“The Fall of Paris” as “the End of Modernism”: Eschatology, War and Ilya Ehrenbourg in a Succession of Cultural Mirrors

Abstract

The article analyzes Ilya Ehrenbourg’s novel “The Fall of Paris&8j1; (1942) against the background of synchronic and diachronic cultural contexts. The author pays special attention to the mythologization of Paris from the middle of the 19th century and to the ideological consequences of the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The work reconstructs the system of Ehrenbourg’s “eschatological journalism&8j1; during the First World War and shows the connection of the writer’s novel with the cultural background of France “between two wars&8j1;. The novelist’s polemical dialogue with Jean Giraudoux on the Franco-German value-cultural collisions is demonstrated. It is concluded that for Ehrenbourg, as for a number of his Western brethren and recent researchers, the fall of Paris in 1940 was a sign of the end of the entire traditional West of Modern Times, and more specifically, the era of Modernism.