Short story writer and playwright who was a correspondent of the Red Army forces of Semyon Budyonny during the Russian civil war. Babel's fame is based on his stories of the Jews in Odessa and his novel Red Cavalry (1926). He was the first major Russian Jewish writer to write in Russian. "The Collected Works of Isaac Babel fills only two small volumes. Comparing Tolstoy's Works to Babel's is like comparing a long road to a pocket watch. Babel's best-loved works all fit in the first volume: the Odessa, Childhood, and Petersburg cycles; Red Cavalry; and the 1920s diary, on which Red Cavalry is based." (in The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman, 2010) Isaak Babel was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa, Ukraine. Most of his early years he spent in the Black Sea port Nikolaev, 90 miles away. At a time when most Jews were forbidden to live in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and other localities, Odessa had many times more Jews than any other city in the Russian part of the empire. Between 1881 and 1917 two million Jews left Russia, mostly for America, but it was, as Babel later wrote, "the most charming city of the Russian Empire. If you think about it, it is a town which you can live free and easy."
Babel's childhood was relatively comfortable, though he witnessed pogroms in Southern Russia in 1905. However, his family was untouched. His father was a successful businessman who installed his family in one of the best streets in Odessa. Babel studied violin, German, French, and Talmud at the Nicholas I Commercial Institute (1905-11) and wrote stories at the age of fifteen in imitation of Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert. In 1915 Babel graduated from Kiev University, which had been evacuated to Saratov on the Volga because of the war. After graduating Babel moved to St. Petersburg, where he studied literature. In that capital city "traitors, malcontents, whiners, and Jews" were banned and Babel had to use an apocryphal passport. Two of Babel's stories were published in 1916 in Letopis, a monthly edited by Maksim Gorky, his literary hero. One described an abortion, in the other an Odessa Jew spends the night with a prostitute to evade the police. These pieces were indicated as obscene, but the courthouse was burned down by revolutionaries, and the records were destroyed.
Although Babel himself had been untouched during the pogroms that spread throughout Russia in 1905, he saw in rising revolutionary movements a promise of freedom, and end of all persecution. Babel's satires attracted the attention of the government. The short story 'V shchelochu' (The Bathroom Window) got him charged with pornography in 1917 but due to the political turmoil there never was a trial. The reworked version, published in 1923 with the subtitle "From the Book Oforty," contained a scene of voyerism.
On Gorky's advice Babel decided to see the world and learn about life. He participated briefly in the war on the Romanian front. He was injured and after discharge Babel joined the staff of Gorky's newspaper Novaya Zhizn. During the Revolution he worked probably as a clerk for the Commissariat of Education and for the CheKa, the Soviet Secret Police. In 1919, Babel married Eugenia Gronfein and joined the Ukrainian State Publishing House (1919-20). He was assigned then as a journalist to Field Marshall Budyonny's First Cavalry army, witnessing its unsuccessful Polish campaign to carry Communist revolution outside Russia. The Reds penetrated almost to Warsaw but were driven back. "I'm tired," Babel confessed in Konarmeyskiy Dnevnik 1920 Goda, his diary from which he drew material for Red Cavalry. "... life flows past me, and what does it mean." (from 1920 Diary, 1995) A full edited version of the diary was published in 1990 in Babel's collected works. When Merian Caldwell Cooper, the future producer of the motion picture King Kong, was captured by Cossacks behind the lines in Galicia, he was interrogated by Babel in July 1920. "A shot-down American pilot, barefoot but elegant, neck like a column, dazzlingly white teeth, his uniform covered with oil and dirt," Babel recorded. "He asks me worriedly: Did I maybe commit a crime by fighting against Soviet Russia?" Eventually Cooper escaped to Riga, without his boots, with which he bribed the guards at the border. While in Odessa Babel began to write a series of stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka, where he was born. "It was not before 1923," Babel recalled later, "that I learned to express my thoughts clearly and not too wordily. Then I went back to writing." Tales of Odessa appeared in book form in 1931. It depicted with broad strokes and humor the Jewish underworld, the middlemen, small merchants, brokers, whores, tough Jewish gangsters, saloon keepers, rabbis, and entrepreneurs, on the eve of Revolution. In the center of the colourful caricature of the ghetto is Benia Krik, the king of gangsters. The stories are entitled 'The King', 'How It Was Done in Odessa', 'The Father', and 'Liuba the Cossack', where Benia Krik is absent. In the play Sunset (1928) Babel returned to the Odessa gangster world, but this time the protagonist was Benya's father, Mendel Krik. It did not gain success and also Marya (1935) attracted little attention. In 1923 Babel started to publish a cycle of novels called Red Cavalry. Like Maupassant, Babel often surprises the reader with twists in the plot. In Red Cavalry basically a pacifist narrator, Liutov, who is a Jewish officer, is assigned to a regiment of traditionally anti-Semitic Cossacs. The joke was, as Jorge Luis Borges has stated, that "the mere idea of a Jew on horseback struck them as laughable, and the fact that Babel was a good horseman only added to their disdain and spite." In one tale, 'Zamosc,' the narrator falls asleep and his horse drags him to the front line of the battle. He wakes looking up at a Russian peasant, armed with a rifle, who tells him, "It's all the fault of those Yids." Out of the horror of battles, torture and murder Babel creates a rapidly cutting polyphonic tale of revolutionary change. Some stories are narrated in a stylized form of the Cossacks' own language. Two stories appeared in Mayakovsky's magazine LEF. The work was translated into more than 