…A piquant, picaresque satire a la Voltaire of both Western capitalism and the Communist Revolution. - TIME A mixture of mockery and prophecy, the book savaged every ideology and religion while foreseeing both the Holocaust and Hiroshima. (Ehrenburg himself predicted the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union to the day—his intimacy with history always bordered on the telepathic.) - Richard Lourie, The NY Times, August 25, 1996 The book deals with the adventures of a Mexican dreamer Julio Jurenito and his wanderings about Europe along with his seven disciples (Ehrenburg himself is the first disciple and the author-narrator). The novel includes authentic characters, such as Mayakovski, Picasso, Chaplin, and Tatlin. This is a biting satire of the European postwar civilization. This extraordinarily sneering book is a modernized Candide, covering Soviet Russia and the European West, after the stress of the WWI years. Its main character Jurenito (he is supposed to be a portrait of the famous Mexican painter, Diego Rivera) and his Negro servant travel, observe, comment, and make the reader roar with laughter at the idiotic inconsistencies of capitalist civilization. A prolific and smart journalist by nature, Ehrenburg combines a satirical vein with a snappy, terse language, and a flair for topical themes with very unsentimental eroticism. Julio Jurenito will probably remain the most vivid illustration, not just in Russian but in the whole of European literature, of the post-WWI sentiments of the harassed western intelligentsia. In this book there is everything: sophistication, cynicism, trenchant satire, sentimental lyricism, and the gay abandon of despair. All this combined makes a brilliant firework of paradoxes, subtle observations of the life of the European bourgeoisie, and sarcastic details. It may be called a confession, a pamphlet, a grotesque, or a poem.
Author
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (Russian: Илья Григорьевич Эренбург) was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure. Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a reporter in three wars (First World War, Spanish Civil War and the Second World War). His articles on the Second World War have provoked intense controversies in West Germany, especially during the sixties. The novel The Thaw (Оттепель) gave its name to an entire era of Soviet cultural politics, namely, the liberalization after the death of Joseph Stalin. Ehrenburg's travel writing also had great resonance, as did to an arguably greater extent his autobiography People, Years, Life, which may be his best known and most discussed work. The Black Book, edited by him and Vassily Grossman, has special historical significance; detailing the genocide on Soviet citizens of Jewish ancestry, it is the first great documentary work on the Holocaust. In addition, Ehrenburg wrote a succession of works of poetry.
