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Collected Stories of Issac Babel
A newly translated collection of stories. His desire to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to be free of them gives Babel a duality of vision, which infuses his work with a powerful energy, from the earliest tales.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1957
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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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January 18, 2022
Babel's intricate prose is vivid and perceptive, creating elegant story structures leading to poignant endings. A true master.
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May 9, 2019This volume of translated stories consists of the cycle Red Cavalry and at least some of his Odessa Stories.
Isaac Babel, by origin a bookish Odessa Jew, a literary man, rode with the largely illiterate and entirely anti-Semitic Cossack Red Cavalry into Poland. One hundred years ago give or take as the Russian revolution expanded and came into full bloom, the first world war came in Eastern Europe, not quite to an end but more sputtered into confusion, at this point an army of red cavalry galloped westwards, presumably with the intention of reaching Germany and encouraging world wide revolution. Unfortunately this simple plan required fighting a war in Poland and across Ukraine en route and it is this which unfolds in Babel's stories with spectacular violence from the first sentence in which the sun sets like a decapitated head, rolling down the sky.
As I mentioned by origin a bookish city Jew, Babel spends several stories trying to impresses upon his comrades that he is a proper man like them - given a horse however, the Cossacks ride in a distinctive manner - he buggers it up he is obliged to decapitate an old woman's last goose to save his own bacon and show the lads what sort of a man he is. In the background to his stories about the campaign are coloured by memorials of Jewish life in Volhynia from the wars of Bogdan Khmelnitsky in the seventeenth century onwards. Khmelnitsky led a cavalry army in war against Poland , which in the nature of things involved considerable violence against the Jewish population - who were non-combatants - and naturally we see the same kind of thing here and one or two people may have noticed that considerable Jewish populations are no longer a feature of eastern European countries.
Another strain is trinitarian heresies, and the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian approaches to life, which in a way is the story of Babel's journey. He doesn't want to be the podgy wordsmith in glasses doing battle from behind his typewriter committing acts of violence on to a virginal sheet of paper, instead he thinks that he wants to be the hero on a big horse, waving a sabre around, cutting down the entangling forces of repression and oppression. One Cossack fresh from the war in the Russian countryside related in States and social revolutions relates how he trampled the local landlord to death and how in the process he got to know life through and through. A woman serving in the Red Cavalry has her mare covered by a stallion and then comforts her horse which in its exited anxiety and slobbery mouth suggests something both of Babel's and the reader's experience of these stories in which the language and images in the war stories are integral with the narration. Abruptly violent, intimate and focused.
And then there are the Odessa stories set before the Revolution.
One features a Jewish woman gangster, or maybe simply a roguish trader. She has recently given birth and finds her need to, when required, whip out her child and breast feed it, is slightly under cutting the hard nosed, businessslike 'I'll smash your knee caps if you don't deliver in quality, in quantity and on time' image that she seeks to project, fortunately an old man is one hand with a comb to assist her to rapidly wean the child.
In another story Babel's father asks, begs, a cavalry officer of the Imperial army to disperse the rioters burning down the family home during a pogrom. The officer repeats ' I'll do what I can, Sir' while continuing to sit still on his horse watching. The son, the Isaac Babel, our author, is entranced by the officer's shiny boots, lemon yellow gloves and insouciant manner.
Another story deals with the trials and tribulation of ticket touts, struggling to make a more or less honestish living out of Odessa's pre-war night life when the theatres insist on staging clunkers.
It is the kind of picture of Jewish city life and wheeler dealers that I hoped that The Yiddish Policemen's Union would be like . A lost world preserved not on s secret south-American plateau but in stories.
Isaac Babel, by origin a bookish Odessa Jew, a literary man, rode with the largely illiterate and entirely anti-Semitic Cossack Red Cavalry into Poland. One hundred years ago give or take as the Russian revolution expanded and came into full bloom, the first world war came in Eastern Europe, not quite to an end but more sputtered into confusion, at this point an army of red cavalry galloped westwards, presumably with the intention of reaching Germany and encouraging world wide revolution. Unfortunately this simple plan required fighting a war in Poland and across Ukraine en route and it is this which unfolds in Babel's stories with spectacular violence from the first sentence in which the sun sets like a decapitated head, rolling down the sky.
As I mentioned by origin a bookish city Jew, Babel spends several stories trying to impresses upon his comrades that he is a proper man like them - given a horse however, the Cossacks ride in a distinctive manner - he buggers it up he is obliged to decapitate an old woman's last goose to save his own bacon and show the lads what sort of a man he is. In the background to his stories about the campaign are coloured by memorials of Jewish life in Volhynia from the wars of Bogdan Khmelnitsky in the seventeenth century onwards. Khmelnitsky led a cavalry army in war against Poland , which in the nature of things involved considerable violence against the Jewish population - who were non-combatants - and naturally we see the same kind of thing here and one or two people may have noticed that considerable Jewish populations are no longer a feature of eastern European countries.
Another strain is trinitarian heresies, and the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian approaches to life, which in a way is the story of Babel's journey. He doesn't want to be the podgy wordsmith in glasses doing battle from behind his typewriter committing acts of violence on to a virginal sheet of paper, instead he thinks that he wants to be the hero on a big horse, waving a sabre around, cutting down the entangling forces of repression and oppression. One Cossack fresh from the war in the Russian countryside related in States and social revolutions relates how he trampled the local landlord to death and how in the process he got to know life through and through. A woman serving in the Red Cavalry has her mare covered by a stallion and then comforts her horse which in its exited anxiety and slobbery mouth suggests something both of Babel's and the reader's experience of these stories in which the language and images in the war stories are integral with the narration. Abruptly violent, intimate and focused.
And then there are the Odessa stories set before the Revolution.
One features a Jewish woman gangster, or maybe simply a roguish trader. She has recently given birth and finds her need to, when required, whip out her child and breast feed it, is slightly under cutting the hard nosed, businessslike 'I'll smash your knee caps if you don't deliver in quality, in quantity and on time' image that she seeks to project, fortunately an old man is one hand with a comb to assist her to rapidly wean the child.
In another story Babel's father asks, begs, a cavalry officer of the Imperial army to disperse the rioters burning down the family home during a pogrom. The officer repeats ' I'll do what I can, Sir' while continuing to sit still on his horse watching. The son, the Isaac Babel, our author, is entranced by the officer's shiny boots, lemon yellow gloves and insouciant manner.
Another story deals with the trials and tribulation of ticket touts, struggling to make a more or less honestish living out of Odessa's pre-war night life when the theatres insist on staging clunkers.
It is the kind of picture of Jewish city life and wheeler dealers that I hoped that The Yiddish Policemen's Union would be like . A lost world preserved not on s secret south-American plateau but in stories.
May 20, 2023
A new favourite writer. Isaac Babel, a Jewish Russian, was executed as a spy by Stalin in 1939. He was in the midst of writing a novel, two chapters of which survive and are brilliant. It's a tragedy he wasn't allowed to finish it. Babel made a foolhardy mistake when he wrote a series of stories about his experiences with the red cavalry and used real names of commanding officers, one of whom was a close friend of Stalin's. Babel's portrait of him was not flattering and the more popular the stories became the more incensed grew this man.
I've grown to love the short story as a form this year. I've got Alice Munro to thank for alerting me to how exciting the short story can be. Writers tend to put more craft into their every sentence. There's much less of the laziness and excess baggage you get in most novels.
Babel is a master stylist. He has an immense talent for making you see the familiar in an eye-opening and ravishing way. He also has a fabulous sense of humour.
I've grown to love the short story as a form this year. I've got Alice Munro to thank for alerting me to how exciting the short story can be. Writers tend to put more craft into their every sentence. There's much less of the laziness and excess baggage you get in most novels.