20 languages, gaining Babel national fame, but it was also attacked by Commander Semyon Budyonny of the First Cavalry, who claimed that its emphasis on brutal acts insulted his troops. Babel was defended by Gorky. Budyonny rose in the Party system, becoming Hero of the Soviet Union and a powerful enemy. From 1923 Babel lived mostly in Moscow. Among his friends was Ilya Ehrenburg who called him "a wise rabbi". Babel often told him that the most important thing is the happiness of people. According to Ehrenburg, he understood the goals of the Revolution and saw it as a guarantee of future happiness. He had an affair with Evgeniya Gladun-Khayutina, the future wife of Nikolai Yezhov, a people's commissar. It was said, that he visited their home even in the 1930s. Before he was allocated an apartment in Moscow in a house occupied by foreigners, he served for a period as the secretary of the village soviet in Molodyonovo. Babel's first wife, Yevgenia Gronfein, went to Paris in 1925, for a "temporary" separation; his daughter Natalie was raised in France. From 1926 on, his mother and sister lived in Brussels, but unwilling to abandon his literary home in the Russian language, the author himself did not leave the Soviet Union, despite numerous opportunities. Babel visited his wife in Paris and travelled on journalistic assignments in Ukraine and the Caucasus. He also served as a secretary of a village soviet in Molodenovo. Between the years 1925 and 1930 he wrote a series of fictionalized accounts of his childhood and young manhood. In the loosely autobiographical 'Story of My Dovecote' (1925) he described the fate of a murdered grandfather Shoyl during the 1905 pogrom in Odessa (at least the hundred of the city's Jewish residents were killed). The narrator and his parents were saved by gentile neighbors. Another story, 'Pervaya lyubov' (1925) takes place in the same day; the narrator wittnesses how his father grovels before a Cossack officer.
Babel's literary reputation was high in the Soviet Union and abroad in the beginning of the 1930s. He revised his stories for his collected works that appeared in 1932 and 1936. From the mid-1930s, Babel avoided publicity under increasing Stalinist persecution. "Today, a man talks frankly only with his wiife – at night, with the blanked pulled over his head," he said privately. (A History Of Russia Volume II: Since 1855, by Walter G. Moss, 2005, p. 261) However, Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova, an young engineer with whom Babel spent his last years in Moscow, states that he was prolific during that period. He worked on a new book and film scripts, including Dzhimmi Khiggins (1928), adapted from Upton Sinclair's novel about an imagined Socialist all-around activist, and Eisenstein's banned Bezhin lug (1937, Bezhin Meadow).
Many of the productions in which Babel was involved, gained popular success, but were not in line with the Party's views. Taking a look at the character of Menakhem Mendl created by Sholem Aleichem, he co-wrote the screenplay for Alexis Granowsky's film, Evreyskoe schaste (1925). It was based on the novel The Adventures of Menachem-Mendl, first published in Warsaw's Yiddish daily Haynt (Today) in 1913. Babel also translated some of the Aleichem's works, but was not very fond of Tevye stories. Antonina Pirozhkova said that he undertook the work "to feed his soul." ('Imagine You Are a Tiger: A New Folk Hero in Babel's Odessa Tales,' in Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature by Rachel Rubin, 2000, pp. 36-37)
In 1934 Babel joked, "If one talks about silence, one cannot fail to say that I am a great master of that genre." One of Babel's rare public appearances was his speech in 1935 at the International Congress of Writers in Paris about Soviet people and culture; it made a great impression. Mariya, his play, was withdrawn from a Moscow theatre. The autobiographical short story 'Di Grasso' (1937) was the last work to be published in Babel's lifetime. It depicted his enthusiasm about theatre in his youth – he has pawned his father's watch with Kolya Schwartz to visit Theatre Street but Kolya does not return it before his wife gets angry about it. When Osip Mandelstam returned from exile to Moscow, Babel prophesied of his own future: "Silence won't save me. Mark my words – they will come for me soon."
"Clutching the watch, I was left alone, and suddenly, with a lucidity I had never known before, I saw soaring columns of the Duma, the illuminated foliage on the boulevard, the bronze head of Pushkin glimmering faintly in the moonlight, and I saw for the first time everything around me as it was in reality – silent, and indescribably beautiful." (in 'Di Grasso') Babel was arrested by the N.K.V.D., a precursor of the K.G.B, in May 1939 at his cottage in Peredelkino, the writers' colony. The secret police confiscated nine folders from the dacha, and fifteen from his Moscow apatment. Under interrogation and probable torture at Lubyanka, Babel confessed a long association with Trotskyites and engaging in anti-soviet activity, including being recruited into a spy network by Ilya Ehrenburg and supplying André Malraux with the secrets of Soviet aviation. "I, Isaac Babel, am the head of a counterrevolutionary organization in the field of literature," he claimed in the N.K.V.D. documents. Babel's trial was held in Buturka Prison and on January 27, 1940, he was shot on Stalin's orders for espionage. His body was dumped in a communal grave. The Soviet officials informed Babel's widow that her husband died on March 17, 1941 in a prison camp in Siberia.
Following Stalin's death and the beginning of the "Thaw" era, Babel's charges were posthumously cleared in 1954. His seized manuscripts have not been recovered. Babel's collected works, based on the 1936 edition but including new materials, were republished in 1957 and 1966. The film version of Babel's play Sakat (1928, Sunset) was made by Alexander Zeldovich in 1990. Leonid Desyatnikov wrote its music; it was his first soundtrack. Desyatnikov's Sketches to Sakat was performed in Berlin in 1996. Antonina Pirozhkova, who devoted her life to his literary legacy, wrote a memoir of the last years of his life; she died in September 2010, at the age of 101.
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