Ilya Ehrenburg Quotes

Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.

كان يعتقد انك إذا قلت إن كل شئ علي مايرام فإن هذا في حد ذاته يصلح الامور إن اهم شئ ألا تتدهور المعنويات

كانت الريح تهب عنيفة،والثلج يكاد يعمي الأبصار ويصم الأذان ،توقف ديمري فجأة .ورفع حاجبيه قليلا،ثم انفجر مقهقهاً

وكان ذلك يستثير أعصاب لينا ألا يستطيع أن يقرأ كتاباً أو يذهب لمشاهدة مسرحية؟ لا،وإنما لذته الكبري هي أن يجلس ساعات بطولها حملق في غمازة السنارة

A pity we hadn't had time to say all the things we wanted to each other.

It is difficult to uproot fully grown plants; they become diseased and often perish. In Russia now they practise winter transplanting: a tree is dug up while it is in a dormant condition. In spring it comes back to life in a new place. A good method, especially as a tree has no memory.

Книгите изменят хората, а това е дълъг и незабележим процес.

فقالت لنفسها إنه لا تزال في الحياة أشياء كثيرة بعيدة عن ادراكها

غير أن ابطاله يعملون العقل أكثر مما يجب،وهذا ما يجعل المرء ،احياناً، لا يصدق وجودهم

إنه شئ سخيف ،ولكن أظن أنني سعيد

I left with a heavy heart and a still heavier suitcase--I had filled it with my favourite books.

The first thing he noticed with fascination was the shape of Lenin's "amazing skull"; filled to bursting with erudition and ideas, it "made one think not of anatomy but of architecture.

O kadar çok adam öldürüldü ya da sakat bırakıldı ki, insanın kafası bu sayıyı alacak gibi değil. Kadınlar çocuklarını dokuz ay taşıyor, doğuruyor, büyütüyorlardı. Derken herifler kendilerini insan üstü yaratıklar sandılar... Belki yeni doğmuş bir Puşkin'i öldürdüler, "V" füzeleriyle beşikteki bir Newton'u ortadan kaldırdılar, Maidanek'te küçük bir Marx'ı yaktılar? Adaletin sözünü etmek gereksiz; bu tür davranışlara karşı verilecek bir ceza var mı?

Memory retains some things and discards others. I remember every detail of some scenes from my childhood and adolescence, by no means the most important ones. I remember some people and have totally forgotten others. Memory is like the headlights of a car at night, which fall now on a tree, now on a hut, now on a man. People (usually writers) who tell the story of their lives as a continuous and detailed whole generally fill in the gaps with conjecture; it is hard to tell where genuine reminiscence ends and the novel begins.

I knew that people lived badly, remembered the barracks of the Khamovniki brewery, had seen flophouses, all-night cafés, drunkards, cruel and ignorant people, prison. But all that had been from the outside, and in the courtroom I caught a glimpse of people's hearts.

The population aids the army. Recently Porkhov schoolboys caught three parachutists. A bearded old villager, armed with a stake, brought in a diversionist, disguised in the green uniform of a pre-revolutionary forester. The peasants drive off the cattle. Grain fields are burning. This year the stalks are almost as tall as an average man. There was not enough time to harvest the grain. Attacks and counterattacks continue. On both sides the losses are heavy. Yesterday one of our tanks caught fire. The driver rushed his burning tank at a German machine.

In peaceful times in a peaceful country a man grows up, goes to school, marries, works, suffers illnesses, grows old. He may go through the whole of life without understanding what freedom is. No doubt he always feels free to the extent to which it is proper for a respectable citizen with average powers of imagination to be free.

Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.

But what is extraordinary is that Modigliani's models resemble each other; it is not a matter of an assumed style or some superficial trick of painting, but of the artist's view of the world. Zborowski with the face of a good-natured, shaggy sheepdog; the lost Soutine; the tender Jeanne in her shift, an old man, a model, somebody with a mustache: all are like hurt children, albeit some of the children have beards or gray hair. I believe that the world seemed to Modigliani like an enormous kindergarten run by very unkind adults.