Babel is a master stylist. He has an immense talent for making you see the familiar in an eye-opening and ravishing way. He also has a fabulous sense of humour.
January 5, 2016
রাশিয়ানদের আসলে হিংসা করতে হয়। না করে উপায় নেই। কি পুণ্যি করলে একটা জাতির বরাতে এরকম সাহিত্য, এরকম সাহিত্যিক জোটে? একটা তো না, একের পর এক, যেন এসেম্বলি লাইন। আইজাক বাবেল সম্পর্কে প্রথম জেনেছিলাম কয়েক বছর আগে - যখন তার "রচনাসমগ্র" প্রথমবারের মত ইংরেজি অনুবাদে বেরিয়ে তোলপাড় ফেলে দেয়। কি করে বিপ্লবোত্তর রাশিয়ার অন্যতম শ্রেষ্ঠ লেখক স্তালিনের বিরাগভাজন হয়ে কেজিবির পূর্বসুরী NKVD'র হাতে ধরা পড়েন - কুখ্যাত লুবিয়াংকা কারাগারে অত্যাচার, অত:পর ১৯৪০ সালের জানুয়ারী মাসে মৃত্যুদন্ড। অথচ বহু বছর তার পরিবারের কেউ জানতে পারেনি বাবেল কোথায়, কি তার পরিনতি। একমাত্র সোভিয়েত ইউনিয়নের পতনের পরেই কেজিবি আর্কাইভ ঘেঁটে জানা গিয়েছিল বাবেল হত্যার প্রকৃত সত্য।
"রচনাসমগ্র" বইটা কিনে রেখেছিলাম, কিন্তু বারবার বাড়ি-বদলের চক্করে কিভাবে যেন হারিয়ে যায়। গত বছর আবার বাসা চেঞ্জ করার পর বইয়ের তাক গুছাতে গিয়ে বুঝলাম যে বইটা কোন বাক্সেই নেই। কি আর করা, আরো বেশ কিছু বই খুইয়েছি ওর সাথে। তবে কপালগুণে এই শহরে পুরনো বইয়ের দোকানের কমতি নেই - কয়েকদিন আগেই আবার পেয়ে গেলাম বাবেল-কে। তবে এবারে "রচনাসমগ্র" নয়, বরং সেই ১৯৬১ সালে পেঙ্গুইন কর্তৃক প্রকাশিত "গল্পসমগ্র"। একদম ক্লাসিক প্রচ্ছদ আর ডিজাইন। "রেড ক্যাভালরি" আছে? আছে। আর কি লাগে, বিনা দ্বিধায় লুফে নিলাম।
বাবেল সম্পর্কে খুব অল্প কথায় বলি - ১৮৯৪ সালে ক্রিমিয়া উপদ্বীপের অডেসা বন্দরে তার জন্ম, কৃষ্ণসাগরের তীরে। মোটামুটি স্বচ্ছল শিক্ষিত ইহুদি পরিবার। মফস্বলে বেশিদিন মন টিকেনি, তরুণ বাবেল চলে যান সেন্ট পিটার্সবার্গে। রাজধানী শহরে তার প্রাথমিক সাহিত্য প্রচেষ্টার অন্যতম পৃষ্ঠপোষক ছিলেন মহান রুশ লেখক গোর্কি। ১৯১৭ সালে অক্টোবর বিপ্লব হলো, তারপর লাল-সাদার রক্তক্ষয়ী গৃহযুদ্ধ আরম্ভ হলো। রুশ দেশে চরম অস্থিরতার সুযোগ নিয়ে পোল্যান্ডের নেতা মার্শাল পিল্সুদস্কি সিদ্ধান্ত নিলেন যে পোল্যান্ডের সীমানার সম্প্রসারণ করা যেতেই পারে এখন। যেমন ভাবা তেমন কাজ - পূব দিকে ইউক্রেন আক্রমন করে সোজা রাজধানী কিয়েভ পর্যন্ত পৌঁছে গেলেন তিনি। কিন্তু এই রকম সুযোগ-সন্ধানী আগ্রাসন তো বরদাশত করা যায় না - পোল্যান্ডকে উচিত শিক্ষা দেয়ার সংকল্প করলেন লেনিন।
পাঠিয়ে দিলেন জেনারেল বুদিওন্নির নেতৃত্বে কসাক (Cossack) অশ্বারোহী বাহিনী। ১৯২০ সালের গ্রীষ্মকাল তখন। বুদিওন্নি শুধু হারানো জমিজমা পুনরুদ্ধার করেই ক্ষান্ত দেননি, খোদ পোল্যান্ডে ঢুকে পড়ে রাজধানী ওয়ারসো অব্দি চলে গিয়েছিলেন। বাবেল-ও গিয়েছিলেন বুদিওন্নির বাহিনীর সাথে, সংবাদদাতার ভূমিকায়। এরপরের ঘটনা বিশ্বসাহিত্যের ইতিহাসের অংশ হয়ে গেছে। পশ্চিম ইউক্রেনে কসাক অশ্বারোহীদের সাথে পোলিশ সৈন্যদের প্রবল সংঘর্ষ, বেসামরিক জনগোষ্ঠির উপর উভয় পক���ষের সীমাহীন নির্যাতন, বিস্তীর্ণ গ্রামাঞ্চলকে বিরানভূমিতে পর্যবসিত করা - এই সমস্তই বাবেল প্রত্যক্ষ করেছিলেন। যুদ্ধক্ষেত্রের বাস্তব অভিজ্ঞতা থেকে যেই ছোটগল্পগুলো লিখেছিলেন, সেগুলো তার কমান্ডারের পছন্দ হয়নি। বুদিওন্নি বলেছিলেন যে যুদ্ধের নৃশংসতা এমন নগ্নভাবে তুলে ধরে লেখক আদতে কসাক বাহিনীর মানহানি করেছেন। কিন্তু বাবেল তাতে থামেননি। ১৯২৬ সালে এক মলাটে বেরোয় একগুচ্ছ গল্প - শিরোনাম কোনার্মিয়া (লাল অশ্বারোহী)। রুশ সাহিত্যের ইতিহাসে একটি মাইলফলক সেটা তো বলার অপেক্ষা রাখে না, কিন্তু "রেড ক্যাভালরি"-র গুরুত্ব তাকেও ছাপিয়ে যায়। তার আগে মোপাসাঁ বা চেখভ, তার পরে হেমিংওয়ে বা বোর্হেসের মত আইজাক বাবেলের এই সংকলনটি ছোটগল্পের বিবর্তনে একটি নতুন অধ্যায় - এমন দাবি করলে কোনভাবেই অত্যুক্তি করা হবে না।।
(চলবে)
December 19, 2015
What I learned and what I continue to learn from Isaac Babel is nothing less than how to write.
When I first found "Guy De Maupassant" languishing in an anthology held over from my college years, I was, in the first place, captivated. In the second, infuriated. How could I have attended one of the top twenty English programs in the country and never once been introduced to Isaac Babel? It was enough to make me want to demand a tuition refund.
Babel was executed in 1940 by Stalin's regime and his stories, once celebrated by the Russian people, were nearly lost.
What is it about Babel that I admire, to the point of declaring him the author I most esteem? Even above my beloved Dostoevsky? Perhaps, a part of it is his mastery of the short story format. A format that I have never really enjoyed nor been able to utilize in any effective way.
His prose is precise. Many of his stories are fewer than ten pages. His style is simple and yet infused with an originality that scintillates. Kagan said it is "primordial." This one word says a great deal (and thus is appropriate in more ways than one when describing Babel).
