Frost and Thaw in Ilya Ehrenburg

(Picture: Koperczak)

(27.-30.11.2022) Frost and thaw are lyrical motifs, just as gardens and flowers are lyrical motifs. Frost, thaw, gardens and flowers, are also – and specifically – lyrical motifs writers and poets used, in times of totalitarianism, to reflect on their actual state of mind, as on the state of being in totalitarian societies.
The writer Ilya Ehrenburg who is known to have been a longtime friend of Pablo Picasso, was also the one – with his short novel Thaw – to give a name to a whole era of Soviet history, the so-called thaw, during which, in 1956, also an exhibition of works by Picasso could take place in the Soviet Union. Yet the exact nature of the relation between Ehrenburg and Picasso is far from being clear, far from having been studied exhaustively. Yet we dispose of Ehrenburg biographies, but still much, actually everything remains delved in vagueness and mystery. Did Ehrenburg and Picasso ever speak about totalitarianism, about Stalin? Prior to 1956? Or in the wake of that crucial year of 1956, that saw the myth of Stalin attacked by Khrushchev?
Many questions to raise (which is what we attempt to do here). Many answers still to find. And perhaps we at least work towards finding such answers, if we attempt to assemble some materials here. And also testimonies from Ehrenburg and from people who actually saw Ehrenburg, observed Ehrenburg. Who seems also to have been a man who was wearing many masks.

[preliminary note: the primary point of reference here is the Ilya-Ehrenburg-article by Pierre Daix in his Picasso dictionary (p. 284f.), but this article has to be read with caution and with keeping in mind that Daix tended to idealize Picasso, since he needed such idealized Picasso as a point of reference for himself, and hence spared him with all-too critical questions; the one big question that I have is the question if Picasso had the slightest idea, prior to 1956, but also after 1956, of how it was for Ehrenburg to serve the Stalinist regime, of whose nature Ehrenburg must have been aware of, and to live under such regime as a writer, while Ehrenburg, at the same time, must have been aware of how naively (French) intellectuals tended to idolize Stalin and the Soviet Union; leading to the question if the relation of two humans can be called a friendship, if such existential dimension of human life was spared (and perhaps had to be spared, since Ehrenburg certainly was observed by the Soviet regime, and this certainly also abroad); leading again to the question if the Ehrenburg-Picasso relation, perhaps, also was one that included many illusions and deceptions, as well as self-deceptions; we can draw, in our inquiery, from many sources, and it is worth mentioning also that the Ehrenburg article in the German Wikipedia is excellent (and it does range officially among the articles qualified as being excellent)]

One) The Relation of Ehrenburg and Picasso in a Synoptic View

(Picture: author unknown)

