As this has unfolded, I have been reading the Soviet-Russian novelist Ilya Ehrenburg's 1942 novel, "The Fall of Paris." I am just past the halfway point. The parallel of his description of French life from 1935 forward is compelling. Each step Hitler took, from supporting Franco in Spain against the Spanish Republic, to taking the Sudtenland in Czechoslovakia and then the latter itself, was greeted with alarm across the French political spectrum. However, the same political elites (except the Communists, who the political elites from the far right to the Socialists reviled) ultimately decided peace was more important than standing up to Hitler. In this set of decisions from the French elites, it was believed by all the so-called smart people that giving in would sate Hitler and standing up for Spain and Czechoslovakia meant war.
Reading this insightful and literarily well-crafted narrative has provided me with a powerful understanding of how this unfolded day-to-day. It is uncanny to me how I see echoes of this in the discourse I have read and sometimes seen at my folks house on MSNBC and CNN. Except, in our time, our nation's Fascist threat is a call from inside the house.
What is surprising to me in reading this novel is Erhenburg was a dedicated Stalinist during the period of the 1930s through Stalin's death. Yet, this novel is deeply sympathetic with respect to business people, conservative and right wing people, and the politically indifferent people who simply wish people would stop with obsessive political arguments, and leave each other in peace. Ehrenburg has been careful to not show how wrongheaded these people were, as he almost tenderly describes their best motives and arguments. Ehrenburg knew he could write the novel in this fashion, as, of course, he wrote his novel after the fall of France. Readers would therefore themselves be able to judge the thinking of these people.
The reason I am still inclined to be negative in my judgment regarding Ehrenburg the person is based upon my reading Victor Serge's most important work, "Memoirs of a Revolutionary," which Serge wrote in his last years before his early death in Mexico in 1947 for what he called the "dresser drawer," and which was not published until after his death. In Serge's magisterial work, he took great care to be as objective as he could about his enemies and opponents. It is what makes the work so powerful, as Serge, a revolutionary, is, in this way, most liberal in that old 19th-Century sense. But he is not willing to be that way with Ehrenburg. In the memoirs, Serge harshly described Ehrenburg as a "hack agitator-novelist" (Serge, 318).
I get Serge's anger. In 1935, Ehrenberg, originally born in Kyvv (!), was then living in France. At an international left writers' conference held in Paris he attended, there was a proposal on behalf of various oppressed writers around the world. One of the speakers mentioned Serge, who was suffering his second internal exile due to Serge being a Left Oppositionist to Stalin and affiliated with Trotsky. Ehrenburg and other pro-Soviet writers denounced Serge as a counterrevolutionary and justified Stalin's treatment of him.
Not long after the conference, Andre Gide and Romain Rolland respectively implored the Soviet ambassador to France and Stalin to let Serge leave, and Stalin relented (Serge, 318-319). This proved to be miraculous as Serge eventually left the Soviet Union not long before the "Great Purges" of mostly Bolsheviks began. As Serge remains my Soviet dissident hero, I hesitated to read Ehrenburg's book as I expected it to be hack work. I was stunned from the start with Ehrenburg's brilliant writing, and, as I have reached the halfway point, have found it remarkably prescient in its insights. The only nod to Stalinism I see is his missing the manner in which the Communists in Spain were behaving and a very brief, indirect, unnamed but positive, nod to the Lysenko agricultural methods. The latter led me to laugh and that nod has thankfully not been repeated. The novel won the Stalin Prize for best novel, which also makes me deeply wince, but damn it, it is really great despite that hackish award.
Again, I find it sadly strange to be reading this novel of France in the late 1930s and seeing how it echoes into today's political environment. Heck, I didn't even need to re-read Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (1935). Lewis' novel is not focused so much on the day-to-day that led to the election of Buzz Windrip. Its focus is on the aftereffects. Ehrenburg's novel takes readers step by step into the abyss in a story with a variety of characters from various parts of life, whose lives overlap with, break apart, or carry on romantic affairs with each other. It is a remarkably insightful and compelling work.
