Ilja Ehrenburg (1891–1967)

Ilja Ehrenburg was born in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine), to a Lithuanian Jewish family. His parents were Anna and Grigoriy Ehrenburg, an engineer. When he was a small child, the family moved to Moscow.
He was expelled from gymnasium (high school) in his early teens for his involvement in illegal Bolshevik activities. In 1908, at age 15, he emigrated to Paris, where he lived a bohemian lifestyle and began publishing poetry. He got to know Russian exiles Vladimir Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya, and became a good friend of Pablo Picasso, who made the drawings for Ehrenburg's first published collection of poems in 1910. In addition to poetry, Ehrenburg eventually wrote in almost all literary fields, including journalism, translation, essays, short stories, novels, criticism, travelogues, memoirs, and political works, Two of his novels and some of his stories were adapted into films in the 1920s. During World War I, he served as a war correspondent at the front and later experienced the civil war in Ukraine. At this time, he wavered between support for and criticism of the Bolshevik leaders. He returned to western Europe, living in France, Belgium, and Germany, and published his first novel, the satirical Khulio Khurenito (The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, 1922), which many consider his best. By 1924, he felt ready to return to the Soviet Union. He participated in literary activities in Moscow, and soon afterwards was sent back to Europe as the foreign editor of several Soviet newspapers. Living in Berlin in the early 1930s, he witnessed the rise of the Nazis to power. Ehrenburg spent most of 1936 to 1940 in Spain and France as a war correspondent for the newspaper Izvestiya. In 1941, he returned to the Soviet Union, where he published Padeniye Parizha (The Fall of Paris), which won the 1942 Stalin Prize. After his acceptance of the Soviet regime, he adapted his writing to government demands and was successful in avoiding the purges that destroyed the lives and careers of many other writers and artists. In 1946-1947, he won a second Stalin Prize with Burya (The Storm). Shortly after Stalin’s death, Ehrenburg published the novel Ottepel (The Thaw, 1954), the title of which become a descriptor of that period in Soviet history. In his autobiography, Lyudi, gody, zhizn (People, Years, Life, 1961), Ehrenburg boldly ranged over many topics and people (e.g., writers lost in the purges) that were normally taboo for Soviet authors. This brought official censure down on him in 1963 when the "thaw" began to reverse. But Ehrenburg managed to survive again and remained prominent in literary circles until his death.