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The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
Finally in paperback, this "monumental collection; gathers all of Babel's deft and brutal writing, including a wide array of previously unavailable material, from never-before-translated stories to plays and film scripts" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). Reviewing the work in The New Republic, James Wood wrote that this groundbreaking volume "represents a triumph of translating, editing, and publishing. Beautiful to hold, scholarly and also popularly accessible, it is an enactment of love." Considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel has left his mark on a generation of readers and writers. This book will stand as Babel's final, most enduring legacy. Winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award; A New York Times Notable Book, a and Library Journal Best Book, a Washington Post Book World Rave, a Village Voice Favorite Book of the Year.
1072 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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About the author
Isaac Babel
207 books298 followersIsaak Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель; 1894 - 1940) was a Russian language journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry, Story of my Dovecote and Tales of Odessa, all of which are considered masterpieces of Russian literature. Babel has also been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry."
Loyal to, but not uncritical of, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Isaak Babel fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge due to his longterm affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Babel was arrested by the NKVD at Peredelkino on the night of May 15, 1939. After "confessing", under torture, to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, Babel was shot on January 27, 1940. The arrest and execution of Isaak Babel has been labeled a catastrophe for the world of literature.
Loyal to, but not uncritical of, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Isaak Babel fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge due to his longterm affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Babel was arrested by the NKVD at Peredelkino on the night of May 15, 1939. After "confessing", under torture, to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, Babel was shot on January 27, 1940. The arrest and execution of Isaak Babel has been labeled a catastrophe for the world of literature.
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June 25, 2015
Isaac Babel was Russian, killed in 1940 by firing squad at 45-years old for “being a member of a terrorist conspiracy.” Let us make no mistake: he was killed for his stories. Those stories and other writings are collected here, in this volume edited by Nathalie Babel with an Introduction by Cynthia Ozick. I came here looking for a reference dropped by Sam Lipsyte in The Ask in which a legless soldier of the Iraq war calls his prosthetics “my girls.” Lipsyte tells us his character copies a soldier, Vassily, in a Babel story. This new translation dated 2002 has such a sense of the absurd and contemporaneity it doesn’t seem possible it is 100 years old.
Lipsyte’s reference to Vassily, I assumed, was buried in the Red Cavalry Stories, themselves filled with pitiless carnage paired with jokes:
Strange as it may seem, when I was reading the stories I began to feel a connection with the way we produce humorous TV serials today. Babel’s voice is so unique, hilarious, and humane that he would have been a huge success in Hollywood. The campaign against Poland and Ukraine was a painful reminder of the limits of coercion, and Babel created characters that live in our imaginations and gave them speaking roles that highlight his taste for the absurd. Imagine my delight, then, to discover that Babel also wrote screenplays, which are included at the end of this collection.
Films in the 1920s were silent films. Babel apparently wrote a screenplay version of his Red Calvary story “Salt,” which was made into a movie in 1925, directed by Pyotr Chardynin and produced by the Ukrainian State Film Company. Babel also wrote subtitles for and screenplays based on the work of others. In 1926 the silent movie “Roaming Stars,” loosely based on Shalom Aleichem’s novel of the same name, Babel wrote the screenplay and subtitles, transforming King Lear’s daughters:
In Babel’s screenplays, actors do not even have to speak to be funny. Babel pokes fun at everything, everyone. This play does not have a happy ending, however, the fact of which has parallels with Babel’s other work.
After his success with the Red Cavlary stories, Babel traveled, wrote stories, and published dispatches from the field: Georgia (1922-24), and France (1935). In one dispatch from Georgia, Babel muses about ‘Muslim Seminaries and Soviet Schools:’
Russians have always known the power of the written word. Babel was exceptional in his understanding, his honesty, and his skill. He does more with a handful of Cyrillic characters and two pages than most people can manage in a book-length novel. He was dangerous. He is still dangerous to those who think they can’t be seen to make mistakes.
Sorry for all the extensive quotes, but Babel writes better than I do. Here is an interview with the amazing Peter Constantine. And thanks to Sam Lipsyte for bringing me to this place. I never did find that reference to “my girls.”
Lipsyte’s reference to Vassily, I assumed, was buried in the Red Cavalry Stories, themselves filled with pitiless carnage paired with jokes:
“So there we were making mincemeat of the Poles at Belaya Tserkov…we got cut off from the brigade commander…no less than a hundred and fifty paces away, we see a dust cloud which is either the staff or the cavalry transport…off we rode. They were eight sabers. Two of them we felled with our rifles…The horse that the Big Ace was riding was nice and plump like a merchant’s daughter but it was tired. So the general drops his reins, aims his Mauser at me, and puts a hole in my leg…Forgive me for butchering the story in my attempt to show you the shocking nature of Babel’s razor-sharp humor. It is not a long story, three pages or so, and this book is filled with more very short stories, also edgy, always pointed. This translation of the complete works gives short introductions to each series of stories or other work, and in one we learn about the Red Army campaign:
I got my wheels rolling and put two bullets in his horse. I felt bad about the horse. What a Bolshevik of a stallion, a true Bolshevik! Copper-brown like a coin, tail like a bullet, leg like a bowstring. I wanted to present him alive to Lenin, but nothing came of it. I liquidated that sweet little horse. It tumbled like a bride, and my King of Aces fell out of his saddle. He dashed to one side, then turned back again and put another little loophole in my body. So, in other words, I had already gotten myself three decorations for fighting the enemy…
‘You’ll get me a Red Medal!’ I yell. ‘Give yourself up while I’m still alive, Your Excellency!’”