To sit indoors was silly. I postponed the search for Savchenko and Ludmila till the next day and went wandering about Paris. The men wore bowlers, the women huge hats with feathers. On the café terraces lovers kissed unconcernedly - I stopped looking away. Students walked along the boulevard St. Michel. They walked in the middle of the street, holding up traffic, but no one dispersed them. At first I thought it was a demonstration - but no, they were simply enjoying themselves. Roasted chestnuts were being sold. Rain began to fall. The grass in the Luxembourg gardens was a tender green. In December! I was very hot in my lined coat. (I had left my boots and fur cap at the hotel.) There were bright posters everywhere. All the time I felt as though I were at the theatre.

To sit indoors was silly. I postponed the search for Savchenko and Ludmila till the next day and went wandering about Paris. The men wore bowlers, the women huge hats with feathers. On the café terraces lovers kissed unconcernedly - I stopped looking away. Students walked along the boulevard St. Michel. They walked in the middle of the street, holding up traffic, but no one dispersed them. At first I thought it was a demonstration - but no, they were simply enjoying themselves. Roasted chestnuts were being sold. Rain began to fall. The grass in the Luxembourg gardens was a tender green. In December! I was very hot in my lined coat. (I had left my boots and fur cap at the hotel.) There were bright posters everywhere. All the time I felt as though I were at the theatre. I have lived in Paris off and on for many years. Various events, snatches of conversation have become confused in my memory. But I remember well my first day there: the city electrified my. The most astonishing thing is that is has remained unchanged; Moscow is unrecognizable, but Paris is still as it was. When I come to Paris now, I feel inexpressibly sad - the city is the same, it is I who have changed. It is painful for me to walk along the familiar streets - they are the streets of my youth. Of course, the fiacres, the omnibuses, the steam-car disappeared long ago; you rarely see a café with red velvet or leather settees; only a few pissoirs are left - the rest have gone into hiding underground. But these, after all, are minor details. People still live out in the streets, lovers kiss wherever they please, no one takes any notice of anyone. The old houses haven't changed - what's another half a century to them; at their age it makes no difference. Say what you will, the world has changed, and so the Parisians, too, must be thinking of many things of which they had no inkling in the old days: the atom bomb, mass-production methods, Communism. But with their new thoughts they still remain Parisians, and I am sure that if an eighteen-year-old Soviet lad comes to Paris today he will raise his hands in astonishment, as I did in 1908: "A theatre!

Голландия не подчинилась постановлению, превращавшему ее во французский департамент «Дюн». Покопавшись в архивах, голландские журналисты написали двусмысленные статейки о затоплении страны. На что надеялись эти люди, отстаивая независимость своей родины, для нас остается тайной. Возможно, что в них жил дух великих мореплавателей прежних времен, и они рассчитывали отплыть вместе со своей страной куда-нибудь в иное полушарие. Так или иначе, узнав о сопротивлении голландцев, господин Феликс Брандево серьезно оскорбился. Он не хотел войны. Он давно стал пацифистом. Кроме того, объявить войну — это означало бы смутить покой симпатичных американцев. Господин Феликс Брандево решил ликвидировать конфликт по-семейному. — Займитесь Голландией, — сказал он своему военному министру, генералу Легату. — Голландия? А что там? Горы? Флот? — спросил исполнительный министр. — Там дождь и сыр. — Насчет сыра я профан. Но дождь, но дождь… Я займусь дождем… — Только, пожалуйста, потише, — предупредил его господин Феликс Брандево. — Нельзя обижать американцев.

(Modigliani liked Baudelaire's poem about the albatross being mocked by sailors: 'Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!')

Today, far continents have become suburbs. Even the moon has somehow come closer. But for all that, the past has not lost its power, and if within a lifetime a man changes his skin an infinite number of times--almost as often as his suits--still he does not change his heart: he has but one.

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances.

J'ai rencontré chez [Giorgio] Bassani des dilemmes similaires aux miens. Dans un contexte italien, certes, et traités avec une simplicité sereine, plutôt classique. De ce point de vue, sans doute, je suis plus proche de Max Blecher et de Bruno Schulz voire de [Saul] Bellow… [...] Je ne suis pas plus proche de [Max] Blecher que de Bassani seulement parce que Roman la ville de Blecher, est plus proche de Burdujeni [quartier de Suceava où est né Norman Manea] ou de Bucarest que Ferrara. Je communique différemment avec Schulz, parce que la Galicie n'est pas très éloignée de la Bucovine, mais pas seulement pour cette raison là. Je suis probablement plus réceptif à l'œuvre de Camil Petrescu qu'à celle d' [Ilya] Ehrenburg ou d'Anna Seghers. Je me suis énormément intéressé à Musil, qui n'a rien de judaïque, et moins à [Lion] Feuchtwanger par exemple même si j'ai lu certains de ses livres avec plaisir. (p. 57-58)

He had shown me letters he had received not only from Kafka but from Jakob Wassermann, Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Martin Buber.