What does it mean to be primordial? Without focusing too much on the dictionary definition, I would say it means to tap into something fundamental. Something so simple and basic as to be overlooked. Why, it's just ooze, you might say. But in that ooze, my friend, is everything that was required to make you.
In Babel's "primordial" prose, is all that is required. Little more and nothing less.
When I first found "Guy De Maupassant" languishing in an anthology held over from my college years, I was, in the first place, captivated. In the second, infuriated. How could I have attended one of the top twenty English programs in the country and never once been introduced to Isaac Babel? It was enough to make me want to demand a tuition refund.
Babel was executed in 1940 by Stalin's regime and his stories, once celebrated by the Russian people, were nearly lost.
What is it about Babel that I admire, to the point of declaring him the author I most esteem? Even above my beloved Dostoevsky? Perhaps, a part of it is his mastery of the short story format. A format that I have never really enjoyed nor been able to utilize in any effective way.
His prose is precise. Many of his stories are fewer than ten pages. His style is simple and yet infused with an originality that scintillates. Kagan said it is "primordial." This one word says a great deal (and thus is appropriate in more ways than one when describing Babel).
What does it mean to be primordial? Without focusing too much on the dictionary definition, I would say it means to tap into something fundamental. Something so simple and basic as to be overlooked. Why, it's just ooze, you might say. But in that ooze, my friend, is everything that was required to make you.
In Babel's "primordial" prose, is all that is required. Little more and nothing less.
March 29, 2022
Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You’re a tiger, a lion, a cat.
Close to five stars for the Odessa Tales and leaning towards three for the famed Red Cavalry. The latter felt contrived, misery chic across a burning plain. Maupassant remains my favorite story -- not sure where i first encountered it some 25 years ago. McMansions and frauds are almost quaint as such are timeless. I gather that one could float adultery as another eternal. I appreciate the frailty and today I can empathize with the awareness of general failure. I suppose that means I'm recovered?
Close to five stars for the Odessa Tales and leaning towards three for the famed Red Cavalry. The latter felt contrived, misery chic across a burning plain. Maupassant remains my favorite story -- not sure where i first encountered it some 25 years ago. McMansions and frauds are almost quaint as such are timeless. I gather that one could float adultery as another eternal. I appreciate the frailty and today I can empathize with the awareness of general failure. I suppose that means I'm recovered?
September 2, 2016
Rus edebiyatında önemli bir yeri olduğunu bildiğim ama şimdiye kadar hiç okumamış olduğum İzak Babel'in (1884-1940) toplu hikayeleri, insanın vahşi doğasını, savaşın acımasızlığını ortaya koymasıyla sarsıcı bir eser. Belki ara vererek okusam değerini daha iyi anlayabilirdim. Kitap aslında dört bölümden, dört ayrı kitaptan oluşuyor; erken dönem hikayeleri, Odesa hikayeleri, Kızıl Süvari hikayeleri ve son dönem hikayeleri. Kimi hikayeler ilk kez basılmış, bazıları tamamlanmamış roman parçaları. Stalin'in temizlik harekatı sırasında 20 dakikakda yargılanıp kurşuna dizilen ve sonra adı uzun süre Rus edebiyatından silinen Babel'in trajik hayatı da bu hikayelerin arkaplanını oluşturuyor. Zaten çoğu otobiyografik. O dönemde Rusya'daki Yahudi hayatına ve onların uğradığı zulme, sade bir dille ve duygusallaşmadan dikkat çekilmiş. Son dönem hikayelerinde Stalin'in kollektivizm hareketinin yarattığı acılara da bir-iki vurucu sahneyle değiniliyor. İçinizi açacak bir kitap değil. Ama tarihi, tarih kitaplarının yanı sıra, edebiyat aracılığıyla da daha iyi anlayabileceğimize bir örnek.
Ben, ilk basıldığında (2002) aldığım İngilizce çevirisinden okudum bu kitabı. Neredeyse 15 yıl beklemiş raflarımda yani. Bazı kitapların kaderi böyle oluyor işte. Bu eseri Can Yayınları birkaç yıl önce iki cilt olarak basmış. Hem de Rus klasiklerinin usta çevirmeni Ergin Altay'ın çevirisiyle. Sıkı Rus edebiyatı meraklılarına tavsiye olunur.
Ben, ilk basıldığında (2002) aldığım İngilizce çevirisinden okudum bu kitabı. Neredeyse 15 yıl beklemiş raflarımda yani. Bazı kitapların kaderi böyle oluyor işte. Bu eseri Can Yayınları birkaç yıl önce iki cilt olarak basmış. Hem de Rus klasiklerinin usta çevirmeni Ergin Altay'ın çevirisiyle. Sıkı Rus edebiyatı meraklılarına tavsiye olunur.
August 18, 2014
Punchy, taut, brisk, abrupt, grotesque, surprisingly subtle and rather laconic. To have ridden in the Red Calvary alone, as an Odessan Jew, was definitely an act of tremendous guts- to write about it effectively afterward is even more impressive, of course.
His short story "Guy De Maupassant" is perfect.
He was snuffed out far too early and was tragically intended to be forgotten by the Stalinist state but his prose sears and burns off the page as if even his sentences themselves are fighting to stay alive.
Perfect description of a writer: "with eyeglasses on my nose and autumn in my heart..."
October 18, 2017
Beauty in Confusion, Humor in Tragedy
Many years ago, as an undergraduate, I read these stories for a class on Soviet Literature. We had to do a lot of reading and I'm afraid I read these more as an assignment. Also, I was young, I hadn't really absorbed the process of thinking about literature, so I judged them according to the plots, nothing more. They were OK, I thought, but I hadn't grokked them in their fullness, to steal a phrase from Robert Heinlein. Now, over half a century later, I've just re-read them. What an impressive body of work! Who knows what Babel might have written if he hadn't been done away with in the massive Stalinist purges of the later 1930s?
There are three varieties of story. One, perhaps the most famous, is the body of work he wrote about his service with a Cossack regiment in the long-forgotten war between Russia and Poland in 1920-21. (Forgotten at least in most of the world.) Though Babel was a Jew and served with people who in some way were polar opposites to the Jews of that time, he does not make much of the differences, rather writing of incidents and the sad or terrible beauty of nature and human existence in those circumstances. The beauty of his descriptions and his penetrating insights into human character bring all these stories to life. The second variety of story concerns life in Odessa, then a vibrant port city with connections all over the world, with a mixed population of Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Romanians, Roma, Tatars, and more. He dwells more on the lower depths, the criminals, and grifters, though the upper class gets a look-in as well. These stories tend to be wryly humorous, though hardly knee-slappers. There are only a few of the third type of story, the autobiographical ones, how it was to grow up Jewish in a lower-middle class family in that time and place. Plus there's one thrown in about France.
All in all, these are wonderful stories, written by a master little known in America. If literature is your bag, you can't afford to miss them
Many years ago, as an undergraduate, I read these stories for a class on Soviet Literature. We had to do a lot of reading and I'm afraid I read these more as an assignment. Also, I was young, I hadn't really absorbed the process of thinking about literature, so I judged them according to the plots, nothing more. They were OK, I thought, but I hadn't grokked them in their fullness, to steal a phrase from Robert Heinlein. Now, over half a century later, I've just re-read them. What an impressive body of work! Who knows what Babel might have written if he hadn't been done away with in the massive Stalinist purges of the later 1930s?
