Ehrenburg's talent and skill are undeniable, but most of his novels are not good literature; the ease and rapidity with which he produces them inevitably affect their quality: they are a mixture of fiction and journalism, and in some of them the element of journalism predominates. Ehrenburg knows how to handle his plot, how to make it thrilling and attractive, he has wit, his satire is often caustic and pointed, he knows how to make shallow thoughts look deep and significant, but the psychology of his characters is usually crude and made to fit in with preconceived abstract schemes. He loves sharp contrasts and ignores all finer shades. His characters are either paragons of abstract virtues …, or embodiments of all that is worst in human nature, like some of his bourgeois and capitalist scoundrels. Some of his novels are more like political pamphlets in the form of thrillers…. Ehrenburg is one of the few Russian writers who knows his Europe well, albeit superficially (he sees it almost entirely from the comfortable vantage-point of an habitué of the Montparnasse cafés), and can write novels about European life and politics, thus supplying a need, which is badly felt in Soviet Russia, for exotic sensationalism…. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1932) is a somewhat melodramatic story about the life of the Russian émigrés in Paris. There are no gross distortions in it, but only a small corner of that life is shown—Ehrenburg's range is never wide. One of Ehrenburg's best and most human novels, where the element of thrilling sensationalism is relegated to the background, is In Protochny Lane (1927; translated into English as In a Moscow Street) of which the action is set mainly in Moscow. Both the pictures of everyday life and the psychology of the characters are here on a much higher level than in most of his other novels…. The Second Day (a reference to the Book of Genesis) deals with the Soviet actuality and the problems of Socialist construction and the evolution of a new type of man. There is, however, in it the usual touch of scepticism—Ehrenburg is by nature incapable of any enthusiasm; a deeply-rooted cynicism is after all his fundamental and most permanent quality. He is one of those men who have lost faith in everything. He speaks himself of that loss of faith quite frankly in his most personal, autobiographical and memoir-like novel The Summer of 1925…. It is this cynicism, this loss of faith, that accounts for his changes of opinion. With all this, Ehrenburg remains a writer in whose works there is always to be found something interesting, although sometimes the grains of gold are very difficult to separate from the dross in which they are embedded. (pp. 11-13)