio Jurenito’] was so plain that some people, carried
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