There are three varieties of story. One, perhaps the most famous, is the body of work he wrote about his service with a Cossack regiment in the long-forgotten war between Russia and Poland in 1920-21. (Forgotten at least in most of the world.) Though Babel was a Jew and served with people who in some way were polar opposites to the Jews of that time, he does not make much of the differences, rather writing of incidents and the sad or terrible beauty of nature and human existence in those circumstances. The beauty of his descriptions and his penetrating insights into human character bring all these stories to life. The second variety of story concerns life in Odessa, then a vibrant port city with connections all over the world, with a mixed population of Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Romanians, Roma, Tatars, and more. He dwells more on the lower depths, the criminals, and grifters, though the upper class gets a look-in as well. These stories tend to be wryly humorous, though hardly knee-slappers. There are only a few of the third type of story, the autobiographical ones, how it was to grow up Jewish in a lower-middle class family in that time and place. Plus there's one thrown in about France.
All in all, these are wonderful stories, written by a master little known in America. If literature is your bag, you can't afford to miss them
January 2, 2019
نصفه ول شد
August 20, 2008
Between this translation by Constantine and an older one by Walter Morison, I prefer Constantine's. He is more direct, perhaps even snappy or punchy, without sacrificing any of Babel's famously strange and lyrical imagery. Not that Morison is weak, by any means. I first encountered Babel through Morison and was bowled over by these violent yet compassionate stories. Constantine just deepened exhiliration.
My favorite stories are "Dolgushov's Death," "My First Goose," and "Guy de Maupassant," which has one of the great lines in any short story: "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."
My favorite stories are "Dolgushov's Death," "My First Goose," and "Guy de Maupassant," which has one of the great lines in any short story: "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."
January 10, 2022
Het literaire werk van Isaak Babel is geniaal. Niets is vergelijkbaar met de beknopte, gestileerde, waanzinnige wreedheid in zijn verhalen.
In totaal drie keer gelezen; na de Engelse vertaling (Penguin Modern Classics), de oudere Nederlandse vertaling van Charles B. Timmer, nu de nieuwste editie bij Van Oorschot, vertaling van Froukje Slofstra.
In totaal drie keer gelezen; na de Engelse vertaling (Penguin Modern Classics), de oudere Nederlandse vertaling van Charles B. Timmer, nu de nieuwste editie bij Van Oorschot, vertaling van Froukje Slofstra.
January 23, 2019
آنجا که، آن کس که، آرامشش را جنگ ربوده می گوید:(ما به دنیا آمده ایم که از کار و جنگ و عشق لذت ببریم.) و انسان و انسان و انسان
.
.
و اما جمله طلایی:
هیچ نیزه ی آهنینی نمی تواند قلب انسان را مانند نقطه ای در جای مناسب بشکافد
.
.
و اما جمله طلایی:
هیچ نیزه ی آهنینی نمی تواند قلب انسان را مانند نقطه ای در جای مناسب بشکافد
November 16, 2025
Maybe 3.5. I didn’t read the whole collection—I read the Odessa stories, a good portion of the Red Cavalry stories, and all the later stories.
I first heard about Babel in a podcast with George Saunders. Babel was popular during his time, beginning with his Odessa stories—essentially Russian Jewish gangster stories set in Babel’s native Odessa. The Odessa stories were fun, but I can’t say that they particularly amazed me.
Babel then gained further popularity with his Red Cavalry stories, where he described the violence and lack of humanity during the Soviet invasion of Poland in the 1920’s. I see why these stories were popular—they are very graphic and shocking, and certainly must have surprised readers at the time to learn what was happening during the war. Unfortunately, these stories were also the cause of Babel’s death. In them, he describes the incompetency of several generals, using their real names. Those generals later rose to power, becoming close allies of Stalin’s, and Babel was subsequently arrested and killed by Stalin’s secret police under false charges of espionage. His last recorded words were, “I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.”
And I do wish that he had. Babel’s later stories, often autobiographical, are where he really shines. Whereas his previous stories were maybe 2-5 pages, these were longer. Often just one sentence in the story was enough to leave an impression. And sometimes it was just interesting to learn about life in Russia during his youth, including the terrible stories about pogroms he witnessed as a child.
Overall, Babel was a hit or miss for me. The hits are going down in my favorites, but the misses really missed… it is obvious that he was a total womanizer and the descriptions of women, as well as some of his “comedic” stories, really did not age well. Nevertheless, he was a fascinating writer, and I do wish that he could have finished his novel; we get to see the first few pages of the novel’s manuscript, unfinished, and they really were some of my favorite pages in the whole collection.
I first heard about Babel in a podcast with George Saunders. Babel was popular during his time, beginning with his Odessa stories—essentially Russian Jewish gangster stories set in Babel’s native Odessa. The Odessa stories were fun, but I can’t say that they particularly amazed me.
Babel then gained further popularity with his Red Cavalry stories, where he described the violence and lack of humanity during the Soviet invasion of Poland in the 1920’s. I see why these stories were popular—they are very graphic and shocking, and certainly must have surprised readers at the time to learn what was happening during the war. Unfortunately, these stories were also the cause of Babel’s death. In them, he describes the incompetency of several generals, using their real names. Those generals later rose to power, becoming close allies of Stalin’s, and Babel was subsequently arrested and killed by Stalin’s secret police under false charges of espionage. His last recorded words were, “I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.”
And I do wish that he had. Babel’s later stories, often autobiographical, are where he really shines. Whereas his previous stories were maybe 2-5 pages, these were longer. Often just one sentence in the story was enough to leave an impression. And sometimes it was just interesting to learn about life in Russia during his youth, including the terrible stories about pogroms he witnessed as a child.
Overall, Babel was a hit or miss for me. The hits are going down in my favorites, but the misses really missed… it is obvious that he was a total womanizer and the descriptions of women, as well as some of his “comedic” stories, really did not age well. Nevertheless, he was a fascinating writer, and I do wish that he could have finished his novel; we get to see the first few pages of the novel’s manuscript, unfinished, and they really were some of my favorite pages in the whole collection.
January 12, 2009
Critical Response: My First Goose by Isaac Babel translated by Walter Morison
My First Goose appears as part of Red Cavalry, which is essentially a novel told with short stories. Red Cavalry was first published in 1929 and is generally considered Babel’s finest work in short form. The larger plot is based on Babel’s own experience as a youth fighting among the ranks of Budenny’s notorious Cossack band. The plot of My First Goose details in first person perspective the appointment of a young law student to a band of Cassock soldiers near the Chugunov-Dobryvodka front. The structure is spare and almost dream-like; it could be described as an initiation story, hinging on the tension of the outsider receiving a test or rite by which he may become an insider. Seen another way this story is also a psychological depiction of war’s mental/emotional toll.
Characterization is essential to the piece as the development of Commander Savitsky into a sort of omniscient antagonist very subtly becomes the essential narrative arc. The story begins with a detailed description of the Commander—the most detailed of all the characters in the short piece. The greatest clue to story’s primary tension is given in the line: “His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in shining, riding boots.” The strange impression of this simile is heighted by an implied sword-like aggression or captivity, and serves to cast the Commander in starkly ironic light. Additionally, the arc of the story is achieved as the narrator curls up to sleep having passed his extemporaneous initiation at no small cost to his mental health, described thus: “We slept, all six of us, beneath a wooden roof that let in the stars, warming one another, our legs intermingled. I dreamed: and in my dreams saw women…” It is with this eerily fitting choice of images—legs and women—that Babel completes the story’s resolution. And, what synecdoche is thematically more fitting to a soldiers life—particularly that of the cavalry always on the move—than to ruminate on the legwork of marching and running to battle. And in questions of why we fight, perhaps the most poignant is why men are driven to war, and women are essentially motivated by peace.
This thematic tension is initially heightened through an ironic passage of dialogue in which the Commander smilingly dictates orders for some unfortunate soldier to either encounter the enemy and destroy them or face his own destruction at the Commander’s hands. The Commander then turns his attention on the narrator with “grey eyes that danced with merriment,” and proceeds to mock him for his learning, picking in particular the narrator’s glasses as an object of slang derision.
