Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Ehrenburg wrote The Thaw in 1954 — and the title attached itself to an entire era. Journalist, writer, a man who survived under Stalin and lived to see the thaw itself.

He was born in Kyiv in 1891. At seventeen came arrest for revolutionary activity and flight to Paris — poetry, cabarets, encounters with Picasso and Modigliani. With the revolution, he returned to Russia.

Julio Jurenito, a satirical novel, appeared in 1922; The Storm and The Ninth Wave were his war prose. He served as a war correspondent from the first day of the Second World War to the last, and his article "Kill the German" became famous.

After Stalin's death came The Thaw. He died in 1967. His memoirs, People, Years, Life, are the portrait of an entire century.