Ilya Ehrenburg Rebels

...portraying realistically some of the seamier sides of Soviet life^ : "The novel [Stendhal is quoted again] is a mirror on a broad road...

...For any Soviet reader who is obtuse enough to miss the point, Ehrenburg has this blunt reminder: "He [Stendhal] belongs to us, and everyone is entitled to see in him his teacher...

...It is difficult to conceive of Ilya Ehrenburg as the champion of freedom and justice, but—whatever his motives—there can be no doubt that at present he is standing up and slugging it out, not merely with "Stalinism" but with the present leadership of the Soviet Union...

...You would do better to blame the road with its bumps on the highway department...

...The mirror reflects mud...

...He shows how contemporary Soviet translations of Stendhal's The Red and the Black have been embellished with needless qualifications and bumbling amplifications, often doubling the length of individual passages...

...If society had been able to tell Newton, Copernicus, Mendeleyev or Einstein what they were supposed to seek and what they were supposed to find, their genius would have been wasted and their discoveries would not have taken place...

...This is most timely, in view of the tenacious behind-the-scenes struggle for loosening of the Party's cultural controls now being waged by a small but courageous group of Russian writers...

...Stendhal is even made to speak in their behalf: "At fault is the society which demands hypocrisy, punishes for truth and stifles large feelings on behalf of a multitude of conventions...

...For months, Soviet propagandists have been running a campaign, in response to questioning voices at home, to convince people that the crimes of the Stalin era wero purely a matter of the late dictator's personality...

...the puddles, the bumps, and \ on accuse the man who holds the mirror of lacking taste...

...He wrote: 'One must learn to flatter no one, not even one's people.' " If Ehrenburg's article is a ringing shout of defiance, the August 22 Literaturnaya Gazeta attack on it, by an obscure individual named Ta-mantsev, is hardly more than a whisper...

...To this, Ehrenburg adds his own comment: "No matter how precise the social [read: Marxian] analysis of the development of society, no matter how much individuality is subordinated to social processes, the world of the novel is different from philosophical [read: Marxist-Leninist] generalizations, state plans, statistical data...

...It is difficult to imagine Ehrenburg, who has long been labeled an opportunist, hurling defiance at the Party line, but that is precisely the effect of his article, "Lessons of Stendhal," which appeared in the Moscow monthly Inostrannaya Litera-tura ("Foreign Literature," No...

...Few Soviet readers will miss the implication that Tsarist Russia, where Mendeleyev lived, and America, where Einstein spent a large part of his productive life, could offer the individual more freedom than does the Soviet Russia of today...

...ILYA Ehrenburg Rebels His 'Lessons of Stendhal' is a hardly-veiled attack on Khrushchev By James Critchlow Manager, Soviet Research Department, Radio Liberation Literaturnaya Gazeta's latest attack on novelist Ilya Ehrenburg is surprisingly gentle, when one considers that the article which provoked it was a clever blast at the very foundations of the Soviet system...

...The result is probably the strongest public condemnation of the Communist party dictatorship since Stalin's rise to power...

...They have denied with repeated vigor the "slander" that Stalin-type abuses are an inherent feature of the Soviet system...

...He wished to reconcile justice with that freedom which seemed to him inseparable from human happiness...

...Moreover, he ignores most of the more telling points made by Ehrenburg, concentrating his fire on relatively minor "shortcomings...

...A tyrant may be intelligent or stupid, good or evil—whatever the case, he is both all-powerful and powerless, he is frightened by conspiracies, he is flattered, he is deceived, the prisons fill, the cowardly hypocrites whisper, and the silence becomes so complete that the heart almost stops...

...Khrushchev, in particular, is currently reaffirming many of the principles which Ehrenburg has made his target in "Lessons of Stendhal...

...He adds: "That is perhaps for us the main thing—not only for writers, but for all people of the mid-20th century: The more passion there is in one's attractions and repulsions, the more insistently will conscience—yes, and reason—demand the truth...

...In answer to this, Ehrenburg comes up with the following quotation from Stendhal: "What counts is not the personality of the tyrant but the essence of tyranny...

...He was too chaste to beat his breast and cry at the crossroads of Europe about the superiority of France...

...it also dispels many illusions of the present day which are at times passed off as incontrovertible truths...

...According to Ehrenburg, the greatest lessons of Stendhal are to be found in his "exceptional truthfulness...

...What Ehrenburg had done was to resurrect the great 19th-century French writer Stendhal and to use his writings as a devastating critique of Soviet life today...

...What of those who, during Stalin's time, were (like Ehrenburg himself) forced to be instruments of the crimes which were committed...

...Through Stendhal, Ehrenburg makes it clear that culture can only suffer ruin when those who create it are subject to Government control: "Even if the king is an angel, his government destroys art, not because it bans the subject of a painting, but because it crushes the soul of the artist...

...The argument about Stendhal's cosmopolitanism is the old argument about the true character of love for one's motherland: Is such love connected with neglect of other peoples, with exaltation of the weaknesses and faults of one's own countrymen, with anathemas and toasts...

...People wish to please a minister or vice-minister, their immediate superior...

...At times it reflects the blue sky...

...and \ ou blame the mirror...

...Perhaps the most subversive passage in the essay, from the standpoint of the Party that has just reasserted the Stalinist claim that a Russian flew the first successful airplane, is Ehrenburg's comment on the subject of patriotism: "Stendhal loved his motherland, but he did not approach it with lying praise or pseudo-patriotic fuss...

...Even though these ministers be the most honorable men in the world, toadyism, flattery and obsequiousness will still develop...

...At least, he slvlv makes Stendhal comment on the power rivalry and the possible emergence of a new Stalin: "Can one be profoundly moved Inverse, even the best verse, when no one knows where we shall be in a year's time, whether we shall find ourselves under the yoke of the inquisition, whether the Duke of Orleans will sit on the French throne" Most of Ehrenburg's essay is devoted to the problem of the writer and the artist in their relationship to society and the state...

...He [Stendhal] said that human unhappiness originates in lies...

...6, 1957...

...Ehrenburg even finds in Stendhal a defense of Vladimir Dudintsev and other Soviet writers who have been accused of "distorting Soviet reality" (that is...

...Ehrenburg also uses his article to poke fun at the stilted, cautious literary language which has become standard in the Soviet Union...

...Stendhal's experience refutes not only the strayings of the distant past...

...at other times the mud...

...Ehrenburg apparently wrote his article as the struggle between Khrushchev and the Malenkov-Molo-tov group was nearing its climax...

...Take, for example, the Stalin "cult of personality...

...Ehrenburg answers without recourse to Stendhal: "It is as if the writer were discovering man, and a discovery is not an invitation, it demands enthusiasm and inner freedom on the part of the person who is searching for it...

...Tamantsev criticizes the article vigorously, but refrains from attacking either the character or the motives of its author...

...For him, the writer's work was the service of truth...

...See "The Revolt of the Moscow Writers," by George Gibian, NL, August 26.] Ehrenburg, despite his past record of having served on occasion as the Party's hatchet-man for cultural issues, is now squarely behind the dissidents...

...Why do writers, and others who create, need freedom...

...The essay by Ehrenburg stresses that Stendhal was a rebel: "If Stendhal were alive among us now, he would probably long fail, as a dilettante, to be accepted into the Union of [Soviet] Writers...