…'Forgive me,' [the general replies], 'but I cannot give myself up to a Communist…finish me off like a soldier.'
'Well, I guess I did.'” [from KONKIN]
“In late May 1920, the First Calvary of the Soviet Red Army, under the command of General Budyonny, rode into Volhynia, today the border region of western Ukraine and eastern Poland. The Russian-Polish campaign was underway, the new Soviet government’s first foreign offensive, which was viewed back in Moscow as the first step toward spreading the doctrines of World Revolution to Poland, then to Europe, then to the world…Babel chronicled this campaign [in which he was a war correspondent] in his Red Calvary stories…” [--Nathalie Babel]The campaign began in May 1920 and by September of that year, the soldiers still alive were straggling back in failure. The stories were first published in magazines throughout the 1920s before being collected for a volume in 1926. They grew out of a “1920 Diary” in which Babel recorded his
“firm Socialist convictions, his sensitivity, his horror at the marauding ways of his Cossack companions, his ambiguous fascination with ‘the West and chivalrous Poland,’ his equivocal stance toward Judaism, with feelings that fluctuate between distaste and tenderness toward the Volhynian Jews, ‘the former (Ukrainian) Yids.’” [--Nathalie Babel]By publishing his stories throughout the 1920s in magazines, Babel kept the disastrous military campaign in the public eye. Dangerously for him, Babel often used the real names of commanders, including Budyonny, who was destined to become a Marshal of the Soviet Union, despite his uninspiring leadership in the field so hilariously portrayed by Babel. In 1926 Babel responded to criticism that he used real names to document the absurdist atrocities committed. I give you a short version of one of his last for the Calvarymen series:
A Letter to the Editor
In 1920 I served in the First Cavalry’s Sixth Division, of which Comrade Timoshenko was commander at the time. I witnessed his heroic, military, and revolutionary work with much admiration. This wonderful and pristine image of my beloved division commander long ruled my imagination, and when I set about to write my memoirs of the Polish Campaign, my thoughts often returned to him, But in the process of writing, my aim of keeping within the parameters of historical truth began to shift, and I decided instead to express my thoughts in a literary form. All that remained of my original outline were a few authentic surnames…under extreme [time] pressure, and in this last minute rush, I overlooked the vital task of changing the original surnames in the final proofs. I need not stress that Comrade Timoshenko has nothing whatsoever in common with the character in that piece, a fact clear to anyone who has ever crossed paths with the former commander of Division Six, one of the most courageous and selfless of our Red Commanders.
I. Babel
Strange as it may seem, when I was reading the stories I began to feel a connection with the way we produce humorous TV serials today. Babel’s voice is so unique, hilarious, and humane that he would have been a huge success in Hollywood. The campaign against Poland and Ukraine was a painful reminder of the limits of coercion, and Babel created characters that live in our imaginations and gave them speaking roles that highlight his taste for the absurd. Imagine my delight, then, to discover that Babel also wrote screenplays, which are included at the end of this collection.
Films in the 1920s were silent films. Babel apparently wrote a screenplay version of his Red Calvary story “Salt,” which was made into a movie in 1925, directed by Pyotr Chardynin and produced by the Ukrainian State Film Company. Babel also wrote subtitles for and screenplays based on the work of others. In 1926 the silent movie “Roaming Stars,” loosely based on Shalom Aleichem’s novel of the same name, Babel wrote the screenplay and subtitles, transforming King Lear’s daughters:
Part Two
61. THE THREE DAUGHTERS OF KING LEAR
62. Two of the daughters are stout, middle-aged Jewish women, the third is a girl of about six. Like Otsmakh, the actresses are also wearing lacquered officer’s boots with spurs. Their stomachs are squeezed into satin vests. One of the women is wearing a kind of helmet from which two braids hang down; the second woman, a cap full of feathers. The third of King Lear’s daughters—the six-year-old—has her hair loose, and is wearing a garland of paper flowers, The girl has on a simple peasant tunic. The Jewish women are having a quick snack before the curtain rises. Otsmakh runs past them with the bell.
63. Otsmakh runs onto the stage, the curtain is down.
64. AT THE COURT OF KING LEAR
65. King Lear’s throne stands to the side of the stage. Above the throne hang Japanese fans and family photographs of God knows who, mostly military figures, Right in front of the audience is a case with Hebrew inscriptions, like the cases in synagogues where the Torah scrolls are kept. Otsmakh rings the bell, and looks through a hole at the audience.