And, it is worth a pause here to note a masterful stroke of insight on the writer’s part. After this passage of devious jibes, Babel very slyly slips in a brief lyrical passage describing the village and the “dying sun… giving up is roseate ghost to the skies.” In a sentence describing the height of beauty, Babel mingles imagery from the grave and maintains his tension while giving the reader both orientation and a chance to breath, before being structurally enjambed with the psychopathic Cossacks, which our poor narrator must impress.
There is also a subtle psychological footnote made about the narrator in so far as the quartermaster who is carrying his trunk offers a clue as to how the narrator must pass Cossack’s test and simultaneously shows himself be a both a little crazy and unwilling to trust the narrator: “He came quite close to me, only to dart away again despairingly.” This description of a marginal character works to both hint to the reader some of the cues and body language, which the narrator is experiencing without going into detail about each person’s reaction to him.
The Cossacks are depicted as more insane than the quartermaster, as they trash the narrator’s belongings and mock him with the shouts of combat. Lyric beauty itself is then ironically employed to illustrate the narrator’s plight with a paragraph that delves into a scene of beauty and torment ending thus: “The sun fell upon me from behind the toothed hillocks, the Cossacks trod on my feet…”
It is then that the narrator fixes on the object of his emancipation—someone weaker than himself, namely the landlady. He proceeds to dominate the landlady, demanding food, refusing to acknowledge her weak pleas, cursing her slowness, and then brutally killing a goose in a passage that is as poetic as it is visceral. And, that’s it. By ruthlessly crushing the one figure smaller than himself, the narrator has passed the test. The Cossacks open their ranks to him, and the narrator even manages to display his literacy in a way that the illiterate madmen can understand by reading Lenin’s speech like a stand-up routine. The double irony is that it is in this fashion that the narrator spies out “exultingly the secret curve of Lenin’s straight line,” something that even resonates with his street smart new comrades.
Throughout My First Goose (including the title) descriptions and symbolism are used in unique even unbalanced ways: the Commander is described has having “a smell of scent;” the narrator’s response to the Commander causes him to “envy the flower and iron of that youthfulness;” the smoke of homes in the village mingle “hunger with desperate loneliness” in the narrator’s head; the Cossacks observe his violent outburst “stiff as heathen priests;” even the moon hangs above them “like a cheap earring.” These subtle details give added meaning to final line’s violent lushness.
An enviable work of biographical fiction, this piece seems both experimental and classical. Some figures move through the tale as though allegories of themselves, others seem to be so mud-drenched and sunburned they defy description, but each is vivid in his or her own turn. The story arc itself is so charged as to nearly become a character itself, and the resolution, while concise, is anything but abrupt as the words and impressions of the piece seem to filter through the readers mind like feedback.
My First Goose appears as part of Red Cavalry, which is essentially a novel told with short stories. Red Cavalry was first published in 1929 and is generally considered Babel’s finest work in short form. The larger plot is based on Babel’s own experience as a youth fighting among the ranks of Budenny’s notorious Cossack band. The plot of My First Goose details in first person perspective the appointment of a young law student to a band of Cassock soldiers near the Chugunov-Dobryvodka front. The structure is spare and almost dream-like; it could be described as an initiation story, hinging on the tension of the outsider receiving a test or rite by which he may become an insider. Seen another way this story is also a psychological depiction of war’s mental/emotional toll.
Characterization is essential to the piece as the development of Commander Savitsky into a sort of omniscient antagonist very subtly becomes the essential narrative arc. The story begins with a detailed description of the Commander—the most detailed of all the characters in the short piece. The greatest clue to story’s primary tension is given in the line: “His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in shining, riding boots.” The strange impression of this simile is heighted by an implied sword-like aggression or captivity, and serves to cast the Commander in starkly ironic light. Additionally, the arc of the story is achieved as the narrator curls up to sleep having passed his extemporaneous initiation at no small cost to his mental health, described thus: “We slept, all six of us, beneath a wooden roof that let in the stars, warming one another, our legs intermingled. I dreamed: and in my dreams saw women…” It is with this eerily fitting choice of images—legs and women—that Babel completes the story’s resolution. And, what synecdoche is thematically more fitting to a soldiers life—particularly that of the cavalry always on the move—than to ruminate on the legwork of marching and running to battle. And in questions of why we fight, perhaps the most poignant is why men are driven to war, and women are essentially motivated by peace.
This thematic tension is initially heightened through an ironic passage of dialogue in which the Commander smilingly dictates orders for some unfortunate soldier to either encounter the enemy and destroy them or face his own destruction at the Commander’s hands. The Commander then turns his attention on the narrator with “grey eyes that danced with merriment,” and proceeds to mock him for his learning, picking in particular the narrator’s glasses as an object of slang derision.
And, it is worth a pause here to note a masterful stroke of insight on the writer’s part. After this passage of devious jibes, Babel very slyly slips in a brief lyrical passage describing the village and the “dying sun… giving up is roseate ghost to the skies.” In a sentence describing the height of beauty, Babel mingles imagery from the grave and maintains his tension while giving the reader both orientation and a chance to breath, before being structurally enjambed with the psychopathic Cossacks, which our poor narrator must impress.
There is also a subtle psychological footnote made about the narrator in so far as the quartermaster who is carrying his trunk offers a clue as to how the narrator must pass Cossack’s test and simultaneously shows himself be a both a little crazy and unwilling to trust the narrator: “He came quite close to me, only to dart away again despairingly.” This description of a marginal character works to both hint to the reader some of the cues and body language, which the narrator is experiencing without going into detail about each person’s reaction to him.
The Cossacks are depicted as more insane than the quartermaster, as they trash the narrator’s belongings and mock him with the shouts of combat. Lyric beauty itself is then ironically employed to illustrate the narrator’s plight with a paragraph that delves into a scene of beauty and torment ending thus: “The sun fell upon me from behind the toothed hillocks, the Cossacks trod on my feet…”
It is then that the narrator fixes on the object of his emancipation—someone weaker than himself, namely the landlady. He proceeds to dominate the landlady, demanding food, refusing to acknowledge her weak pleas, cursing her slowness, and then brutally killing a goose in a passage that is as poetic as it is visceral. And, that’s it. By ruthlessly crushing the one figure smaller than himself, the narrator has passed the test. The Cossacks open their ranks to him, and the narrator even manages to display his literacy in a way that the illiterate madmen can understand by reading Lenin’s speech like a stand-up routine. The double irony is that it is in this fashion that the narrator spies out “exultingly the secret curve of Lenin’s straight line,” something that even resonates with his street smart new comrades.
Throughout My First Goose (including the title) descriptions and symbolism are used in unique even unbalanced ways: the Commander is described has having “a smell of scent;” the narrator’s response to the Commander causes him to “envy the flower and iron of that youthfulness;” the smoke of homes in the village mingle “hunger with desperate loneliness” in the narrator’s head; the Cossacks observe his violent outburst “stiff as heathen priests;” even the moon hangs above them “like a cheap earring.” These subtle details give added meaning to final line’s violent lushness.
An enviable work of biographical fiction, this piece seems both experimental and classical. Some figures move through the tale as though allegories of themselves, others seem to be so mud-drenched and sunburned they defy description, but each is vivid in his or her own turn. The story arc itself is so charged as to nearly become a character itself, and the resolution, while concise, is anything but abrupt as the words and impressions of the piece seem to filter through the readers mind like feedback.
