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Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg. London: I. B. Tauris, 1996, xii + 482 pp., 19.50.
IN A LETTER FROM THE SPRING OF 1963, Nadezhda Mandelshtam wrote to Ilya Ehrenburg: `You know there is a tendency to accuse you of not reversing the direction of rivers, of not changing the course of the stars, of not breaking up the moon into honeycake and feeding us the pieces. In other words, people always wanted the impossible from you and were angry when you did the possible' (quoted on p. 6). Her eloquent characterisation captures the central problem of this superb biography of one of the more talented and influential writers to have established himself within the restrictive bounds of Soviet Russian letters: how does a prominent Soviet writer and Jew reconcile his commitment to artistic innovation and basic human rights in the face of the atrocities that have largely defined 20th-century Russian and European history? In an effort to correct for what he sees to be overly politicised criticisms of Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) as one whose career was built on a foundation of compromise and collaboration, Joshua Rubenstein argues that, while Ehrenburg was a willing part of the `Stalinist machinery in the West, establishing an intricate relationship with the regime that lasted until the end of his life' (p. 3), he was also-largely by virtue of his stature as an established Soviet writer-one of the more effective and outspoken intellectuals of his time, whose positions on issues ranging from artistic expression to human rights often challenged, and positively influenced, those of the central party apparatus.
Two features make this...