An autographed letter from Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg is a Russian writer, poet, publicist, journalist, war correspondent, translator from French and Spanish, public figure, photographer.

International Life is a scientific and political magazine, the leading Soviet and now Russian foreign policy monthly publication, published since 1954. It was published by NKID in 1922-1930. In 1954, at the initiative of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. M. Molotov, the publication was resumed.

This letter is Ehrenburg's refusal to be invited to publish in International Life. In the text, the writer explains the reason for his negative response: according to Ehrenburg, his journalism does not correspond to the subject of the magazine.

The desire of the editorial board to involve Ehrenburg in the work in the magazine is not accidental: the writer was active in journalism. So during the Great Patriotic War Ehrenburg worked as a war correspondent. His anti-German propaganda articles and writings greatly contributed to the growth of his fame. A significant part of these articles, which were constantly published in the newspapers Pravda, Izvestia, and Krasnaya Zvezda, are combined in the three-volume journalistic "War" (1942-1944).

In 1942, Ehrenburg joined the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and was active in collecting and publishing materials about the Holocaust, which, together with the writer Vasily Grossman, were collected into a "Black Book".