June 23, 2021
***1/2
niet-uitgelezen
November 26, 2023Dit is een boek om af en toe een verhaal uit te lezen. Er zijn briljante verhalen bij, maar ook een heleboel waarbij ik de context mis. Voor nu leg ik het even aan de kant, misschien ga ik later verder.
Read
February 9, 2015We think of Russians as writing either sweepingly grand, romantic set pieces, or blackly humorous mutterings of the sort you might expect from a blind accordionist in a dark alley on a rainy night. Isaac Babel, however, is a different animal. He's writing army stories that make the war seem as bleak and absurd as it was, and these wonderful beautiful-loser stories that makes Odessa at the time seem like Beat-era North Beach or Isherwood's Berlin, and these shtetl stories that that are so charming and Chagall-ish that I can't help but fall in love. I get the feeling Babel has been relegated to a writer's writer-- and most people who are reading him are churning out a few stories themselves-- but anyone who likes Raymond Carver or Richard Yates or John Cheever should read him.
January 23, 2008
The Walter Morrison translation is the one you want. The new Norton editions are handsome and worth owning for hardcore fans but the translations are a bit clunky. Newcomers should start here to discover why Babel is such a great short story writer in modes ranging from bawdy stories about Odessa, caustic fables, laugh out loud sketches about the foibles of politics and love, poetic evocations of youth, and harrowingly bleak stories of wartime.
October 10, 2009
تو آدم خوش اقبالي هستي،آلكساندر كنستانتينووويچ.چند قرن پيش نياكانت پوشيده در پوست حيوانات اين طرف و آن طرف مي دويدند،در حالي كه من اغلب اوقات سنگيني قرن ها فرهنگ باستاني مردمم را احساس مي كنم،و نفسم زير بار آن تنگ مي شود
October 30, 2025
I would like to put some long quotes in here, but my copy of this book is packed somewhere, and it will be a long while before I am able to recover it.
Babel's writing kept me as a reader continually off balance in a bewitching sort of way. Witty, earnest, ironic, with enthralling prose and startling observations. I saw a review that described Babel's "brutal lyricism," and that's the perfect way to characterize this. This review is phenomenal and will do a much better job of explaining Isaac Babel than I can. I don't usually link outside reviews in my GR stuff but thought it was worthwhile this time.
Babel's writing kept me as a reader continually off balance in a bewitching sort of way. Witty, earnest, ironic, with enthralling prose and startling observations. I saw a review that described Babel's "brutal lyricism," and that's the perfect way to characterize this. This review is phenomenal and will do a much better job of explaining Isaac Babel than I can. I don't usually link outside reviews in my GR stuff but thought it was worthwhile this time.
December 8, 2025
Isaac Babel is the literary equivalent of a live wire — bright, dangerous, impossible to touch without feeling the current burn straight through you.
His collected stories are tiny grenades disguised as prose: brilliant, tightly constructed, emotionally devastating, and morally ambiguous in the way only a writer forged in the chaos of early Soviet history could produce.
Babel writes like he knows the world is ending tomorrow — every sentence is packed, urgent, glittering with danger.
There’s no wasted breath, no indulgent digression, no room for sentimentality. But there is feeling — raw, bruised, smouldering feeling that seeps through every line like blood through bandages.
Let’s start with the Red Cavalry cycle, because that’s where Babel is at his sharpest and most terrifying. Written from his experiences with Semyon Budyonny’s cavalry during the Polish-Soviet War, these stories read like dispatches from a front where reality has been shredded.
Violence is everywhere, but never glorified. It’s brutal, absurd, casual, and deeply personal. Babel writes about war with the strange clarity of a man who can hold beauty and horror in the same sentence without blinking.
He gives you landscapes drenched in sunlight and gore. He gives you soldiers who are sometimes children, sometimes murderers, sometimes philosophers. And he gives you himself — or at least his narrator — a bespectacled intellectual riding through this carnage with a notebook and a sense of existential dislocation. That tension — between the man of words and the world of violence — creates the signature Babel effect: irony sharpened into a blade.
Then come the Odessa Tales, which are the opposite of Red Cavalry in tone but just as sharp in craftsmanship.
These stories are swaggering, witty, full of criminal charm — centred on the legendary gangster Benya Krik, the “King.” Odessa becomes almost mythic in Babel’s hands: a city where Jewish humour, lawlessness, and desperate hope swirl together.
But don’t mistake the laughter for lightness — Babel’s Odessa is a place of hunger, exploitation, and the constant threat of collapse. The humour is survival. The swagger is camouflage.
What binds Babel’s writing across cycles is his absolute mastery of contradiction. His sentences are simultaneously lyrical and brutal. His characters can be pathetic and heroic within the same paragraph. His world is violent, but his prose is delicate — a fragile lace laid over a battlefield.
And then there’s the shadow hovering over the book: Babel’s real-life fate. Arrested by Stalin’s regime, executed in 1940, manuscripts destroyed.
When you read the collected stories, you feel that loss — the sense that a once-in-a-century voice was silenced at the height of its power.
That absence becomes part of the reading experience. Babel isn’t just a writer; he’s a ghost in Russian literature, one who wrote quickly because history gave him no time.
What makes his stories so enduring is how modern they feel. The violence, the dark humour, the fractured identity, the political absurdity — it all resonates today.
Reading Babel is like watching a documentary shot yesterday with fragments from a century ago. The stories refuse to age.
Here’s the truth: nobody writes like Isaac Babel. Nobody ever has. Nobody ever will.
Recommended.
His collected stories are tiny grenades disguised as prose: brilliant, tightly constructed, emotionally devastating, and morally ambiguous in the way only a writer forged in the chaos of early Soviet history could produce.
Babel writes like he knows the world is ending tomorrow — every sentence is packed, urgent, glittering with danger.
There’s no wasted breath, no indulgent digression, no room for sentimentality. But there is feeling — raw, bruised, smouldering feeling that seeps through every line like blood through bandages.
Let’s start with the Red Cavalry cycle, because that’s where Babel is at his sharpest and most terrifying. Written from his experiences with Semyon Budyonny’s cavalry during the Polish-Soviet War, these stories read like dispatches from a front where reality has been shredded.
Violence is everywhere, but never glorified. It’s brutal, absurd, casual, and deeply personal. Babel writes about war with the strange clarity of a man who can hold beauty and horror in the same sentence without blinking.
He gives you landscapes drenched in sunlight and gore. He gives you soldiers who are sometimes children, sometimes murderers, sometimes philosophers. And he gives you himself — or at least his narrator — a bespectacled intellectual riding through this carnage with a notebook and a sense of existential dislocation. That tension — between the man of words and the world of violence — creates the signature Babel effect: irony sharpened into a blade.
Then come the Odessa Tales, which are the opposite of Red Cavalry in tone but just as sharp in craftsmanship.
These stories are swaggering, witty, full of criminal charm — centred on the legendary gangster Benya Krik, the “King.” Odessa becomes almost mythic in Babel’s hands: a city where Jewish humour, lawlessness, and desperate hope swirl together.
But don’t mistake the laughter for lightness — Babel’s Odessa is a place of hunger, exploitation, and the constant threat of collapse. The humour is survival. The swagger is camouflage.
What binds Babel’s writing across cycles is his absolute mastery of contradiction. His sentences are simultaneously lyrical and brutal. His characters can be pathetic and heroic within the same paragraph. His world is violent, but his prose is delicate — a fragile lace laid over a battlefield.
And then there’s the shadow hovering over the book: Babel’s real-life fate. Arrested by Stalin’s regime, executed in 1940, manuscripts destroyed.
When you read the collected stories, you feel that loss — the sense that a once-in-a-century voice was silenced at the height of its power.
