- Person
- Isaac Babel
- Lived
- 1894–1940
- Field
- Short fiction
- From
- Russian (Soviet)
The story
Isaac Babel was born in 1894 in the Moldavanka district of Odessa to Jewish parents. A gentle, bespectacled intellectual who had studied the Talmud and written his first stories in French, he followed Maxim Gorky's advice to gain experience of life. In 1920 he was attached to Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army as a war reporter during the Polish-Soviet War, travelling under the name Kirill Lyutov through battered villages in eastern Poland and western Ukraine.
From his diary and experiences he wrote Red Cavalry, a cycle of short stories including "Crossing the River Zbrucz" and "My First Goose". Several appeared in Vladimir Mayakovsky's magazine LEF in 1924, and the collection was published as a book in 1926. In "My First Goose" the narrator, mocked for his glasses, must brutally kill a goose to win acceptance from the Cossacks. In "Gedali" an old Jewish shopkeeper, who has seen both sides loot his town, asks how anyone can tell the Revolution from the counter-revolution, and dreams of an International of good people.
Professor Knut Andreas Grimstad of the University of Oslo says Babel's credible, explicit depictions of violence differed greatly from the revolutionary propaganda of the day, so that many Russian readers were exposed to the realities of the war for the first time. The stories also confront antisemitism directly, showing atrocities against Jews in the old Pale of Settlement committed by both Red and White forces.
Budyonny was furious at the portrait of his marauding Cossacks and demanded Babel's execution, but Gorky protected him and helped guarantee publication. Red Cavalry was translated into English in 1929 and later into many other languages. Nazi Germany placed it on its lists of books to be removed from libraries in 1933, and under Stalin it was withdrawn from sale and only returned to Soviet bookshops after the dictator's death.
Today Red Cavalry is regarded as Babel's most famous work and one of the great books about war. Ernest Hemingway admired its concision, and it inspired writers as different as the Irish storyteller Frank O'Connor and the American novelist Denis Johnson.
Why it matters
Red Cavalry stands as an honest testimony to the cruelty of war and remains a masterpiece of the short story.
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.
More about Isaac Babel
- Isaac Babel's Complete Works appeared in English in 2002In 2002 W. W. Norton published The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, translated by Peter Constantine, edited by his daughter Nathalie and introduced by Cynthia Ozick.
- Isaac Babel's Odessa Stories created the gangster Benya KrikIsaac Babel's Odessa Stories, published in 1921–1924 and collected in 1931, brought Odessa's Jewish Moldavanka district to life through the gangster Benya Krik.
- Isaac Babel's play Sunset reached the Moscow Art TheatreIsaac Babel's play Sunset, set in Odessa's Jewish Moldavanka, premiered in Baku in 1927 and was staged at the Moscow Art Theatre; Boris Pasternak called it remarkable.
- Isaac Babel's 1920 Diary documented the horrors of warIsaac Babel's 1920 Diary, kept during the Polish-Soviet War, recorded the horrors he witnessed; it was finally published in 1990.
- Isaac Babel brought Sholem Aleichem to Russian filmIsaac Babel translated Sholem Aleichem from Yiddish into Russian and wrote for early Soviet Yiddish-themed films, including Jewish Luck (1925) and Wandering Stars.
Sources
- Isaac Babel Wikipedia
- Admired by Hemingway: the war in Ukraine has given Isaac Babel new relevance University of Oslo
- Red Cavalry Wikipedia
- Isaac Babel Jewish Virtual Library
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