66. The eighth row of the orchestra. The audience is from a little ramshackle Galician town. Hasidic men, old women in brown wigs, and headdresses, young men with swank sideburns, opulent Jewish women in tightly corseted dresses. A multitude of children. Babies make up a third of the audience. They are squealing, crying, or sleeping…
In Babel’s screenplays, actors do not even have to speak to be funny. Babel pokes fun at everything, everyone. This play does not have a happy ending, however, the fact of which has parallels with Babel’s other work.
After his success with the Red Cavlary stories, Babel traveled, wrote stories, and published dispatches from the field: Georgia (1922-24), and France (1935). In one dispatch from Georgia, Babel muses about ‘Muslim Seminaries and Soviet Schools:’
"Influencing a person’s soul requires vision and circumspection. Under the difficult conditions of the East, these qualities must be multiplied by ten and pushed to the limit…[The Mensheviks] imported the guileless ardor of shortsighted national chauvinism into the tottering kingdom of the Ajarian Mullah. The results were not surprising…Mistrust has been fanned in the Muslim peasants, and passions burst into flame…the Menshevik school…undermined the authorities of its founders but also gnawed away at the basic foundations of the culture…"
Russians have always known the power of the written word. Babel was exceptional in his understanding, his honesty, and his skill. He does more with a handful of Cyrillic characters and two pages than most people can manage in a book-length novel. He was dangerous. He is still dangerous to those who think they can’t be seen to make mistakes.
Sorry for all the extensive quotes, but Babel writes better than I do. Here is an interview with the amazing Peter Constantine. And thanks to Sam Lipsyte for bringing me to this place. I never did find that reference to “my girls.”
February 27, 2018
«Voi sapete tutto. Ma a che vi serve, se avete sempre gli occhiali sul naso e l'autunno nell'anima?».
May 2, 2021
Why did Isaac Babel go back? In 1935, he was permitted to leave the Soviet Union to address a writers' conference in Paris, where his wife and daughter were living. Despite pleas to stay, he returned to the Soviet Union; four years later, he was arrested by the NKVD and taken to the Lyubanka, where he was killed, presumably after torture. To understand his decision is to look at the contradictions of his life, the self-censorship. When criticised for his diminished output, he jokingly called himself "a great master of the genre of silence".
Babel was born in the poor neighbourhood of Moldavanka in Odessa. It was the home of the Jewish crime kingpin Mishka Yaponchik, who Babel turned into the character of Benya Krik in short story, theatre and film. As a young writer in Moscow, he met Maxim Gorky, who told him, "it is very clear that you don’t really know anything, but that you are good at guessing quite a lot. What you must now do is go out into the world." Babel listened. His early stories attempt, not quite successfully, to mimic the French and Russian short stories Babel had read; he then signed up with the "Red Cavalry" fighting the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 (the Comintern's first attempt to export Communism, an utter failure) which he fictionalised into a popular series of stories. (Unwisely, since some of the characters whose names he did not change eventually rose to Stalin's inner circle.) He also wrote a series of stories about life in Odessa among Jewish gangsters. After a decade of journalism and travel dispatches in the faltering promise of the new workers' state, he translated Shalom Aleichem and adapted him for film (Wandering Stars), wrote more stories, some autobiographical, and worked on film projects. He was collaborating on Mark Donskoy's famous trilogy about Gorky when he was arrested and declared persona non grata, his name removed the credits and his body disposed of.
Those autobiographical stories (among his best) contain this line (from The Story of my Dovecote):
After Khruschev came to power Babel was rehabilitated and celebrated in the Soviet Union and the West. (Red Cavalry came out in English in the 50s with an introduction by Lionel Trilling, and Babel has been cited as an influence by American writers such as James Salter, George Saunders and Denis Johnson). His writing remains powerful, mixing violence and kindness, despair and romanticism, the ability of human beings even in the worst privation to admire the moon through some clouds. As is clear from the multiple drafts in this volume, Babel worked hard to pare down his writing to just the lines needed to convey his point, abstracting a hundred gory details into one incident of black humour. As he puts it in Guy de Maupassant (an astonishingly perfect story)
Babel was born in the poor neighbourhood of Moldavanka in Odessa. It was the home of the Jewish crime kingpin Mishka Yaponchik, who Babel turned into the character of Benya Krik in short story, theatre and film. As a young writer in Moscow, he met Maxim Gorky, who told him, "it is very clear that you don’t really know anything, but that you are good at guessing quite a lot. What you must now do is go out into the world." Babel listened. His early stories attempt, not quite successfully, to mimic the French and Russian short stories Babel had read; he then signed up with the "Red Cavalry" fighting the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 (the Comintern's first attempt to export Communism, an utter failure) which he fictionalised into a popular series of stories. (Unwisely, since some of the characters whose names he did not change eventually rose to Stalin's inner circle.) He also wrote a series of stories about life in Odessa among Jewish gangsters. After a decade of journalism and travel dispatches in the faltering promise of the new workers' state, he translated Shalom Aleichem and adapted him for film (Wandering Stars), wrote more stories, some autobiographical, and worked on film projects. He was collaborating on Mark Donskoy's famous trilogy about Gorky when he was arrested and declared persona non grata, his name removed the credits and his body disposed of.