That absence becomes part of the reading experience. Babel isn’t just a writer; he’s a ghost in Russian literature, one who wrote quickly because history gave him no time.
What makes his stories so enduring is how modern they feel. The violence, the dark humour, the fractured identity, the political absurdity — it all resonates today.
Reading Babel is like watching a documentary shot yesterday with fragments from a century ago. The stories refuse to age.
Here’s the truth: nobody writes like Isaac Babel. Nobody ever has. Nobody ever will.
Recommended.
December 22, 2010
The stories are divided into four groups: "Early Stories," "'Autobiographical' Stories," "Red Cavalry", and "Odessa Stories." The stories, sometimes more like sketches, in "Red Cavalry" describe his experiences when he joined the Red Cossacks in the short 1920 war against Poland. The emphasis is on the horrors of war and their effect on the men who fight—some rising to heroic action, some unable to cope; some unexpectedly rising to leadership, some escaping to brutalism. In some respects they are equivalent to Crane's Red Badge of Courage. The stories demonstrate that little has changed in the way men deal with the barbarities of war. A young peasant is elevated to a position of leadership in the field, and he rides away from battle with "the lordly indifference of a Tartar kahn." On the other hand the narrator complains ""The chronicle of our humdrum evil doings constricts me indefatigably, like a heart complaint." A red Cossack takes vicious revenge on white Russian villagers who were complicit in the murder of his parents.
The "Odessa Stories" describe a rough kind of Yiddish patriarchy. Benya Krik, the central figure of many of these tales rules the town with an iron hand. While the "Autobiographical Stories" may not be all that autobiographical, they do seem to realistically depict a moment in the history of the Russian Jewish community through the eyes of what may well be a typical Jewish child. In "The Story of My Dovecote," the young narrator's childhood innocence embodied in his purchase of pet doves is destroyed by a brutal pogrom, which not only kills his birds, but his Grand-uncle as well. "First Love" continues the tale, as the reader is shown the devastating effect of the pogrom on the boy's father. Other stories emphasize the importance of learning and art as a means for the Jewish child to get ahead in the gentile world.
Isaac Babel is a writer whose work deserves to be better known. He gives life to a world long past, in some ways not unlike other writers such as Zweig or Roth.
The "Odessa Stories" describe a rough kind of Yiddish patriarchy. Benya Krik, the central figure of many of these tales rules the town with an iron hand. While the "Autobiographical Stories" may not be all that autobiographical, they do seem to realistically depict a moment in the history of the Russian Jewish community through the eyes of what may well be a typical Jewish child. In "The Story of My Dovecote," the young narrator's childhood innocence embodied in his purchase of pet doves is destroyed by a brutal pogrom, which not only kills his birds, but his Grand-uncle as well. "First Love" continues the tale, as the reader is shown the devastating effect of the pogrom on the boy's father. Other stories emphasize the importance of learning and art as a means for the Jewish child to get ahead in the gentile world.
Isaac Babel is a writer whose work deserves to be better known. He gives life to a world long past, in some ways not unlike other writers such as Zweig or Roth.
June 16, 2010
ايساك بابل در سال 1894 در منطقه اي فقير نشين در اودسا متولد شد.
فراگيري زبانهاي انگليسي، فرانسه و آلماني و هم چنين رفاه و فقري كه او در دوران زندگي خود شاهد آن بود باعث شد تا از او نويسنده اي توانا بسازد. نثر ايساك بابل تقليد ناپذير است و به همين دليل نويسنده اي نمي تواند ادعا كند كه شاگرد اوست. بابل زير سلطه حكومت تزاري كه محدوديتهاي قانوني سختي را بر مردم تحميل مي كرد و به ويژه يهوديان را تحت فشار قرار مي داد تبديل به نويسنده اي مي شود كه چشم انداري گسترده دارد. نوشته هاي بابل صادقانه و طنزآميز است. كشاكشي ميان خشونت و رافت در كارهايش نهفته است. خشونتي كه شكلي شاعرانه مي يابد. خانم مژده دقيقي در ترجمه اي خوب ظرافت اين تصوير ها را حفظ كرده است. حضور زندگي و عشق در جاي جاي كارهاي بابل برجسته و ماندگار است. شخصيت هاي داستانيهاي او همه از مردمي هستند كه در اطراف او زندگي مي كنند. او از متن زندگي مي نويسد و بسياري از داستانهايش منتزع از اتفاقاتي است كه براي خودش بوجود آمده است. اعدام فاجعه بار بابل در حكومت استالين به جرم جاسوسي و رفع اين اتهام چهارده سال بعد همه حاكي از اقدامي عجولانه براي نابودي مردي است كه نظام كمونيستي در روسيه را زير علامت سئوال مي برد. انتشار كتاب « سواره نظام سرخ » او را در دوره خود مشهورترين نويسنده روسيه مي سازد. آشنايي با ماكسيم گوركي و آندره ژيد و مسافرتهاي بسياري كه بابل در طي دوران پرآشوب روسيه انجام مي دهد زمينه اتهامات جاسوسي او را فراهم مي كند. او در فضايي پر تنش و شرايطي كابوس وار به ثبت وقايع و داستانهايي مي پردازد كه انسان و فرديت او ناديده گرفته مي شود و در جامعه اشتراكي مورد نظر استالين فرديت تخريب مي گردد و مجالي براي انسان بودن نيست و خصوصيات ويژه انساني به تدريج محو مي گردد. ايساك بابل در سال 1939 دستگير مي شود. نوشته هايش توقيف و نابود مي گردد و بسياري از نمايشنامه ها، ترجمه هاي نيمه كاره و فيلم ها نيز و طنزهايش.
سال بعد در بيست و ششم ژانويه پس از محاكمه غير علني تير باران مي شود و طنز آخر ابطال حكم مجازات بابل از سوي ديوان عالي اتحاد شوروي در سال 1954 است.
ماكسيم گوركي به رومن رولان نوشت بابل اميد بزرگ ادبيات روسيه است.
فراگيري زبانهاي انگليسي، فرانسه و آلماني و هم چنين رفاه و فقري كه او در دوران زندگي خود شاهد آن بود باعث شد تا از او نويسنده اي توانا بسازد. نثر ايساك بابل تقليد ناپذير است و به همين دليل نويسنده اي نمي تواند ادعا كند كه شاگرد اوست. بابل زير سلطه حكومت تزاري كه محدوديتهاي قانوني سختي را بر مردم تحميل مي كرد و به ويژه يهوديان را تحت فشار قرار مي داد تبديل به نويسنده اي مي شود كه چشم انداري گسترده دارد. نوشته هاي بابل صادقانه و طنزآميز است. كشاكشي ميان خشونت و رافت در كارهايش نهفته است. خشونتي كه شكلي شاعرانه مي يابد. خانم مژده دقيقي در ترجمه اي خوب ظرافت اين تصوير ها را حفظ كرده است. حضور زندگي و عشق در جاي جاي كارهاي بابل برجسته و ماندگار است. شخصيت هاي داستانيهاي او همه از مردمي هستند كه در اطراف او زندگي مي كنند. او از متن زندگي مي نويسد و بسياري از داستانهايش منتزع از اتفاقاتي است كه براي خودش بوجود آمده است. اعدام فاجعه بار بابل در حكومت استالين به جرم جاسوسي و رفع اين اتهام چهارده سال بعد همه حاكي از اقدامي عجولانه براي نابودي مردي است كه نظام كمونيستي در روسيه را زير علامت سئوال مي برد. انتشار كتاب « سواره نظام سرخ » او را در دوره خود مشهورترين نويسنده روسيه مي سازد. آشنايي با ماكسيم گوركي و آندره ژيد و مسافرتهاي بسياري كه بابل در طي دوران پرآشوب روسيه انجام مي دهد زمينه اتهامات جاسوسي او را فراهم مي كند. او در فضايي پر تنش و شرايطي كابوس وار به ثبت وقايع و داستانهايي مي پردازد كه انسان و فرديت او ناديده گرفته مي شود و در جامعه اشتراكي مورد نظر استالين فرديت تخريب مي گردد و مجالي براي انسان بودن نيست و خصوصيات ويژه انساني به تدريج محو مي گردد. ايساك بابل در سال 1939 دستگير مي شود. نوشته هايش توقيف و نابود مي گردد و بسياري از نمايشنامه ها، ترجمه هاي نيمه كاره و فيلم ها نيز و طنزهايش.