Ehrenburg seems to have made the acquaintance of Picasso in Paris in 1913. And there is already much that Daix, in his dictionary, does not say: Ehrenburg, born from a Jewish family, then, was a son of bourgeois parents, who lived (and published as a writer) on the money of his father, but politically had already turned to Lenin (and he already had turned away from Trotsky, after having apparently met Trotsky in Vienna). It is also striking that Daix says nothing on Ehrenburg’s reaction to the October Revolution, but be it as it may: Picasso later was to recall that, in 1915, he, Picasso, had read poems by Boris Pasternak that Ehrenburg had translated for him (see Tabaraud, p. 152). And Picasso was to recall that – it actually might be relevant also on an art historical level – after 1956, and probably in 1957 or 1958, when Pasternak was much debated in the press for his Doctor Zhivago. Daix, however, who was obviously unaware of that, speaks of a rather superficial relation still in the 1920s.
During the 1930s everything was becoming more complicated. Ehrenburg sided with opponents of the Surrealists (Picasso’s friend Éluard, and of course, Breton, among them, politically being inclined to support Trotsky; Éluard later supported Stalin); and now Ehrenburg, apparently already acting on behalf of the Soviet regime, found himself in a role that already required an extremely cautious stance, also abroad, in Paris. If then was friendship between the two men – it does not seem to be the case, with Picasso remaining rather reluctant, not willing to be drawn into political-aesthetical conflict – it must already have been made complicated by circumstances, but also by the political stance of Ehrenburg. And Picasso, as a Spaniard living abroad, in France, had to be more than cautious as to his political adherence.
After the Second World War, with Picasso already having entered the French Communist Party (PCF), Ehrenburg seems to have developed a new interest to meet Picasso. And if there was friendship, because friendship had been before, it was now also paired with interest. Perhaps a shared interest, but one might also say that Picasso had decided, with himself entering the PCF, to be entrapped in circumstances. Because Picasso might have been an idealist only, with little interest in the difference between Stalin and Trotsky, but as a public figure, of course, was now the target of all kinds of attempts to influence him to do this or that. And if Picasso joined the Peace Movement, attended the Congrès mondial des partisans de la paix and sided with the so-called World Peace Council – Ehrenburg acted as its vice-president –, he did join structures that were –, in the context of the Cold War, also soft power tools of the Soviet regime, or at least targets that the Soviet regime attempted to use as soft power tools. And it is little surprising that Ehrenburg developed an interest to see Picasso siding with this movement, while Picasso obviously also found it the right thing to be there, even if he must have known that Ehrenburg had little other choice than to act on behalf of the Soviet regime (and not really in actual freedom to do, what perhaps, at the time, he also found the right thing to do). It may be that the two men indeed found common ground, because Ehrenburg took interest in an artist that was problematic (as a ›formalist‹) from the official point of view of the Soviet regime, and Picasso on the other hand, would have liked to have seen his work seen by the people, especially the artists, of the Soviet Union. Still, one does wonder, if Ehrenburg, who had witnessed the Stalinist terror (Nikolai Bukharin had been a friend to him), ever addressed the nature of the regime in the context of his friendship with Picasso. Because if not, he must have perceived Picasso – as other Western supporters of the Soviet regime – simply as rather naive. But it may also be that, on the basis of nostalgic memories of Montparnasse, both men simply denied – Picasso out of a certain naiveté, Ehrenburg due to a necessary self-preservation – to acknowledge what was going on in the Stalinist Soviet Union. We simply don’t know, but it is not enough, not to raise this questions. And if Daix wrote in his dictionary

»Picasso trouvait en lui [Ehrenburg] un interlocuteur qui ne cachait plus la véritè sur L’Union soviétique, même s’il se devait de rester dans la litote, […].« (p. 284)

this might be rather a projection in hindsight, and I doubt that Daix actually knew. And if this was true, one would have to ask, why Picasso indeed decided to remain always a member of a communist party. But it seems more likely to me that Picasso actually knew little, and the little he was perhaps told by Ehrenburg, could have been rather vague. And it could also have been that Picasso never asked much, because he had others to deny what was seen as Anti-Soviet propaganda at the time, as for example Daix himself or Aragon.
After Stalin had died in 1953, things were getting even more complicated, since, in the wake of 1956, when Ehrenburg was allowed to do a Picasso exhibition in the Soviet Union, one had – every communist had – to face the question, in view of what had happened under Stalin, of a) how oneself had acted, given the things than one knew; and b) the question of what all that had happened under Stalin now meant for the communist cause. So, if the relation Ehrenburg-Picasso was delicate prior to 1956, it was now even more delicate, because the history of the communist cause, as well the future of it, were now in question. Ehrenburg’s book Thaw, did certainly not ›open‹, as Daix is suggesting (p. 285), the path to de-Stalinization, which was driven by many other factors (for example the crisis in the Gulag, but also other reasons), and certainly not by a short novel, even if the book had a certain impact, because it, its title, offered a simple metaphor that also politicians now could use (and Khrushchev, who met with Ehrenburg in 1956, seems to have liked the title). Khrushchev also must have allowed the Picasso exhibition, but it is naive to think that this happened for aesthetical reasons. There was a need to indicate a new path, and allowing a Picasso exhibition was one way to indicate it. The risk Ehrenburg was taking was rather a risk of thaw turning into frost again soon (which is also what happened), which might be also the reason that Ehrenburg, as a writer, was constantly using this metaphors in his writings. Not ›thaw‹ alone, but also ›frost‹, and also seeds of flowers that shortly see a blooming, before dying in the next frost. Picasso and Ehrenburg saw each other also after 1956, and in person, and one does wonder what they talked – or did not talk about. Daix mentions the memoirs Ehrenburg was writing in the 1960s, but does not explain the complicated history they had, until being published in full. Did the two men have a shared view on communism, as Daix suggests finally? I think that this was indeed the case, as we will see, because the stance Ehrenburg was taking in his memoirs, resembles the position taken by Picasso in 1956 and in the wake of 1956. But it is important that these distinctions – in 1956, and in the wake of it – are being made.

