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Isaac Babel

 
Biography: Isaac Emmanuelovich Babel
 
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The Russian writer Isaac Emmanuelovich Babel (1894-1941) was a master of the short story. His compact, vivid stories of Jewish life in the Odessa of his childhood and of the Russian Revolution are written with great subtlety and intense moral passion.

Isaac Babel was born on July 1, 1894, in Odessa to middle-class orthodox Jewish parents. As a boy, he studied the Bible and the Talmud intensively at home, and at school he was an outstanding student, writing stories in French by the time he was 15. He absorbed a detailed knowledge of Jewish life and culture, which he used in many of his later stories. In 1915 he left home for St. Petersburg, where he was befriended by the writer Maxim Gorky, who as a magazine editor published two of Babel's stories in 1916. The Russian authorities, however, labeled the stories subversive and indecent, and Babel would have been prosecuted but for the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

For the next few years Babel abandoned literature. He engaged in political, journalistic, and administrative activities for the Bolsheviks, and in 1920 he became a political commissar in a Cossack cavalry regiment fighting for the Bolsheviks in Poland. This experience was the basis of short stories he began publishing in 1923, which were collected in the volume Red Cavalry (1926) and established his fame. They are stories of extreme brutality, violence, and cruelty, often told with grim, ironic humor. Babel's style is ornate, with colorful imagery and startling metaphors, while his technique of moral understatement emphasizes shock and moral impact.

Babel's stories of Jewish life in Odessa, in a collection first published in 1926 but subsequently augmented, are largely based on his own, often painful boyhood and youth. "The Story of My Dovecote" recounts the terrifying experiences he and his family suffered as victims of a pogrom, or organized massacre. There are also extravagantly humorous tales of gangsters in the Odessa underworld.

Babel lived in France periodically from 1928 to 1934. He found writing increasingly difficult in the oppressive environment of Soviet literature during the 1930s. Although recognized as a major author, he was viewed with suspicion by U.S.S.R. authorities and published little during this period. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police on unspecified charges in 1939 and died in a Siberian concentration camp on March 17, 1941.

Babel's name was officially obliterated from the annals of Soviet literature for the 15 years following his arrest. In 1954 he was formally rehabilitated, and many of his works have been reprinted since then.

Further Reading

The most thorough biographical account of Babel is in his own The Lonely Years, 1925-1939: Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence, edited by Nathalie Babel (trans. 1964). There are valuable additional accounts, including reminiscences of the writer by his contemporaries, in Babel's You Must Know Everything: Stories, 1915-1937, edited by Nathalie Babel (trans. 1969). Both volumes contain important stories never before published. Interesting interpretations of his writing are in the introduction by Lionel Trilling to Babel's Collected Stories (1955), and in Edward J. Brown, Russian Literature since the Revolution (1963).

Additional Sources

Falen, James E., Isaac Babel, Russian master of the short story, Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press 1974.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel
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(born July 13, 1894, Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire — died Jan. 27, 1940, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) Russian short-story writer. Born Jewish in Ukraine, Babel grew up in an atmosphere of persecution that is reflected in his stories. Maksim Gorky encouraged him to travel abroad to expand his horizons. Out of his experience as a soldier in the war with Poland came the stories in Red Cavalry (1926). His Odessa Tales (1931) include realistic and humorous sketches of the Jewish ghetto outside Odessa. Initially well regarded in the Soviet Union, in the late 1930s Babel's writing was found incompatible with official literary doctrine. He was arrested in 1939 and later executed. He is one of Russia's greatest writers of short stories.

For more information on Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel, visit Britannica.com.

 
Russian History Encyclopedia: Isaac Emmanuyelovich Babel
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(1894 - 1940), regarded as one of the finest writers of fiction of the twentieth century.

Babel was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Odessa. Though nonobservant, he remained interested in Jewish culture - he translated Shalom Aleichem - and Jewish identity became a central interest of his art. Odessa was a vibrant port city, without a heritage of serfdom, more cosmopolitan than was the custom in Russia. Babel saw it as fertile ground for a southern school of Russian literature - sunny, muscular, centered on sensuous experience, free of the metaphysical yearnings and somber seriousness of the Russian tradition. French literature attracted him. He had a Flaubertian dedication to his craft; Maupassant's skill in depicting the surface of things was a model. Babel's playful side is most evident in his first cycle of short stories, The Odessa Tales (1921 - 1924). But an age of war, revolution, and terror demanded sterner stuff. Babel responded with his tragic Red Cavalry (1923 - 1925) and his study of the complexities of growing up Jewish, The Story of My Dovecot (1925 - 1931).

