Throughout this long and informative book [Memoirs: 1921–1941], Ilya Ehrenburg remains, for the most part, a writer of memoirs rather than of autobiography; he busily records the events in a crowded twenty-year stretch in his public life as novelist, poet and journalist, at home in literary circles in half a dozen western capitals as well as in Russia, and rather rarely attempts to examine his experiences in depth or to trace the larger dominant patterns in his life, in the way that characterizes the writer of the full-scale autobiography. (p. 492)

In the earlier parts of his book Ehrenburg's assiduous and unselective recording of his professional and social life produces a certain intermittent tedium: the pages are dense with the names of the innumerable Russian writers with whom Ehrenburg was friendly, and the uninstructed Western reader has to grasp thankfully at those few recurring names that became internationally famous: Babel...