Those autobiographical stories (among his best) contain this line (from The Story of my Dovecote):
All the men of our clan had been too trusting of others and too quick to take unconsidered action. We had never had any luck in anything. My grandfather had once been a rabbi in Belaya Tserkov, had been chased out of town for blasphemy, and then lived in scandal and poverty for another forty years, learned foreign languages, and started going insane in his eightieth year. My Uncle Lev, my father's brother, studied at the Yeshiva in Volozhin, evaded conscription in 1892, and abducted the daughter of a quartermaster serving in the Kiev military district. Uncle Lev took this woman to California, to Los Angeles, where he abandoned her, and he died in a madhouse among Negroes and Malays. After his death, the American police sent us his belongings—a large trunk reinforced with brown iron hoops—from Los Angeles. In this trunk were dumbbells, locks of a woman's hair, Uncle's tallith, whips with gilded tips, and herbal tea in little boxes trimmed with cheap pearls. The only men left in the family were mad Uncle Simon, who lived in Odessa, my father, and me...[I]n our family I was my mother's only hope. Like all Jews, I was short in stature, weak, and plagued by headaches from too much study.This massive paperback brings together all of Babel's extant work: stories, diaries, sketches, scripts, and plays. Translator Peter Constantine, who has said it was his favourite project, has added explanatory notes, and the book includes a preface by Cynthia Ozick and an afterword by Babel's daughter Nathalie which adds some family history. (She has some fairly shocking claims against Ilya Ehernberg, the Stalinist writer and close friend of Babel.) Babel lived a life of secrets - he had not one but two secret families - while navigating a society increasingly hostile to writers and the truth, one he still seems to have truly believed in - as much as we can guess what was in his heart.
After Khruschev came to power Babel was rehabilitated and celebrated in the Soviet Union and the West. (Red Cavalry came out in English in the 50s with an introduction by Lionel Trilling, and Babel has been cited as an influence by American writers such as James Salter, George Saunders and Denis Johnson). His writing remains powerful, mixing violence and kindness, despair and romanticism, the ability of human beings even in the worst privation to admire the moon through some clouds. As is clear from the multiple drafts in this volume, Babel worked hard to pare down his writing to just the lines needed to convey his point, abstracting a hundred gory details into one incident of black humour. As he puts it in Guy de Maupassant (an astonishingly perfect story)
I spoke to her of style, of an army of words, an army in which every type of weapon is deployed. No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.
February 20, 2012
I hadn't set out to read this book but, after reading the first chapter of Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, in which she talks about her involvement with an Isaac Babel seminar in grad school, her recounting of Babel's tragic story grabbed hold of me and, since I already had this book sitting on my shelf, I was moved to read it before I'd even finished The Possessed.
I haven't read all 1072 pages yet, but I did read the sections that interested me most. I started with Babel's 1920 diary, then read his Red Cavalry stories, the "additional" Red Cavalry stories (which hadn't been included in the initial Russian collection), his propaganda articles for the Red Cavalrymen, and a few other miscellaneous stories (about 300 pages in all).
What these sections taught me, first and foremost, is that my knowledge of Revolutionary Russia (both pre- and post-1917) is woefully lax. Considering that I was in middle school and high school in the leadup to the end of the Cold War (graduating high school in 1991), it's actually pretty unbelievable that I don't know much about Russian (or Soviet) history--"know your enemy" and all that nonsense. What I really could've used, before reading these sections, were a few history books--particularly on the Cossacks and on Soviet Russia's failed conflict with the Republic of Poland, circa 1919-1921. (I've already tracked down a copy of Philip Longworth's The Cossacks.)
Nonetheless, Babel's diary and Red Cavalry stories provided me with a visceral, first-person look at the cruelty and hypocrisy of the war (on both sides). The people who suffered most horribly, it seems, are the civilians who lived in the villages that were occupied, retreated from, and reoccupied as the battle lines shifted, first by the Russian army and then by the Polish army, perpetually throughout the war. And each time a village was reoccupied, the houses were looted, the civilians' food, equipment, and horses were confiscated, their wives and daughters were raped, and their husbands and fathers were executed as spies for the opposing army. These horrors, metaphorically typified in Babel's most famous story, "My First Goose," seem to have been omnipresent, despite the Red Cavalry's b.s. party line of how they're bringing the glories of Revolution to the oppressed Polish people.
Babel's stories tend to be pretty short, usually only two or three pages. In the Red Cavalry stories, anyway, the plots are somewhat rambling, focusing on brief, sometimes chaotic sequences of events or definitive moments in a character's life. He emphasizes the pettiness and ineptitude of the Red Cavalry's officers, the casual depravity of the mercenary Cossacks, and the dreary, oppressed lives of the villagers caught in the crossfire. Babel's Red Cavalry stories and his 1920 diary are, in other words, completely depressing, though there are moments of humor and humanity lurking within them. They had a profound effect on me and, as I mentioned, they've motivated me to learn more about this aspect of Russian history, not to mention the enigmatic Cossacks.
