I. G. Ehrenburg’ Meeting with Sverdlovsk Party Activists
in October 16, 1932
In the autumn of 1932, Ilya Ehrenburg (at that time, constantly lived in Paris) made a trip to
Kuznetsktstroy, capturing several cities along the way, including Sverdlovsk. Until now, by the
materials of the Sverdlovsk local press and memoirs only the meeting with the creative intelli-
gentsia was traced. The transcript preserved in the fund of the Sverdlovsk Regional Committee of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (then the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks))
bears witness to another event, where Ilya Grigorievich communicated with the party activists in
Sverdlovsk. The article provides a detailed commentary to the document, first publishing in this
volume.
A specially convened party meeting was conducted by two local representatives of the party
and cultural establishment, Ivan Astakhov and Semen Tubanov, both recently appointed from
Moscow, the fact which well shows the need of the Ural region and its capital for the influx of
“cultural forces” from the outside. Writers and artists were heavily invited to the Urals during that
time, but it was not easy to sing the victories of socialism here: shortly before Ehrenburg, unable
to withstand the local flavor, Boris Pasternak initially arrived “for a long time”, fled from Sverd-
lovsk.
Ehrenburg reads excerpts from his last works, tells about the search for a new literary form,
which he calls the “romanization of a factual material,” then answers questions from the audience.
Many of the topics raised at the Sverdlovsk meeting are cross-cutting for that Ehrenburg’s journey to the USSR and his work of the early 1930s in general. Among them there are the possibility
for literature to influence life actively, Ehrenburg revealed this idea by the chapter “A Republic of
the Workers” from his recent book “Spain”, as well as the position of Soviet culture against the
background of European, primarily both French and Russian émigré literature. The writer attaches
particular importance to the Gorgulov case, thanks to which he began to cooperate with newspa-
per “Izvestia”, and was able to make a business trip to the cities of Siberia and the Urals in 1932.
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I. G. Ehrenburg’ Meeting with Sverdlovsk Party Activists
in October 16, 1932 // Сюжетология и сюжетография. 2019. № 1. Pp. 225–258. DOI: 10.25205/2410-7883-2019-1-225-258.