The Complete Works of Isaac Babel

By Isaac Babel

Book Overview

Considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--and the most revered short-story writer since Chekhov--Isaac Babel (1894-1940) left an extraordinary literary legacy that continues to grow, remarkably, more than sixty years after his death in Lubyanka Prison at the hands of Stalin's secret police. Despite Babel's celebrated stature--which had already been achieved during his lifetime--the whole of his work, owing to his arrest and the state of affairs in the Soviet Union, was never assembled in one place.

This magnificent edition of Babel's collected work fulfills a lifelong ambition of Babel's daughter, Nathalie, who has authorized and edited the entire collection, and has collaborated with award-winning translator Peter Constantine in readying the work for publication. Every story or selection included in this volume (147 in total) has been newly edited and translated, beginning with Babel's first published story, "Old Shloyme," originally published in 1913, and concluding with two scenes from a screenplay that Babel did not live to see made into a film. Included in The Complete Works are stories that will be familiar to Babel enthusiasts, like the "Red Cavalry" cycle and his diaries, as well as untranslated stories and other works that appear in English for the first time.

To read Babel is to relive the wild and often terrifying swings of twentieth-century Russian history. No writer has conveyed with such emotion and convulsive energy the tragic story of a modern nation that remained a prisoner of its brutal and repressive past. Combining the compassion of Dostoevsky with the mordant wit of Chekhov, Babel injected a daring social criticism and a palpable sexual tension into the literary climate of post-tsarist Russia. In the process, he created a style so vivid, so lacerating, and so utterly hypnotic that his stories have come to define the sanguinary landscape of the Soviet Union in the years between the two world wars.

As these stories illustrate, and as Cynthia Ozick insightfully observes in her passionate introduction, Babel was a man of acute contradictions. Born in the cosmopolitan port city of Odessa during the long reign of Alexander II, Babel was quite competent in both Hebrew and Yiddish but, influenced by both Flaubert and Maupassant, wrote his first stories in fluent French. His often comic portrayal of characters--such as the ruthless Jewish mobsters depicted in his Benya Krik stories--resulted from observing them firsthand as a boy in the Moldavanka neighborhood of Odessa. As Ozick notes, the "breadth and scope of his social compass enabled him to see through the eyes of peasants, soldiers, priests, rabbis, children, artists, actors, women of all classes. . . . He was at once a poet of the city ('the glass sun of Petersburg') and a lyricist of the countryside ('the walls of sunset collapsing into the sky')."

Arranged sequentially in fourteen sections, The Complete Works traces the entire arc of Babel's literary career, beginning with early stories, which are followed by The Odessa Stories and The Red Cavalry Stories. Also included are his Reports from St. Petersburg (1918), the remarkable 1920 Diary, and reports from Soviet Georgia and France, where his wife, Evgenia, and his daughter, Nathalie, lived. Many of his later stories (1925-38) reflect a compelling literary quality and abrupt change in style that have challenged translators for years. An accomplished playwright and screenwriter, Babel, at the height of his popularity, began writing for the Soviet cinema as early as the 1920s, and many of these works have never been translated before. This edition also includes a foreword and a biographical afterword by Nathalie Babel, a translator's preface and annotations throughout by Peter Constantine, and a chronology by Gregory Freidin, regarded as one of the foremost Babel scholars in the world.

Unprecedented for both its literary and its scholarly achievement, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel will stand as Babel's final, most enduring legacy.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393048462
• ISBN13: 9780393048469
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 1072 Pages
• Weight: 3.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 6.8" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Essential

Babel's output was relatively small. His reputation rests on his short stories, particularly the stories about his hometown of Odessa and the remarkable Red Cavalry sequence describing the Soviet invasion of Poland. This work is, nonetheless, a high point of 20th century literature. Babel was a great writer, putting more into short stories than many talented writers can put into whole novels. His descriptions of life under the Czar, seen particularly through the prism of Jewish gangsters in Odessa, are remarkably gripping accounts of a repressive society. The Red Cavalry sequence, a tour de force of vivid narration and psychological insight gets right to the heart of the brutality that characterized much of the 20th century.