I haven't read all 1072 pages yet, but I did read the sections that interested me most. I started with Babel's 1920 diary, then read his Red Cavalry stories, the "additional" Red Cavalry stories (which hadn't been included in the initial Russian collection), his propaganda articles for the Red Cavalrymen, and a few other miscellaneous stories (about 300 pages in all).
What these sections taught me, first and foremost, is that my knowledge of Revolutionary Russia (both pre- and post-1917) is woefully lax. Considering that I was in middle school and high school in the leadup to the end of the Cold War (graduating high school in 1991), it's actually pretty unbelievable that I don't know much about Russian (or Soviet) history--"know your enemy" and all that nonsense. What I really could've used, before reading these sections, were a few history books--particularly on the Cossacks and on Soviet Russia's failed conflict with the Republic of Poland, circa 1919-1921. (I've already tracked down a copy of Philip Longworth's The Cossacks.)
Nonetheless, Babel's diary and Red Cavalry stories provided me with a visceral, first-person look at the cruelty and hypocrisy of the war (on both sides). The people who suffered most horribly, it seems, are the civilians who lived in the villages that were occupied, retreated from, and reoccupied as the battle lines shifted, first by the Russian army and then by the Polish army, perpetually throughout the war. And each time a village was reoccupied, the houses were looted, the civilians' food, equipment, and horses were confiscated, their wives and daughters were raped, and their husbands and fathers were executed as spies for the opposing army. These horrors, metaphorically typified in Babel's most famous story, "My First Goose," seem to have been omnipresent, despite the Red Cavalry's b.s. party line of how they're bringing the glories of Revolution to the oppressed Polish people.
Babel's stories tend to be pretty short, usually only two or three pages. In the Red Cavalry stories, anyway, the plots are somewhat rambling, focusing on brief, sometimes chaotic sequences of events or definitive moments in a character's life. He emphasizes the pettiness and ineptitude of the Red Cavalry's officers, the casual depravity of the mercenary Cossacks, and the dreary, oppressed lives of the villagers caught in the crossfire. Babel's Red Cavalry stories and his 1920 diary are, in other words, completely depressing, though there are moments of humor and humanity lurking within them. They had a profound effect on me and, as I mentioned, they've motivated me to learn more about this aspect of Russian history, not to mention the enigmatic Cossacks.
December 21, 2019
A remarkable collection which should be read by everyone.
February 22, 2016
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel I picked this up after browsing through its exhaustive though nothing short of staggering collection of one of Russia's greatest writers--and perhaps, I would argue, one of the greatest short story writers, and the greatest short-short story writer ever. Babel is a genius of prose, with razor sharp, electric descriptions of whores, businessmen, Romeos, street urchins, Jews and Gentiles tossed amid the storm of life, every sentence pulsating with vibrant energy, reaching to pull you into the soul of the desperate, the deranged, and the dazzling, while wrapping you in a shawl of settings sublime and vivifying. A phenomenal bibliography, introduction, and afterward. If you are interested in defining the flavor of this translation, I suggest to read alongside this tome, the Penguin collection of his works, which renders the prose more floral (and more beautiful); see the story "Italian Sun" for example: “I sat to the side, dozed, dreams pouncing around me like kittens”.
August 10, 2019
I've read a fair amount of Russian and Soviet literature, some of which I've enjoyed, much of which I haven't. I have to say I'm not a fan of Babel. Important writer, yes. His Red Cavalry stories are a chronicle of war that have a Hemingway quality about them, but they felt almost superficial, just a matter of fact telling of things that happened (or, more accurately, fictionalized accounts inspired by real events). Arguably, that's what makes them powerful, but they don't make for great short stories.
March 19, 2014
Although I sometimes prefer the Penguin translation by David McDuff, this is a must-have all inclusive book for lovers of Isaac Babel. Strewn with gems of language and stories to die for, this volume reveals the genius that was Babel, tragically extinguished in his prime by Stalin. My favorite line is from his story, "Guy De Maupassant," page 628 in my edition:
"No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."
"No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."
November 8, 2007
I've not read every single story, perhaps because I feel the best enjoyment Babel brings is in the original publications read through newspapers, and however else someone can snatch his morsels. He is truly a paragon of excellence, but he is no mensch! Three stars for the writing, fourth star because he is Jewish and the fifth because he is a socialist!
August 8, 2013
Babel's short stories are wonderful, especially the ones set in Odessa and Paris, very funny and often with bizarre metaphors. If this were just a collection of his short stories, I would give it five stars. However, this is a complete collection, and it was just too complete for me.
February 26, 2018
If Tolstoy were Jewish, a revolutionary, possessed a mordant sense of humor, and wrote short stories, he might resemble Isaac Babel. By that I mean the ability to see everything and everyone with great clarity, balancing equal amounts of warm sympathy and cool interest, whether for Cossack officers or Jewish villagers, villains and victims alike.
