Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigoryevich [key], 1891–1967, Russian journalist and novelist, whose name is also spelled Erenburg. He wandered throughout Western Europe as a youth. He was noted for his articles about the two world wars. Some of these are translated in The Tempering of Russia (1944). Because of long residence abroad (1921–40), Ehrenburg was the most cosmopolitan of the Soviet writers. Among his satiric novels are The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples (1921, tr. 1930) and The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz (1928, tr. 1960). He won Stalin Prizes for The Fall of Paris (1941, tr. 1942), a novel dealing with the decay of French society from 1935 to 1940, and The Storm (1948, tr. 1949), a panoramic war novel. The title of his postwar novel The Thaw (1954, tr. 1955) has been used in Russia to describe the general lessening of tension after Stalin's death. A lesser work, it was important because it dealt for the first time with the repressions under Stalin's rule. Much of his later journalism is severely critical of the United States.
See his memoirs (tr., 6 vol., 1962–67).
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