Among the real people and fictional characters
mentioned in Amfiteatrov's story "The Point of Rest" (http://www.russianresources.lt/archive/Amfi/Amfi_4.html,
the publication in the Berlin weekly Ekho is
accompanied with illustrations one of which shows
Einstein straddling Ilya Ehrenburg) are Ilya Ehrenburg and Julio
Jurenito, the hero of Ehrenburg's novel "The Extraordianry Adventures of Julio
Jurenito and his Disciples" (1922). The name
Ehrenburg looks as if it were that of a city and rhymes with St.
Petersburg (in an epigram cited by Bunin in Okayannye Dni, "The
Cursed Days", A. Koyransky does rhyme Erenburg and
Peterburg), VN's home city renamed at first Petrograd and then
Leningrad, and Ekaterinburg, "the capital of Ural" where the tsar's family was
executed. In the 1961 Novoe Russkoe slovo interview VN calls
Ehrenburg "a brilliant journalist and big sinner." He says that his late
mother greatly admired Ehrenburg's poem "The Prayer for Russia" written when the
author was still an anti-Communist.
Alexey Sklyarenko