Which isn’t to say that Babel’s masterpiece, the Red Cavalry stories are anything like Tolstoy, or even Chekhov. They are sui generis. But like Tolstoy or Chekhov, Babel never let morality or politics interfere with his writer’s compulsion to capture the violent truths that he witnessed as participant and observer of the Russian Revolution, and in particular, the 1920 military expedition into Poland. It was one of Bolshevik Russia’s first foreign forays and it ended in disaster. Red Cavalry made Babel’s reputation, but its blistering honesty also earned him powerful enemies.
Babel was a true believer in socialism and revolution, but he was first and foremost a writer, a fact that almost ordained his eventual arrest and execution by Stalin in 1939. “Babel sacrificed his life to his language,” critic Cynthia Ozick writes in the introduction.
Babel was a master miniaturist; many of his finest stories are really vignettes — vividly etched character portraits and descriptive passages connected by a slender plot line. His prose is always striking and original.
A description of a Cossack officer: “His long legs looked like two girls wedged to their shoulders in riding boots.”
The thoughts of a soldier after a day of defeat and retreat use words in odd but evocative ways: “The evening soared into the sky like a flock of birds and the darkness laid its wet garland upon me. I was exhausted and crouching beneath the crown of death, walked on hugging fate for the simplest ability — the ability to kill a man.”
Babel first made his reputation with his Odessa Stories, comic accounts of Jewish gangsters and family life in his native city. (Who can resist a gangster whose nickname was “Yid-and-a-Half?”) Red Cavalry possesses a dark humor as well, but what predominates are Babel’s portrayals of war’s degradation and brutality.
He allows the basic humanity of his characters to survive, but little else. The combat often occurs in heavily populated Jewish shtetls, and Babel, who takes on the persona of a Cossack soldier in some of the stories, treats them in an alternately callous and sympathetic manner. The reflexive anti-Semitism of the Cossacks and their Polish foes can dishearten a modern reader.
Babel Is clearly testing his identity as a vanguard revolutionary at certain points, while at other times, he embraces — or at least does not reject — his Jewish identity. (In addition to Russian, Babel was fluent in French and Yiddish and never limited himself to writing purely out of a Jewish tradition.)
Babel’s later stories became longer and more personal, but the language remains fresh and striking. He also wrote plays and several screenplays, which were not produced. A vast number of manuscripts and parts of an unfinished novel disappeared after his arrest and execution.
Which isn’t to say that Babel’s masterpiece, the Red Cavalry stories are anything like Tolstoy, or even Chekhov. They are sui generis. But like Tolstoy or Chekhov, Babel never let morality or politics interfere with his writer’s compulsion to capture the violent truths that he witnessed as participant and observer of the Russian Revolution, and in particular, the 1920 military expedition into Poland. It was one of Bolshevik Russia’s first foreign forays and it ended in disaster. Red Cavalry made Babel’s reputation, but its blistering honesty also earned him powerful enemies.
Babel was a true believer in socialism and revolution, but he was first and foremost a writer, a fact that almost ordained his eventual arrest and execution by Stalin in 1939. “Babel sacrificed his life to his language,” critic Cynthia Ozick writes in the introduction.
Babel was a master miniaturist; many of his finest stories are really vignettes — vividly etched character portraits and descriptive passages connected by a slender plot line. His prose is always striking and original.
A description of a Cossack officer: “His long legs looked like two girls wedged to their shoulders in riding boots.”
The thoughts of a soldier after a day of defeat and retreat use words in odd but evocative ways: “The evening soared into the sky like a flock of birds and the darkness laid its wet garland upon me. I was exhausted and crouching beneath the crown of death, walked on hugging fate for the simplest ability — the ability to kill a man.”
Babel first made his reputation with his Odessa Stories, comic accounts of Jewish gangsters and family life in his native city. (Who can resist a gangster whose nickname was “Yid-and-a-Half?”) Red Cavalry possesses a dark humor as well, but what predominates are Babel’s portrayals of war’s degradation and brutality.
He allows the basic humanity of his characters to survive, but little else. The combat often occurs in heavily populated Jewish shtetls, and Babel, who takes on the persona of a Cossack soldier in some of the stories, treats them in an alternately callous and sympathetic manner. The reflexive anti-Semitism of the Cossacks and their Polish foes can dishearten a modern reader.
Babel Is clearly testing his identity as a vanguard revolutionary at certain points, while at other times, he embraces — or at least does not reject — his Jewish identity. (In addition to Russian, Babel was fluent in French and Yiddish and never limited himself to writing purely out of a Jewish tradition.)
Babel’s later stories became longer and more personal, but the language remains fresh and striking. He also wrote plays and several screenplays, which were not produced. A vast number of manuscripts and parts of an unfinished novel disappeared after his arrest and execution.
March 4, 2019
It's difficult to write a review of the works of Isaac Babel, for me, at least. So much of his work is infused with the strident socialist idealism of the early Soviet period. At the same time, he wasn't a regime hack. He openly criticized leaders and decisions in about as open a manner as one could, which would eventually lead to his demise during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. He's at his best when he's not being political, just telling stories, either of the denizens of the Jewish ghettos or life among the “Red” Cossacks during the Soviet-Polish war.
