Isaac Babel's 1920 Diary documented the horrors of war

Person: Isaac Babel
Lived: 1894–1940
Field: Short fiction
From: Russian (Soviet)

The story

In 1920 Isaac Babel was a young Jewish writer from Odessa who had already published stories in Maxim Gorky's magazine and worked as a newspaper reporter in Petrograd. When the Polish-Soviet War broke out, he was assigned as a war correspondent to Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army, a force of Cossack horsemen. He travelled under the Russian name Kirill Lyutov through battered villages in eastern Poland and western Ukraine, many of them home to old Jewish communities.

Throughout the campaign he kept a diary. In it he recorded what he saw day by day: battles, looting, executions and the suffering of civilians caught between armies. The Jewish Virtual Library notes that the diary depicts the cruelty of both the Polish and Russian armies toward the Jews. For Babel, a Jew riding with Cossacks, the old enemies of Jewish shopkeepers, the experience was full of painful contradictions.

The diary became the raw material for his masterpiece. Babel later drew on it to write Red Cavalry, the cycle of short stories, including "Crossing the River Zbrucz" and "My First Goose", that made him famous in the 1920s. Professor Knut Andreas Grimstad of the University of Oslo says that Babel's accounts of conflict between Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews remain as disturbing now as when they first appeared, and that many of the battles took place in western Ukraine.

The notebook itself had a long road to readers. Babel was arrested in 1939 and executed in 1940, and many of his papers were seized and never recovered. The 1920 Diary was finally published in 1990, fifty years after his death. His widow, Antonina Pirozhkova, who spent decades restoring his legacy, made the transcription that was published in the United States in 1995, in an English translation by H. T. Willetts from Yale University Press.

Readers can now compare Babel's raw notes with the polished stories built from them, a rare view of how a great writer turns experience into art. The diary also stands on its own as an eyewitness record of a forgotten war and of the Jewish towns of Galicia it passed through. Grimstad argues that a new war in the same region has given Babel's writing fresh relevance.

Why it matters

The diary is a precious eyewitness record of a brutal war and of the peoples, Jews among them, caught up in it.

About Isaac Babel

Odessa-born master of the short story whose Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories transformed Russian prose, before Stalin’s secret police arrested and shot him in 1940.

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Isaac Babel

1894–1940 · Short fiction

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