[preliminary note: it is worth noting that about the same time we are seeing the imagery of frost and thaw in writers like Ilya Ehrenburg, Chinese poet Ai Qing went on to develop the imagery of a more diverse garden in his prose piece, The Gardener’s Dream; this has to be seen against the backdrop of Mao’s Hundred-Flowers-campaign of 1956/57; and this campaign, again, against the backdrop, or in parallel to the developments that we are used to describe as the Thaw-era in the history of the Soviet Union; writers react – or more precise: their imagery, their metaphors react to cultural and political circumstances, and it is the imagery of nature, but also that of cultured nature, the garden, which serves as the medium to express states of mind, states of being, hopes and disillusions, under the rule of totalitarianism]

Two) Keys Needed or Not-Needed? Ehrenburg and Picasso in 1956

It seeems that in the crucial year of 1956 Picasso and Ehrenburg did not see each other in person. It may be that they had contact via telephone, but it seems unlikely that important things were being discussed on the phone (due to Picasso fearing, at least in 1955, that he got wiretapped). But the social network of both men secured at least that there was indirect contact. It is known, for example, that Hélène Parmelin, who did belong to Picasso’s inner circle, saw Ehrenburg in Paris in the summer, just at the time when Parisian intellectuals were in heated debates over the so-called ›Secret Speech‹ by Khrushchev, that the newspaper Le Monde had just published. Ehrenburg seems to have offered Parmelin ›keys‹ that she, however, did not need, since, after travelling to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1956, Parmelin had experienced also an atmosphere of tense, but restrained discussions there (it was the time when, in closed circles, the speech was read aloud to party members), without knowing then, however, the content of the speech (she got more informations on that when she got back to France, and went also to see Picasso).
The planning for the Picasso exhibition in Moscow as well as in St. Petersburg, an exhibition that was meant to honor Picasso on the occasion of his 75. birthday, involved also Parmelin, who seems to have acted as an intermediary between Picasso and the Soviet embassy (and also Jean Cocteau got involved, at least a little, since Cocteau did help Picasso to phrase a message, meant to be read to Soviet artists, since Picasso, although invited, probably never had had the intention to actually travel to Moscow).
The importance of Hélène Parmelin is generally underestimated in Picasso literature; and here it has to be said that she was the one who did inform Picasso on matters that had to do with the Soviet Union. And one can assume that Picasso got to know roughly what Parmelin was also to write in a book on her journey to the Soviet Union in the spring, a book that also was published in the summer. And Parmelin was certainly also the one who used to inform Picasso on artistic matters that had to do with the Soviet Union, so Picasso, in case he was informed that Ehrenburg had added a second part to his book Thaw now, Picasso must have heard such things from Parmelin. It is unlikely, however, that Picasso knew that Ehrenburg had been in talks with Khrushchev in the summer. Ehrenburg-biographer Lilly Marcou, who did interview Parmelin in 1991 for her book, got to hear that Picasso did like Ehrenburg very much, but the two man never had spoken about politics, but only about painting and the arts in general (Marcou, p. 328). Perhaps one has to come to the conclusion that this friendship did exist under political circumstances, but did only exist, as one may say, because all political aspects got avoided by the two men themselves, and organisational aspects of the Picasso show, for example, could be handed over to other people, which may have also facilitated to avoid the political dimension. But it remains odd that two men, of which one of them (Ehrenburg) once got a phone call by Stalin himself (a story that Ehrenburg, in 1956, related to Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, chose to empty their relationship from all political (and hence also the historical), to speak only about painting and the arts in general.
If Picasso did not see Ehrenburg in 1956, not only Parmelin got to meet him, but also Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, who had decided to go on a tour through the whole Eastern bloc, although the whole matter was controversial due to the Hungarian Uprising, and they got to see not only Ehrenburg, but also his secretary, who was a woman, according to Signoret (p. 195f.), who had spent years in the Gulag, and yet asked herself if Khrushchev had done right, when attacking the myth of Stalin – to the effect of disillusioning the people.