سال بعد در بيست و ششم ژانويه پس از محاكمه غير علني تير باران مي شود و طنز آخر ابطال حكم مجازات بابل از سوي ديوان عالي اتحاد شوروي در سال 1954 است.
ماكسيم گوركي به رومن رولان نوشت بابل اميد بزرگ ادبيات روسيه است.
October 5, 2015
"I had dreams and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed."
First things first: the cover of this edition is hilariously bad. It's a bland, black-and-white photograph of the author ('disappeared' Jewish Russian writer, Isaac Babel) that makes him look like an insane Chinese shopkeeper.
Second things second: as with most story collections, things tend to be hit or miss, but for this one the hits are really all in the central section, 'Red Cavalry,' which, if it had been isolated, would have made me rate this a solid four stars. The stories in that section are concise and powerful and violent, written with a potent, intentionally laconic style. You can tell that he knew how to use the impact of a full stop, and he usually ends each story with a punch, like a coup de grace. As it happens, this collection also includes 'Early Stories,' 'Autobiographical Stories' and 'Odessa Stories' which aren't quite as good.
Lastly: Babel took his laconic style all the way to utter silence in the 1930's. He once said "I am the master of the genre of silence," more in a dig at the Soviet authorities than any kind of boast. It's a cruel coincidence that by the time he was really prepared to start writing, the Soviet authorities were cracking down on any literary expression that didn't meet strict, Stalinist, social-realism guidelines. Despite (or due to) his friendship with Yagoda, one of the many ill-fated chiefs of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, by 1940 he was very much out of favor, and likely executed immediately after his arrest.
"So I shall write to you only about what my eyes have seen with their own hands."
First things first: the cover of this edition is hilariously bad. It's a bland, black-and-white photograph of the author ('disappeared' Jewish Russian writer, Isaac Babel) that makes him look like an insane Chinese shopkeeper.
Second things second: as with most story collections, things tend to be hit or miss, but for this one the hits are really all in the central section, 'Red Cavalry,' which, if it had been isolated, would have made me rate this a solid four stars. The stories in that section are concise and powerful and violent, written with a potent, intentionally laconic style. You can tell that he knew how to use the impact of a full stop, and he usually ends each story with a punch, like a coup de grace. As it happens, this collection also includes 'Early Stories,' 'Autobiographical Stories' and 'Odessa Stories' which aren't quite as good.
Lastly: Babel took his laconic style all the way to utter silence in the 1930's. He once said "I am the master of the genre of silence," more in a dig at the Soviet authorities than any kind of boast. It's a cruel coincidence that by the time he was really prepared to start writing, the Soviet authorities were cracking down on any literary expression that didn't meet strict, Stalinist, social-realism guidelines. Despite (or due to) his friendship with Yagoda, one of the many ill-fated chiefs of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, by 1940 he was very much out of favor, and likely executed immediately after his arrest.
"So I shall write to you only about what my eyes have seen with their own hands."
September 23, 2024
An astounding collection. The short stories of Isaac Babel are unlike those of any other author I've read. At first I wasn't sure if I liked them: I found them disarming in an odd way, concise but directionless, too compressed for my taste; but even though they are very precise the prose they are rendered in still manages to be extremely lyrical and mysterious. Babel's poetic but muscular style makes it all the more devastating when an enigmatic or hallowed scene suddenly explodes into direct or indirect violence...
Babel himself was an odd contradiction in terms: a Jewish intellectual who became a Bolshevik and fought for the Ukrainian cossacks against Poland in the mostly forgotten Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921. Poland rang rings around the Russians and Ukrainians at the beginning: there were Whites, Reds and Makhno's anarchists milling about in confusion. Many of Babel's stories deal with this conflict and are the best war stories I've ever read.
Other story cycles include a series set among the Jewish gangsters of Odessa starring Benya Krik (the most famous hoodlum of that city) and also a set of powerful and darkly funny autobiographical tales. But my favourite of all Babel's stories is probably 'The Sin of Jesus', a very peculiar and daring fantasy that criticises the way things are run not just on earth but also in heaven. It's an important story and Babel is an incredibly important figure in 20th Century World Literature -- the equal of Kafka, Nabokov and Proust.
Babel himself was an odd contradiction in terms: a Jewish intellectual who became a Bolshevik and fought for the Ukrainian cossacks against Poland in the mostly forgotten Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921. Poland rang rings around the Russians and Ukrainians at the beginning: there were Whites, Reds and Makhno's anarchists milling about in confusion. Many of Babel's stories deal with this conflict and are the best war stories I've ever read.
Other story cycles include a series set among the Jewish gangsters of Odessa starring Benya Krik (the most famous hoodlum of that city) and also a set of powerful and darkly funny autobiographical tales. But my favourite of all Babel's stories is probably 'The Sin of Jesus', a very peculiar and daring fantasy that criticises the way things are run not just on earth but also in heaven. It's an important story and Babel is an incredibly important figure in 20th Century World Literature -- the equal of Kafka, Nabokov and Proust.
November 29, 2014
Кратки, невероятни и абсолютно необясними - какви разкази само!!!
February 16, 2024
نابغهای قدر نایافته، نویسندهای که بیعدالتی و ظلم دید، چقدر؟ تا منتهی امکان!آ
October 11, 2021
***1/2
Soms een wat wisselvallige selectie, maar dat moet je al lezend ontdekken...
Soms een wat wisselvallige selectie, maar dat moet je al lezend ontdekken...
January 10, 2024
Issac Babel was a Russian journakist, playwright and short story writer and all his work is included in this collection
The most renown is his Red Cavalry series highlighting incidents in the Polish Russian war. This part of the books includes his notes, the 1920 diary and short fictional stories which are based on actual events he experienced. In a way this work reminds me of Vasily Grossman albeit Grossman wrote sbout the German invasion of Russia. Babel's accounts are, however more poetic and emotional
Babel's short stories particularly his Odessa and Petersburg tales are injected with compassion and wit yet at the same time hypnotic
Babel's books were banned in by Lenin and in 1941 he was arrested and execiuted so he did not see his astories published in his lifetime.
The book is a mammoth read and does take some time. - initially I started this book a while ago and then abandoned it but resurrected it over the Christmas holidays. A worthwhile read
The most renown is his Red Cavalry series highlighting incidents in the Polish Russian war. This part of the books includes his notes, the 1920 diary and short fictional stories which are based on actual events he experienced. In a way this work reminds me of Vasily Grossman albeit Grossman wrote sbout the German invasion of Russia. Babel's accounts are, however more poetic and emotional
Babel's short stories particularly his Odessa and Petersburg tales are injected with compassion and wit yet at the same time hypnotic
Babel's books were banned in by Lenin and in 1941 he was arrested and execiuted so he did not see his astories published in his lifetime.
The book is a mammoth read and does take some time. - initially I started this book a while ago and then abandoned it but resurrected it over the Christmas holidays. A worthwhile read
Displaying 1 - 30 of 146 reviews