- Person
- Isaac Babel
- Lived
- 1894–1940
- Field
- Short fiction
- From
- Russian (Soviet)
The story
By the mid-1920s Isaac Babel was famous for Red Cavalry and for his Odessa Stories about the Jewish gangster Benya Krik. In 1926 he expanded the Odessa world into a play, Sunset, loosely based on the story of the same name. He also turned the stories into the screenplay for the 1927 silent film Benya Krik.
Sunset is set in Moldavanka, Odessa's Jewish quarter, in 1913, the district where Babel was born. It centres on the stormy relationship between Benya Krik and his father, Mendel, a drunken, philandering carter who squanders the family's money and refuses his daughter a dowry. When Mendel plans to run off with a young woman and disinherit his children, Benya and his brother confront him and take control of the family. The play ends with a celebration at which the rabbi declares that everything is as it should be. It is both a family drama and a comic, affectionate portrait of a Jewish neighbourhood.
Sunset premiered at the Baku Workers' Theatre on 23 October 1927 and went on to play in Odessa, Kiev and at the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre. Reviews were mixed. Some critics praised its anti-bourgeois stance and its theme of fathers and sons, but Moscow critics found its attitude to the bourgeoisie contradictory, and the Moscow Art Theatre dropped it from its repertoire. The text was published in 1928.
The play nevertheless had passionate admirers. In a 1928 letter to his father, the poet Boris Pasternak wrote that reading Sunset made him feel, almost for the first time in his life, that Jewry was a phenomenon of positive, unproblematic importance and power, and he urged his father to read this remarkable play. According to Babel's widow, Antonina Pirozhkova, the film director Sergei Eisenstein often compared it to the writings of Émile Zola for illuminating capitalist relationships through the experience of a single family. He criticised the Moscow Art Theatre for not conveying every word of its unusually terse text.
Sunset has outlived its early critics. A 1990 Russian film was based on the same Odessa story, and the characters also inspired the 1989 musical film The Drayman and the King. The play remains part of Babel's Complete Works, available in English since 2002.
Why it matters
Sunset gave the Soviet stage a vivid, affectionate portrait of Jewish life that moved even other great writers to see their heritage anew.
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 Red Cavalry told the truth about warIsaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories, drawn from the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, showed readers the brutal realities of war, far from the propaganda of the time.
- 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
- Sunset (play) Wikipedia
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