Three) Ehrenburg and Picasso after 1956

After 1956 Pablo Picasso may have felt as a betrayed propagandist, who had helped to serve (as he would have seen it) a good cause, but also had supported a ›false priest‹ (if one does like so) who had represented that cause. Ehrenburg, on the other hand, cannot be seen as a betrayed propagandist, due to his having been aware of the nature of the Stalinist rule, and his emotions, in view of the actual Thaw, must have been very mixed, like that of many other communists: a mix of being relieved and having hopes, but also of fears as to the future of the communist cause, and of it – the ›ideas of the October Revolution‹ – having been betrayed and discredited as well (by Stalin’s and other’s crimes). And one might add the fear of facing revisionist developments, reactionary developments in the future as well, as the complicated task of coming to terms with one’s own past, being discredited as well personally, given that one had had a public role during the Stalin-era. And one does wonder if Picasso actually spared Ehrenburg some questions as to his role, if Picasso spared him the question of why he, Ehrenburg, to some degree, had also betrayed Picasso, if he, Ehrenburg had not told him, Picasso, more (to spare him, Picasso, once to feel as a betrayed propagandist, as he now did). These are the questions, the core questions, as to the Ehrenburg-Picasso relationship, questions that, up to the present day, have never been asked.
After Picasso and Ehrenburg had seen each other for the last time in 1966, when Picasso had been awarded – by Ehrenburg – with the Lenin-Peace-Prize, it was up to the Swiss writer Max Frisch to transmit a rather vivid, but also ambiguous image of Ehrenburg, the man. Frisch, who got to see Ehrenburg in Prague, in the February of 1967 (the year Ehrenburg was to die), paraphrased a two-hours-conversation with Ehrenburg in his diary of 1966-1971. And the way Frisch did that makes clear that he had mixed emotions as to Ehrenburg, the man. Who spoke about Isaac Babel so vividly; but who caused some irritation in Frisch, since Ehrenburg seemed to have known exactly whom Frisch had met in Moscow; and since Ehrenburg also showed a frankness that was somehow suspicious to Frisch. And in the end Max Frisch chose to transmit most directly, not in paraphrase, in direct quotation, that is, what seems to be on some level Ilya Ehrenburg’s last words on Stalin. The conversation of the two man had turned to the topic of youth, and specifically the seeming political apathy of youth in Prague. And after some beating around the bush, after saying that it was not the fault of youth, Ehrenburg seems to have said the remarkable words: »Youth is asking us, of course, how the Stalin-era was possible, if we had been criminals then or idiots, and that it is difficult to answer –« (Frisch, p. 74; my translation).
What is remarkable about these words, is that here we are offered a choice of how to see Ehrenburg as a man and as an artist. Some biographer may focus on how Ehrenburg, during his whole life, strived to maintain integrity as a man; another one may focus on the role Ehrenburg actually had had during the Stalin-era. A role that caused him to speak of ›we‹, when speaking to Frisch about that era, a role as a propagandist (and also his later role, in the context of the peace movement, might be seen as that of a propagandist) that had also been the reason why once Stalin had apparently called him by phone. And one has to read these words also in the light of what Picasso had to say on Stalin in 1956. The question, thus, is, how to fill a void, the not-talked-about, in the relation of Picasso and Ehrenburg. Was it silent knowing, if there was silence on Stalin, in the relation of these two men? Was it a silence that was just open for everything to be projected into this silence, or was it also silent understanding? Since the stance Ehrenburg was expressing in his memoirs was similar to the stance that Picasso had expressed, in the end of 1956, when he had made clear to a journalist that an inner de-Stalinization had happened, but that still he wanted to remain a communist. And it was similar with Ehrenburg, who decided to stick to the ›ideals of the October Revolution‹, and did not struggle at all to leave a Stalinist winter behind. But he did obviously struggle with having been involved in that era, just as Picasso did obviously struggle, without much showing it, with the fact to have been involved in structures that had supported the Stalinist regime and identified with it.

[PS: One of the early Boris Pasternak poems Ilya Ehrenburg might have translated for Pablo Picasso in 1915 is the beautiful poem February of 1912, in which we find, I have only discovered this just now, the motif as well as an atmosphere of thaw again.]

(Picture: Thaw, by Fyodor Vasilyev, 1871)

Selected Literature:

Lilly Marcou, Wir grössten Akrobaten der Welt. Ilja Ehrenburg – eine Biographie, Berlin 1996;
Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties. The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, New York 1996;
Max Frisch, Tagebuch 1966-1971, Frankfurt am Main 1979 [1972];
Simone Signoret, Ungeteilte Erinnerungen, Munich 1979 [1976];
Georges Tabaraud, Mes années Picasso, Paris 2002;
Paul G. Pierpaoli Jr., World Peace Council, in: Spencer C. Tucker (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Cold War. A Student Encyclopedia, Santa Barbara etc. 2008, p. 2263f.

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