Babel studied his predecessors well. Of the writers in Russian, only Chekhov is his peer in short story form. It is unfortunate that the turgid partisan Gorki was an even larger influence. His short stories have the ability to capture nuanced mood and character in under ten pages, but whereas Chekhov is dour and ultimately misanthropic, Babel seems to find redeeming and human qualities in even brutal gangsters and bloodthirsty cavalrymen. It's not a total moral inversion. The gangsters are still profiteers and the cavalrymen still sadistic bigots, but no one is a caricature... well, until we get to his longer writing with its noble/tragic socialist heros, but even there he stills sneaks in some sly references to show he's knowingly doing so. There's a lot of degradation and brutality in his stories... but at the same time there's a bit of joy, even if it seems derived from finding the humor and irony in some very dark situations. He's not as skilled a prose stylist as Chekhov or Maupassant, he's not as able to create mood via physical description, nor craft evocative passages. At the same time he's managed to write with a far wider emotional range in some respects.
I have the omnibus edition of all his surviving works compiled. To be honest, I'd skip the dramas and screenplays. They're fairly mediocre. Some of the stories are “meh” as well, and likely I think the author would agree which is why they weren't published in a collection. That's the thing with these sorts of editions, you get the good and the not so good. The afterword written by his daughter is a great piece of literature in and of itself, a personal reflection of a father she barely knew as she lived an early life of poverty and insecurity in exile with her mother.
Four out of Five stars
Babel studied his predecessors well. Of the writers in Russian, only Chekhov is his peer in short story form. It is unfortunate that the turgid partisan Gorki was an even larger influence. His short stories have the ability to capture nuanced mood and character in under ten pages, but whereas Chekhov is dour and ultimately misanthropic, Babel seems to find redeeming and human qualities in even brutal gangsters and bloodthirsty cavalrymen. It's not a total moral inversion. The gangsters are still profiteers and the cavalrymen still sadistic bigots, but no one is a caricature... well, until we get to his longer writing with its noble/tragic socialist heros, but even there he stills sneaks in some sly references to show he's knowingly doing so. There's a lot of degradation and brutality in his stories... but at the same time there's a bit of joy, even if it seems derived from finding the humor and irony in some very dark situations. He's not as skilled a prose stylist as Chekhov or Maupassant, he's not as able to create mood via physical description, nor craft evocative passages. At the same time he's managed to write with a far wider emotional range in some respects.
I have the omnibus edition of all his surviving works compiled. To be honest, I'd skip the dramas and screenplays. They're fairly mediocre. Some of the stories are “meh” as well, and likely I think the author would agree which is why they weren't published in a collection. That's the thing with these sorts of editions, you get the good and the not so good. The afterword written by his daughter is a great piece of literature in and of itself, a personal reflection of a father she barely knew as she lived an early life of poverty and insecurity in exile with her mother.
Four out of Five stars
January 28, 2014
Babel, like most Russian authors, is a descriptive writer. This made his short stories fascinating little pictures in time. Some were sweet, some comical, many tragic in a thoroughly Russian way. I loved the Odessa Stories and his reports on France. His plays and screenplays, however, were a unique form of torture.
July 13, 2016
Indispensable for the Babel scholar--and for short story authors in general. The latter sections contain screenplays from the early days of cinema. Interesting to see Babel defining what his art would do in that new medium. The short stories--especially the Red Cavalry stories--are mind-blowing. Learned so much from the book about writing and Russia.
February 28, 2017
As my first expose to Babel, a complete works was the wrong way to go. I do think if I had a read a curated collection of stories, I would have enjoyed this far more. However, this tome included a lot of stuff that I think was likely just writing exercises or works he would have chosen not to publish. Also, there was the huge cultural barrier.
July 26, 2011
I bought this because I was interested in Jewish experience during the Russian Revolution. I found it hard to get through because the stories were too short to develop the characters. It's interesting to think what Babel could have written had he survived Stalin's purges.
June 25, 2017
I place Jorge Borges as my absolute favorite writer of the 20th century. This collection places Babel at a very, very close second. It amazes me still how some writers can give you more in a story 3 or 4 or 5 pages long than most writers can in a novel.
Read
May 13, 2008I haven't read all of this yet, but I enjoy "You Must Know Everything," which is also read by George Saunders somewhere on the New Yorker website.
March 29, 2018
Babel was one of the best writers of short stories in Russian, second only (perhaps) to Chekhov.
This omnibus volume is long overdue.
In her introduction, Cynthia Ozick, in just a few lines, compares and contrasts Babel and Kafka - Very thought provoking.
This omnibus volume is long overdue.
In her introduction, Cynthia Ozick, in just a few lines, compares and contrasts Babel and Kafka - Very thought provoking.
February 6, 2022
All you will ever need to know about Isaac Babel. His letters, early fiction, and complete books are in here. But for the real feel of his novels and short stories look to the translator Boris Drayluk.
April 23, 2022
Part journalism, part prose this is a rapid fire series of snapshots of Russia at the very beginning of the Russian revolution. Some are frustratingly brief but there's some stunning imagery, vivid depictions of the Civil war and some wry humor. A tantalizing glimpse of a talent taken too soon
April 12, 2020
Bought this for and read "The Red Cavalry Stories". Will eventually read the remainder.