Babel was sympathetic to the aims of the Russian Revolution and served it in several capacities, including a stint as translator for the secret police (Cheka). For a long time he enjoyed the benefits and celebrity of a Soviet writer, though he eventually became a victim of Soviet terror. In 1920 he signed on as correspondent with the First Cavalry Army, a leading unit of the Reds in the civil war, at the time engaged in battle with Poland. His summer with this largely Cossack army gave him the material for his great book of revolution and war.

Success brought pressures to conform. With the ascendancy of Josef Stalin and the mobilization of society commencing with the First Five-Year Plan (1928 - 1932), writers could no longer feel safe pursuing their private visions as long as they avoided criticism of communist rule. They were now expected to produce work useful to the state. Babel made abortive attempts to conform but mostly sought the safety of seclusion and silence. As he said at the First Congress of Soviet Writers: "I have so much respect for [the reader] that I am struck dumb." Nevertheless, he produced some outstanding work in the thirties, including "Guy de Maupassant" (1932) and "Di Grasso" (1937) - two parables of the life of the artist. He was arrested as a spy on May 15, 1939. Like millions of innocent men and women, he fell victim to Soviet tyranny; he was shot on January 27 of the following year.

Babel wrote many fine stories and several interesting plays. Among his best work are his cycles. The Odessa Tales treat a crew of Damon Runyon - like gangsters and their cohorts of the Jewish ghetto of Moldavanka. They are not clothed in realism's ordinary dress but in the colorful garments of romance or the crazy garb of comedy. The stories are designed to charm, not move the reader, though their rejection of Jewish resignation to suffering is a common theme for Babel. The four tales comprising The Story of My Dovecot have greater depth. They tell of the breaking away of a Jewish boy from his highly pressured home - the father is compensating for the indignities wrought by anti-Semitism. Red Cavalry is a masterpiece. It weaves its complex ways between irreconcilable antagonisms - of constancy and change, action and culture, revolution and tradition - to offer an image of the tragic character of human life.

Bibliography

Carden, Patricia. (1972). The Art of Isaac Babel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Ehre, Milton. (1986). Isaac Babel. Boston: Twayne.

Poggioli, Renato. (1957). "Isaac Babel in Retrospect." In The Phoenix and the Spider. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Trilling, Lionel. (1955). Introduction to The Collected Stories, by Isaac Babel. New York: New American Library.

—MILTON EHRE

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Isaac Emmanuelovich Babel
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Babel, Isaac Emmanuelovich (ē'säk əmänūā'ləvĭch bä'bəl) , 1894–1940, Russian writer, b. Odessa. Babel was quick to embrace the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, but in the end it was the regime born of that revolution that destroyed him. He won fame with Odessa Tales (1921–23), written in Russian-Jewish dialect, and Red Cavalry (1926, tr. 1929), dramatic stories based on his life in the army (he had concealed his Jewish identity) and employing the racy slang of the Kuban Cossacks with whom he rode. The original journal from which this book was written, 1920 Journal, was published in Russia as the Soviet Union disintegrated and translated into English in 1995. A brilliant litarary stylist, he wrote a uniquely terse and forceful prose, combining astringent Jewish irony with Russian caricature, lyricism with brutality, and comedy with bleakly grave subject matter. He also wrote the novel Benia Krik (1927) about an Odessan Jewish gangster, and turned to drama with Sunset (1928) and Maria (1935). Babel was criticized by the Communist party during the 1930s, arrested in 1939, and executed in 1940 after a 20-minute trial. After Stalin's death, some of his works were republished in censored form in the Soviet Union. Translations of his best stories appear in Collected Stories (1955) and You Must Know Everything (1969). The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by his daughter Nathalie, was published in English translation in 2001.

Bibliography

See memoir by his companion, Antonina Pirozhkova (tr. 1996); biography by J. Charyn (2005); studies by P. Carden (1972), R. W. Hallett (1972), J. E. Falen (1974), D. Mendelson (1982), M. Ehre (1986), and R. Mann (1994).

 
Quotes By: Isaac Babel
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Quotes:

"No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."

