Extremely widely traveled, Ehrenburg was a versatile if uneven writer, poet, and journalist. Familiar with an extraordinary range of people in Russia and Western Europe, he survived the Stalin era to bear witness to the losses suffered by Russian culture: His memoirs, People, Years, Life (1961-65), introduced a younger generation to a host of annihilated and forgotten literary and artistic figures. Of his novels, the first, Julio Jurenito (1922), a biting satire of the West, is usually regarded as his best. A later work, The Thaw (1954), is his best known. Its cautious yet deliberate deviation from Stalinist norms in literature signaled broader changes in Soviet society. The title became a designation for the immediate post-Stalin period and a generic label for any subsequent moments of liberalization in Soviet life.
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