July 16, 2024
The Odessa stories had charm and hung together well. The Red Calvary stories, to me, were sluggish and arduous to read. I've read several Russian writers and would not rank him as among the best.
November 15, 2014
Issac Babel is the most literary of the practitioners of socialist realism that came out of the Russia (née Soviet Union). Despite his endeavor to situate his stories within realism, his lyricism shines through again and again. Had Babel been rounded up in one of Stalin's many purges, he just may have replaced the old vanguard of Russian literature and art. This collection is a beautiful collection of his work that could be unearthed, along with some beautiful writing from his daughter that situates Babel within a nuanced biographical framework which does not dodge his contradictions.
What sets apart Babel and Fyodor Gladkov, author of Cement, is that they do not write the collectivization of the Soviet Union from a purely ideological one. Both detail hardships of the proletariat and their struggles. Both support the move towards a egalitarian society, but do not spare the growing bureaucracy of the Soviet leadership from October 1917 through to today. Babel's section of reporting from St. Petersburg (Petrograd) demonstrates that Babel had an eye for detail to separate out the vulgar, everyday, detail and isolate it until it becomes a sublime symbol of the greater situation. Babel could have been one of the greatest journalist of any nation or time. But true to his life he chose to skip around genres and mediums. Perhaps one of his greater strengths is that his stories, especially the Red Cavalry, seem singular. While a downside of the collection appears as Babel tried to adapt his Odessa and Red Cavalry stories for the stage and early films. These adaptations may have been successful in those mediums but do not hold up on the page.
One last interesting comparison would be between babel and Hemingway. This seems counter-intuitive—but, it is not. Hemingway covers the same socioeconomic milieu, yet Hemingway uses the minutiae of everyday life to block out the entropy of modern ethics in terms of politics. Hemingway's oeuvre is that of anxiety: the anxiety of being unable to leap from the quantitative to a qualitative leap without the dependence upon dogmatic choice.
Babel's works, especially the cavalry stories embraces the suspension of the ethical constantly. His characters struggle and fight, despite constantly acknowledging the world is shit. The lesson to be taken away from Babel's stories is that there is no moment where ethics reaches the Hegelian moment of synthesis and reconciliation. His literature and life testify to a world where aesthetics are the most beatiful and brutal of all things.
What sets apart Babel and Fyodor Gladkov, author of Cement, is that they do not write the collectivization of the Soviet Union from a purely ideological one. Both detail hardships of the proletariat and their struggles. Both support the move towards a egalitarian society, but do not spare the growing bureaucracy of the Soviet leadership from October 1917 through to today. Babel's section of reporting from St. Petersburg (Petrograd) demonstrates that Babel had an eye for detail to separate out the vulgar, everyday, detail and isolate it until it becomes a sublime symbol of the greater situation. Babel could have been one of the greatest journalist of any nation or time. But true to his life he chose to skip around genres and mediums. Perhaps one of his greater strengths is that his stories, especially the Red Cavalry, seem singular. While a downside of the collection appears as Babel tried to adapt his Odessa and Red Cavalry stories for the stage and early films. These adaptations may have been successful in those mediums but do not hold up on the page.
One last interesting comparison would be between babel and Hemingway. This seems counter-intuitive—but, it is not. Hemingway covers the same socioeconomic milieu, yet Hemingway uses the minutiae of everyday life to block out the entropy of modern ethics in terms of politics. Hemingway's oeuvre is that of anxiety: the anxiety of being unable to leap from the quantitative to a qualitative leap without the dependence upon dogmatic choice.
Babel's works, especially the cavalry stories embraces the suspension of the ethical constantly. His characters struggle and fight, despite constantly acknowledging the world is shit. The lesson to be taken away from Babel's stories is that there is no moment where ethics reaches the Hegelian moment of synthesis and reconciliation. His literature and life testify to a world where aesthetics are the most beatiful and brutal of all things.
August 2, 2014
I haven’t finished all 1072 pages but taking a breather. It’s right beside the bed. These are powerful, urgent stories -- Ive read about a quarter of them -- and I prefer to put them down and then take them up again in a while, refreshed. In the meanwhile I’ve moved on to Francine Prose’s Lovers at the Chameleon Cafe - Paris 1932. Loving it, moving swiftly along
January 4, 2015
This is the edition I got from the library and never finished. I ended up buying a very old used copy of another edition with a wonderful introduction by Lionel Trilling. It's so old it doesn't have an ISBN. The introduction is like a work of art in itself.
March 22, 2007
he taught me to be more funny. and poignant. i like these stories because they are funny and poignant.
June 18, 2007
Good enough to make me want to read things in translation again. Well, almost. Sorry, Pasternak, you'll have to wait another year.
January 18, 2008
at least three times a story, goes in a direction you never anticipate. at least once a page writes a line so gorgeous you write it down so you never forget it.
September 2, 2008
Because I just had to walk into a used bookstore in Rochester and just had to buy something. I'm enjoying the updated translation so far.
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