 
Wikipedia: Isaac Babel
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Isaac Babel

Born July 13, 1894(1894-07-13)
Odessa, Russian Empire
Died January 27, 1940 (aged 45)
Butyrka prison, Moscow, USSR
Occupation journalist, playwright, and short story writer
Ethnicity Jewish
Citizenship Russian, Soviet

Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаа́к Эммануи́лович Ба́бель, 13 July [O.S. 1 July] 1894 – January 27, 1940) was a Soviet journalist, playwright, and short story writer who was acclaimed by some as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry."[1]

Contents

Early years

Babel was born into a Jewish family in Odessa during a period of social unrest and mass exodus of Jews from the Russian Empire. Although he survived the 1905 pogrom with the help of Russian Orthodox neighbors, his great uncle Shoyl was one of about 300 Jews murdered.[2]

In his teens, Babel hoped to get into the preparatory class of the Nicolas I Odessa Commercial School. However, he first had to overcome the Jewish quota (10% within the Pale of Settlement, 5% outside and 3% for both capitals). Despite the fact that Babel received the passing grades, his place was given to another boy, whose parents had bribed the school officials. As a result he was schooled at home by private tutors.

In addition to regular school subjects, Babel also studied the Talmud and music. Inspired by his teacher of the French language and its literature, he so revered Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant that his own first stories were written in French.

After an unsuccessful attempt to enroll at Odessa University (again due to the quota), Babel entered Kiev Institute of Finance and Business. There he met Yevgenia Gronfein, his first wife. They eventually divorced, and Gronfein emigrated to France. Later Babel married Antonina Pirozhkova (Антонина Николаевна Пирожкова).

Early career

In 1915, Babel graduated and moved to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), in defiance of laws restricting Jews to residence within the Pale. In the capital he met the Russian writer Maxim Gorky who published some of his stories in his literary magazine Letopis' ("Летопись", "Chronicle"). Gorky advised the aspiring writer to gain more life experience and later Babel wrote in his autobiography: "... I owe everything to that meeting and still pronounce Alexey Maksimovich (Gorky's) name with love and admiration." One of his most famous autobiographical short stories, "The Story of My Dovecot" ("История моей голубятни"), is dedicated to Gorky.

The story "The Bathroom Window" was considered obscene by censors and Babel was charged with violating criminal code article 1001.

In the next seven years, Babel fought on the Communist side in the Russian Civil War, worked in the Cheka as a translator for the counter-intelligence service, in the Odessa Gubkom (regional Bolshevik party committee), in the food requisitioning unit, in the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education), in a typographic printing office, and served as a newspaper reporter in Petersburg and Tiflis. He married Yevgenia Gronfein on August 9, 1919 in Odessa.

In 1920 Babel was assigned to Field Marshal Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army, witnessing a military campaign of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. Poland was not alone in its newfound opportunities and troubles. Virtually all of the newly independent neighbours began fighting over borders: Romania fought with Hungary over Transylvania, Yugoslavia with Italy over Rijeka, Poland with Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn Silesia, with Germany over Poznań and with Ukrainians over Eastern Galicia (Galician War). He documented the horrors on the war he witnessed in the 1920 Diary (Konarmeyskiy Dnevnik 1920 Goda) which he later used to write the Red Cavalry (Конармия), a collection of short stories such as "Crossing the River Zbrucz" and "My First Goose". The legendary violence of the Red Cavalry seemed to harshly contrast the gentle nature of Babel himself.

Babel wrote: "Only by 1923 I have learned how to express my thoughts in a clear and not very lengthy way. Then I returned to writing." Several stories that were later included into Red Cavalry, were published in Vladimir Mayakovsky's LEF ("ЛЕФ") magazine in 1924. Babel's honest description of the brutal realities of war, far from revolutionary romanticism, brought him some powerful enemies, among them Budyonny, but Gorky's intervention helped to save the book, and soon it was translated into many languages.

Back in Odessa, Babel started to write the Odessa Tales, a series of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka where he was born, describing the life of Jewish gangsters before and after the 1917 October Revolution (many of them featuring the anti-hero Benya Krik). During this same period, Babel met and maintained an early friendship with Ilya Ehrenburg, while continuing to publish stories, to wide acclaim, throughout the 1920s. In 1925 Babel’s wife emigrated to Paris.

Clashes with the authorities

Beria's letter to Politburo Stalin's resolution The Politburo's decision
Left: Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities." Number 12 on the list is Isaac Babel.
Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (affirmative).
Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin.

In 1930, Babel travelled in Ukraine and witnessed the brutality of the collectivization in the USSR, especially the forced Famine-Genocide - Holodomor of 1932-1933. As Stalin tightened his grip on Soviet culture in the 1930s, and especially with the rise of socialist realism, Babel increasingly withdrew from public life. During the Stalinist campaign against "Formalism" in the art, Babel was criticized for alleged "aestheticism" and low productivity. At the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934), Babel noted ironically, that he was becoming "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence."

