The Struggle of Spain in I. G. Ehrenburg's Verse

Abstract

In the realm of Soviet literature the name of Ilya Ehrenburg is not usually associated with the genre of the lyric nor, for that matter, with poetry as a whole. Indeed, although he was primarily a novelist, a number of literary scholars and critics have viewed him simply as a journalist, talented or untalented, depending on the time, circumstances, and, unfortunately, the personal attitude or bias of the critic.1 Yet, his initial literary efforts, at the age of seventeen, were in poetry, which he wrote intermittently throughout the course of his long career spanning almost sixty years. Unlike much of his prose and journalism, his poetry is of a purely personal, even confessional character. While stylistic differences are certainly encountered when surveying his poetic oeuvre as a whole, his poems, in whatever form, unfailingly communicate to the reader the inner sentiments of the poet; through them rings the authentic voice of the man himself. His verse can be viewed as falling, chronologically, into seven distinct periods, reflecting the poet's preoccupations over the years. His five collections of verse written before the First World War, although imitative and now largely forgotten, launched him on the path of symbolism and revealed a predilection for religious, mythological and pantheistic motifs.2 During the period of the First World War his poetry was predominantly reflective, but its focus understandable for a young bystander and eye-witness-was exclusively on the events of the war that was supposed to end all wars.3 The fratricidal Russian Civil War, in which the poet was buffeted about between the warring factions, gave birth to a modest number of verse compositions, symbolist in style and profoundly subjective in content, as he directed his attention to what he called the iron convulsions of a new day.4 In the early 1920s he viewed the revolutionary ordeal of Russians in retrospect and betrayed his particular perception of what had occurred.5 Ehrenburg's poetry of the years 1938-41, including his verses of the last two years of the Spanish Civil War, revealed considerable differences from what had been written a decade and a half earlier-more direct and immediate imagery was employedbut the pathos-laden content still emerged from the depths of his soul.6 The poetry of the Second World War described in emotional but consciously subdued terms the many facets of the war condition on