A master storyteller

Babel is one of the great storytellers. The man who according to his description as recorded by Lionel Trilling had ' spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart' was a pale Yeshiva- boy type thrust into the world of Cossack violence. He recorded that violence and the horror of it with chilling accuracy in his 'Red Cavalry' stories. More ebullient are the stories of the Odessa Jewish underworld and its Robin- Hood Benya Krik. Babel was a writer of the mot juste who grew up on Flaubert and Maupassant. He wrote and rewrote his stories, thirty or forty times. "No steel pierces the heart more poignantly than a period in the right place'. The most memorable of his stories for me is one of his childhood 'For my Dovecoat' about the experiencing of a pogrom, the murder of a grandfather. Babel has been celebrated by many of the most distinguished modern writers and critics. Deservedly so. He is a true master.

Masterful

Babel is a masterful teller of short stories. His stories, most of which do not exceed a few pages, speak volumes about the extraordinary times in which he lived. For me, the most interesting aspect of Babel's writing is his ability to convey how the onset of Soviet power changed everything--and yet changed nothing (ie, the cossacks of the Red Army seeking to spread world communist revolution in Poland, and simultaneously reprising past cossack wars and pogroms in the region). Babel lived in a fascinating, uncertain time, and his vivid diaries describe the Red Army's exhilaration as they sweep westward into Poland--seemingly as the vanguard of a world revolution--and their confusion and dejection as the Polish pans push them back. This book was too intense and too homogeneous for me to read all at once: many of Babel's stories feature the same themes (chiefly Jewish life and red cavalry) and after a few hundred pages a definite sense of deja vu sets in as Babel reworks various characters, scenes, etc. Nonetheless, a fantastic book to read in smaller chunks.

Read this Book

Hemingway was a wimp. Babel's stories about men and their ludicrous justifications for their appalling violence are rigorous and strangly fair. He does not judge; and the morality of the reader is revealed. The Polish front during an inept campaign, peopled by a fascinating war and horse culture is the subject of the Red Cavalry Stories. Any one who lives with or loves horses would be fascinated by them. The interaction of animal and man is, I think, rarely so well written.

A Treasure Chest

Isaac Babel was a Russian Jewish writer who wrote his most famous works -- all short stories -- under the Soviet regime in the 1920s. He was tragically killed during the Stalin purges of the late 1930s. His work is unique from so many perspectives: he was a Jew, but he did not live in the Pale or write in Yiddish (he was a modern, secular Jew how lived in Odessa and wrote in Russian); he fought in the Red Army in the Russian Revolution, became disillusioned, but never left Russia; he wrote only short works such as short stories in screen plays.In this one volume, his daughter has collected every available work that he ever wrote. While there were many manuscripts that were destroyed when Babel was purged, this will stand as his complete works, all recently translated.In addition to Babel's own writings, there are wonderful introductions from Cynthia Ozick, the translator Peter Constantine and Babel's daughter, Nathalie Babel. Ms. Babel also includes, as an afterward, a wonderful memoir of how she came to produce this work, starting with the gripping tale of her and her mother's life in France during WWII. Also included is a timeline of Babel's life. These materials alone make for fascinating reading as you dip into Babel's literary works.Of course, it is Babel's short stories that are the star attraction. There are three main collections, the Odessa stories, which tell the tales of Russian Jewish thugs living in a district in Odessa, the Red Cavelry stories, which are based on Babel's experiences in the Red Army in the Russian Revolution, and the Dovecote stories, which are autobiographical tales of Babel's youth. The stories are all lean and sparsely written with a biting irony that attacks all facets of Russian life. This is not a book one is likely to or needs to read from cover to cover at one time. It is, however, perfectly designed to let one slowly absorb this great writer as you dip into this over time.