Poet, novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, journalist, and translator Il'ia Erenburg was the most European of the Russian writers of his generation. His position in the Soviet Union and his relationship with Joseph Stalin were unusual: he escaped the purges of the 1930s as well as the later anti-Jewish campaign and purges of Jewish intellectuals during the late 1940s and early 1950s. As a public figure, he often represented the Soviet Union abroad and traveled widely at a time when few others could. He was an internationalist when this stance was frowned upon; he had many foreigners as friends and did not hide it.

Prior to World War II he spent long periods of time living in Western Europe. His position was ambiguous: as someone loyal to the Soviet government, he was not accepted by the émigré Russian community; as someone living mostly abroad, he was...