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Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigorievich
(1891-1967)
writer and journalist
A prolific Russian writer of Jewish background,
Ehrenburg began his career as a poet before
turning to fiction and journalism, where he
found great acclaim. Born in Kiev, the son of an
engineer, he became involved in revolutionary
activities at age 16. Arrested in 1908, he escaped
to France and lived in Paris from 1909 to 1917.
His love-hate relationship with Western culture
found an early outlet in
Julio Jurenito
(1921), a
novel that satirizes contemporary civilization.
Ehrenburg returned permanently to the Soviet
Union in 1924, and after experimenting with
various literary trends, embraced socialist real-
ism (at least in theory) by 1932. In subsequent
work, Ehrenburg showed an ability for writing
about topical themes on the minds of Soviet
readers. In
The Second Day
(1933), he evoked the
conflicting emotions generated by rapid industri-
alization. He revealed himself as an outstanding
war correspondent, first during the Spanish Civil
War and then during World War II. His two-vol-
ume collection,
War
(1941-42), struck a chord
among readers for its moving portrait of a nation
resisting the German onslaught.
Storm
(1948), a
forceful attack on the West, reflects the interna-
tional tensions of the first years of the cold war.
In the years after
STALIN
's death in 1953, Ehren-
burg emerged as a leading spokesman for cul-
tural liberalization, and he is most frequently
noted for his work
The Thaw
(1954), which, with
its imagery of spring after a long frozen winter,
aptly captured the mood of expectation in intel-
lectual circles that followed
STALIN
's death. The
final work of his long career was a multivolume
autobiography,
People, Years Life
(1960-61),
where between sketches of people in his life, he
tackled the difficult issues of personal survival
during the Stalin years. Like many intellectuals
and artists of his generation, he was able to walk
the fine line between criticism of the regime and
approval from it, with only occasional mishaps.
In 1963, with a new cultural freeze on the hori-
zon, conservative cultural commentators harshly
criticized his memoirs. He died in Moscow on
August 31, 1967.
Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich
(1898-1948)
film director
The most famous film director, producer, and the-
orist of the Soviet cinema, Eisenstein was a bril-
liant innovator who embraced political and
historical topics in his work, and as a result
encountered government opposition in the 1930s
and 1940s, leaving many projects unfinished.
Born in Riga, the son of an architect, Eisenstein
first trained as a civil engineer (1916-18). A Red
Army volunteer in 1918, he worked in a theatri-
cal propaganda group during the civil war. In
1921 he became a director for the Proletkult
(proletarian culture movement) theater, where
he worked with the great Vsevolod
MEYERHOLD
.
In 1925 his first film,
Strike!,
was released, fol-
lowed by
Battleship Potemkin,
which received its
premiere at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater.
Battleship
Potemkin,
based on events around the sailors'
mutiny during the 1905 Revolution, is still con-
sidered one of the classics of Soviet and world
cinema, and its “Odessa steps” scene is one of the
most cited and identifiable. With
October
(dis-
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