Isaak Babel
Russian author
born July
13 [July 1, Old Style], 1894,
Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire
died Jan. 27, 1940, Moscow,
Russia, U.S.S.R.
Soviet
short-story writer noted for his
war stories and Odessa tales. He
was considered an innovator in
the early Soviet period and
enjoyed a brilliant reputation
in the early 1930s.
Born into a Jewish family,
Babel grew up in an atmosphere
of persecution that is reflected
in the sensitivity, pessimism,
and morbidity of his stories.
His first works, later included
in his Odesskiye rasskazy
(“Odessa Tales”), were published
in 1916 in St. Petersburg in a
monthly edited by Maksim Gorky;
but the tsarist censors
considered them crude and
obscene. Gorky praised the young
author’s terse, naturalistic
style, at the same time advising
him to “see the world.” Babel
proceeded to do so, serving in
the Cossack First Cavalry Army
and in the political police
(Babel’s daughter denied this),
working for newspapers, and
holding a number of other jobs
over the next seven years.
Perhaps his most significant
experience was as a soldier in
the war with Poland. Out of that
campaign came the group of
stories known as Konarmiya
(1926; Red Cavalry). These
stories present different
aspects of war through the eyes
of an inexperienced,
intellectual young Jew who
reports everything graphically
and with naive precision. Though
senseless cruelty often pervades
the stories, they are lightened
by a belief that joy and
happiness must exist somewhere,
if only in the imagination.
The “Odessa Tales” were
published in book form in 1931.
This cycle of realistic and
humorous sketches of the
Moldavanka—the ghetto suburb of
Odessa—vividly portrays the
lifestyle and jargon of a group
of Jewish bandits and gangsters,
led by their “king,” the
legendary Benya Krik.
Babel wrote other short
stories, as well as two plays (Zakat,
1928; Mariya, 1935). In the
early 1930s his literary
reputation in the Soviet Union
was high, but, in the atmosphere
of increasing Stalinist cultural
regimentation, Communist critics
began to question whether his
works were compatible with
official literary doctrine.
After the mid-1930s Babel lived
in silence and obscurity. His
last published work in the
Soviet Union was a short tribute
to Gorky in 1938. His powerful
patron had died in 1936; in May
1939 Babel was arrested, and he
was executed some eight months
later. After Stalin’s death in
1953, Babel was rehabilitated,
and his stories were again
published in the Soviet Union.
Encyclopaedia
Britannyca
