The Thaw (novel)

The Thaw (Russian: Оттепель, Ottepel) is a short novel by Ilya Ehrenburg first published in the spring 1954 issue of Novy Mir.

The novel marked a break both from Ehrenburg's earlier purely pro-Soviet work, and from previous ideas about socialist realism.

[2] It drew criticism from the authorities for mentioning the Great Purge and other negative aspects of Stalinism; in late 1954 the Second Congress of Soviet Writers harshly criticized it, along with Vera Panova's novel The Seasons and Leonid Zorin's play Guests.

Konstantin Simonov, then secretary of the Union of Writers of the USSR, accused Ehrenburg "of caricaturing ... artistic life."

[4] It was translated into English by Manya Harari and published in 1955[5] by Regnery in the US and Harvill Press in the UK.