Lyubka the Cossack and Other Stories

by Isaac Babel, Andrew R. MacAndrew (Translator)

Book by Babel, Isaac

Genres: Short Stories, Russia, Fiction, Russian Literature

285 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Isaak 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.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful set of linked stories with the most invetive and ennervating use of language i have read in a while. His stories are vibrant, his characters almost Rabelaisian.

[Miriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

babel writes about jewish life in odessa, the home of my paternal grandmother's family (my great-grandparents left after the 1905 pogrom, which babel also survived). his stories are funny and cruel and worth reading on their own merits, but part of the enjoyment for me is definitely the insights into a tiny slice of jewish and personal history.

[Katrinka · Rating 5 out of 5]

The input I've heard about Babel seems to be spot-on: there's never an extraneous word; there's never too little. This guy was the master of the short story. Read him!

[Fred Dameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Babel's "Red Cavalry" and found him wonderful. His Lyubka the Cossack, which includes "Red Cav" is also a time machine to prerevolutionary Odessa, the Polish War, post Revolutionary Russia, and the beginnings of Stalinism. I placed this book on my Russian history shelf as it describes in story, pogroms, winter, life in Petersburg 1915 - 1917, writing, and life during extraordinary events. Reading Babel is seeing through his words how those events effected the lives of the people around him. Very few writers get this feeling across to the reader as effectively as Babel does.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kafka once said that we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. This collection by Isaac Babel certainly does the trick. It includes Red Cavalry, a collection of stories about the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921.

The stories aren't all doom and gloom. "Lyubka the Cossack", is humorous, "Pan Apolek" mocks the Polish state and church, and "The King" is tender and moving. Babel's stories are suffused with power. His language is spare and shocking.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best stories in this collection were the ones describing the narrator's childhood in pre-Revolutionary Odessa.

[Susan Webb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes weird, sometimes inscrutable, like folktales but semi-autobiographical and semi-journalistic, Babel's stories give a glimpse, whimsical and sordid at the same time, of hard realities of pre-revolutionary Odessa and its environs and the post-revolution civil war in which Babel served in the Red Army, including the situation of Jews in those days.

[erl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well written. Dark and graphic. Like Kerouac, I suspect Babel’s stories are actually memoirs. The first section, about his childhood, dragged a bit. The second section, about his years with the red army were engrossing. Just don’t read before bedtime. The theme of antisemitism runs throughout. And Babel himself was clearly an advocate of the revolution in spite of it all. Worth reading.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elif Batuman sent me here and it was worth it