The title of Ehrenburg's [Memoirs: 1921–1941] in the original Russian is People, Years, Life, a title intentionally disjointed to serve notice that his work is not to be taken as history, but only as a collection of memories, unsystematically recorded by a private individual. Implicitly, it is the first of many disclaimers interspersed throughout his narrative…. (p. 343)

[Therefore, let Ehrenburg's] book be judged, as he requests, not as history but as confession. But what is meant by "confession"? Confession presupposes a confrontation of a man with his conscience, an acknowledgment of error, accompanied by a sense of guilt. And where in Mr. Ehrenburg's memoirs is there either guilt or conscience? Self-exculpations there are in plenty, but these are attempts to justify himself in the eyes of others, not in his own eyes…. Unfortunate though it is that Mr. Ehrenburg must defend himself against narrow partisanship and violent abuse, he would be more believable, and less pathetic, did he not protest so much, did he not want so much to ingratiate himself …; and he would be more convincing were he dealing with lesser themes.

But Ehrenburg has been involved in the most tragic events of our time…. He gives eyewitness reports of historic events; and the names of his friends and acquaintances add up to a small encyclopedia of twentieth-century intellectual history…. [Yet] Western critics are unkind enough to detect an extraordinary selectivity in … [Ehrenburg's memories], which somehow never seem to fall, as Isaac Deutscher has pointed out, on those who still remain "unpersons" in the U.S.S.R. Search the pages for Trotsky's name, for example, and you will search in vain. (pp. 344-45)

The reader is bound to be impressed by many vivid pages: graphic glimpses of street scenes and battle scenes, portraits of individuals and sharp summaries of social conditions…. (p. 345)

But is Ehrenburg the man to take upon himself the confession of a whole generation? Is his heart really bent under a "heavy weight"? Was he not closer to the truth about himself when in the first part of his memoirs he wrote: "As a child, I heard the saying: 'Those who remember everything have a hard life'; later I found out for myself that the age was too difficult for any one to carry a load of memories"? Ehrenburg knows how to forget as well as to remember, and he knows even better how to refer to his age, the cruel and capricious age to which he belongs, the errors that may be imputed to himself. He is avowedly, and conveniently, a determinist…. "Many of my contemporaries," he has written, "have found themselves under the wheels of time. I have survived—not because I was stronger or more far-seeing but because there are times when the fate of a man is not like a game of chess, but like a lottery." Mr. Ehrenburg is too modest. He obviously plays an excellent game of chess. Nor does he consistently disavow his strength. He quotes himself often and at length—articles, novels, poems—not just to revive the years he is remembering but to exhibit his acumen and foresight; and when he acknowledges his reason's faults, the sorrow of his heart atones for them.

He sees himself as a man of courage, principle, and patriotism, who has always been "firm in the knowledge that no matter how much [he] was saddened or revolted by this or that thing" in his own country, he "could never dissociate" himself "from a people that was the first to have the courage to put an end to the world of greed, of hypocrisy, of racial and national arrogance…."

If his voice is loud, his temper shrewd, and his mind limited, it is his age that has made them such…. Ehrenburg's nature craves excitement and his age has granted it to him in abundance. Is it to innocence or muddleheadedness that one should ascribe the shoddiness of his thinking? Hardly to innocence. Ehrenburg is nothing if not shrewd; and the mental confusion of one so astute as he, the clever dullness, the showy triteness must be laid at the door not of intellectual but of moral inadequacy. It amounts simply to this: Ehrenburg is not big enough to do justice to the tragic events that have absorbed him. Bright, vain, energetic, and frivolous, he cannot rise to the level of the people, years, and life that are his theme. That is the pity of it. (pp. 352-53)