JULY 24 The alarm found me in the Foreign Office after a press conference. In the shelter I was surrounded by foreign correspondents. Among them was the American author Erskine Caldwell. I remember his stories—cruel and humane. There is much of the clay and of the master about him. At two a.m. he put on a helmet and went off to broadcast for America. Werth had been in Paris and in London, another Englishman had been in Spain; these are specialists on war and bombs. Some of them are in a skeptical mood: they fear a “lightning” denouement. In the theaters the actors take turns as watchmen in anti-air defense. An air-alarm, and lo, Lope de Vega Spaniards run up the roof with a hose.

Now Moscow too has experienced an air raid. This happened last night at ten. An incendiary bomb fell in our courtyard. In the nick of time a youngster threw it into a barrel of water. It was the first time he had seen a bomb, but he kept his poise. An old woman wanted to sprinkle the bomb with sand, but they drove her into the shelter. At five in the morning—there had been a very long alarm—Moscow streets were animated as in the daytime: people emerged from shelters, inspected the damage done. One hour later panes were being put into windows and craters filled in. In peace-time you had to wait long for the glazier, but now he came immediately, looking important, like a commander. If the Germans thought they would arouse a panic, they were mistaken.

Like every great love, patriotism broadens one’s conscience. A true patriot loves the whole world. Having discovered the greatness of one’s native land, it is impossible to conceive hatred for the world. People devoid of love are poor patriots. The pseudo-patriotism of the fascists rests on contempt for other peoples; it narrows down the world to the limits of one language, one type of people, one breed.

They say that sometimes a man cannot recognize himself in a looking-glass. It is even harder to recognize oneself in the clouded mirror of the past.

Everyone was searching for something, conducting lively arguments, getting excited, but behind it all one felt weariness, disillusion, emptiness.

Life seemed too calm; people looked for unhappiness in art as one might look for a raw material in short supply.

The epithet "monolithic" is often used as a term of praise in this country; but a monolith is a mass of stone. Human beings are far more complex.

I knew that people lived badly, remembered the barracks of the Khamovniki brewery, had seen flophouses, all-night cafés, drunkards, cruel and ignorant people, prison. But all that had been from the outside, and in the courtroom I caught a glimpse of people's hearts. Why had that quiet, modest peasant woman brutally murdered her next-door neighbour? Why had this old man stabbed to death the stepdaughter with whom he lived? Why did people have faith in this pock-marked ugly miracle-worker? Why were they full of darkness, prejudice, violent passions which they themselves could not understand?

I can't listen to music often. It plays on my nerves; it makes me want to say silly, tender things and stroke the heads of people who, living in a dirty hell, can yet create such beauty.

Bryusoc wrote: "Time to admit it--I'm not young; my fortieth year soon..." Nadya wrote: "But when I was about to go home alone I suddenly noticed that you were no longer young, that your right temple was almost grey, and I was so sorry I felt cold." Those lines were written in the autumn of 1913, and on November 27 Nadya committed suicide. She had been translating some poems by Jules Laforgue, who wrote about the unbearable boredom of sSundays; in one of his poems a schoolgirl throws herself into the river for no known reason. Bryusov often used to talk about suicide; one of his poems had as its epigraph the words from Tyutchev: "Who, in the excess of feeling, when the blood boils and freezes, has not known your temptations--Suicide and Love?" And Nadya shot herself. In the preface to the posthumous edition of her book I read: " In Lvova's life there were no significant external events." Dear Lord, how many events do there have to be in a person's life? At fifteen Nadya became an underground worker, at sixteen she was arrested, at nineteen she began to write poetry, at twenty-two she realized: "I'm only a poetess" - and shot herself. I'd have said that was enough.

In winter we often met in cafés and threw pennies into the bellies of noisy automatic barrel organs so that the sound of the music should drown our discussions. In the cafés we got sausage cut into cubes and forks with broken prongs; the sausage stank so badly that even mustard didn't help. We munched our sugar instead of putting it into the tea and broke pieces off the sugar loaf with black tongs. The cafés were noisy but not gay; people came in to get warm, and the harsh misery of home did not forsake them.