After numerous requests he was permitted to visit his family in France, and in 1935, he delivered a speech to anti-fascist International Congress of Writers in Paris. Upon his return, Babel collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein on the film Bezhin Meadow and worked on the screenplays for other Soviet movies.

Arrest and death

The NKVD photo of Babel made after his arrest

After the suspicious death of Gorky in 1936, Babel noted: "Now they will come for me." (See Great Purge). He also reportedly "began an affair with the beautiful adventuress wife of Stalin's murderous NKVD boss, Yezhov" and when Yezhov was thrown from power, "so did she and all her lovers - including Babel."[3]

In May 1939 he was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino, and eventually interrogated under torture at the Lubyanka. On his arrest, Babel told his wife "Please see our girl grows up happy."[4] At first, Babel confessed that his "creative impotence, which has prevented me from publishing any significant work for last few years" was "deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write", but this was not enough. In his confession paper that contained blood stain, Babel "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux to spy for France. In the final interrogation, he retracted his confession and wrote letters to prosecutor's office that he implicated innocent people, but to no avail. Babel was tried before an NKVD troika and convicted of simultaneously spying for the French, Austrians, and Leon Trotsky, as well as "membership in a terrorist organization." On January 27, 1940, he was shot in Butyrka prison. [5] His second wife, Antonina Pirozhkova (Антонина Пирожкова), did not know about his fate for 15 years.

According to the early official Soviet version, Isaac Babel died in a prison camp in Siberia on March 17, 1941. His archives and manuscripts were confiscated by the NKVD and destroyed.

Rehabilitation and legacy

On December 23, 1954, during the Khrushchev thaw, it was announced that Isaac Babel had been exonerated of all charges "for lack of any basis". However, his works were never published in uncensored form until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

His daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, went on to become one of the world's foremost scholars of her father's life and work. When his complete writings were published in 2002, she edited the volume and provided a foreword.

Babel's play Maria, a portrait of the sordid underbelly of Soviet society, caused Babel to be chided by Maxim Gorky for having a "Baudelairian predilection for rotting meat." Gorky further warned his friend that "political inferences" would be made "that will be personally harmful to you." Although intended to be performed by Moscow's Vakhtangov Theatre, the play's performance was cancelled by the NKVD during rehearsals in 1935. Although it was very popular at Western European colleges during the 1960s, it was not performed in Babel's homeland until 1994. The first English translation appeared in 2002, edited by Nathalie Babel Brown. Maria's American premiere, directed by Carl Weber, took place at Stanford University two years later.[6]

Bibliography

  • Конармейский дневник 1920 года, English translation: 1920 Diary, ISBN 0-300-09313-6
  • Конармия, (1926), English translation: Red Cavalry, ISBN 0-393-32423-0
  • Одесские рассказы, Odessa Tales
  • Закат, Sunset, play (1926)
  • Benya Krik, screenplay (1926) (filmed in Ukraine and available on DVD from National Center for Jewish Film)
  • Мария, Maria, play (1935)
  • You Must Know Everything, Stories 1915-1937, Translated from Russian by Max Hayward. Edited, and with notes by Nathalie Babel, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 1966.

Quotes

  • "No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."
  • "Over the town roamed the homeless moon. I went along with her, warming up in my heart impracticable dreams and discordant songs."
  • "He can write, but he's got nothing to say."[7]
  • "I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others... I am asking for only one thing -- let me finish my work."[8]
    • Last recorded words in Butyrka prison.

References

  1. ^ Neither and Both; anthology. Joshua Cohen. The Forward Arts & Culture; Pg. B2. July 6, 2007
  2. ^ Odessa Pogroms. Center of Jewish Self-Education "Moria" and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
  3. ^ THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ISAAC BABEL ISAAC BABEL; BOOK OF A LIFETIME, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Arts & Book Review, June 1, 2007
  4. ^ Montefiore: Stalin, p.287
  5. ^ The Independent, "The History of Hell", January 8, 1995
  6. ^ Michelle Keller: Babel’s ‘Maria’ makes U.S. debut at Pigott The Stanford Daily, 27 februari 2004.
  7. ^ Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs: 1921-1941, page 110.
  8. ^ "Complete Works," page 28.

External links



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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Russian History Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Russian History. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Isaac Babel".  Read more

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