Isaac Babel
Encyclopedia
Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel 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 world literature
.
Isaak Babel was born in the Moldavanka
section of Odessa
. His parents were Manus and Feyga Bobel. Soon after his birth, the Babel family moved to the port city of Nikolayev
. They later returned to live in a more fashionable part of Odessa in 1906. However, Babel subsequently used Moldavanka as the setting for The Odessa Tales
and the play Sunset
.
Although Babel's short stories present his family as "destitute and muddle-headed" (as he wrote in the story "In the Basement"), they were in fact relatively well-off. According to Babel's autobiographical statements, his father Manus was an impoverished shopkeeper. According to Nathalie Babel Brown, her father fabricated this and other biographical details in order to "present an appropriate past for a young Soviet writer who was not a member of the Communist Party
." In fact, Babel's father was a dealer in farm implements and owned a large warehouse.
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
. Despite the fact that Babel received passing grades, his place was given to another boy, whose parents had bribed 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. According to Cynthia Ozick
,
After the Jewish quota also foiled an attempt to enroll at Odessa University
, Babel entered the Kiev
Institute of Finance and Business. There he met Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein, a daughter of a wealthy industrialist. She eventually eloped with him to Odessa. Babel graduated from the Institute under his original surname of Bobel.
In 1915, Babel graduated and moved to Petrograd
, in defiance of laws restricting Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement
. Babel was fluent in French, besides Russian and Yiddish, and his earliest works were written in French. However, none of his stories in that language have survived.
Also in St. Petersburg, Babel met 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; 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 semiautobiographical short stories, "The Story of My Dovecot" ("История моей голубятни"), was dedicated to Gorky.
The story "The Bathroom Window" was considered obscene by censors and Babel was charged with violating criminal code article 1001.
There is very little information about Babel's whereabouts during and after the October Revolution
. According to one of his stories, "The Road" (Дорога), he served on the Romanian front until early December 1917. He resurfaced in Petrograd in March 1918 as a reporter for Gorky's Menshevik
newspaper, Novaya zhizn (Новая жизнь). Babel continued publishing there until Novaya zhizyn was forcibly closed on Lenin's orders in July 1918.
Babel later recalled,
, which led to the Party's monopoly on the printed word, Babel worked for the publishing house of the Odessa Gubkom (regional CPSU Committee), in the food procurement unit (see his story "Ivan-and-Maria"), in the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education), and in a typographic printing office.
After the end of the Civil War, Babel worked as a reporter for The Dawn of the Orient (Заря Востока) a Russian-language newspaper published in Tiflis
. In one of his articles, he expressed regret that Lenin's controversial New Economic Policy
had not been more widely implemented.
Isaak Babel married Yevgenia Gronfein on August 9, 1919 in Odessa. In 1929, their marriage produced a daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, who grew up to become a scholar and editor of her father's life and work. By 1925, the Babels' marriage was souring. Yevgenia Babel, feeling betrayed by her husband's infidelities and motivated by her increasing hatred of communism
, emigrated to France
. Babel saw her several times during his visits to Paris
. During this period, he also entered into a long-term romantic relationship with Tamara Kashirina. Together, they had a son Emmanuil Babel, who was later adopted by his stepfather Vsevolod Ivanov
. Emmanuil's name was changed to Mikhail Ivanov, and he later became a noted artist.
After the final break with Tamara, Babel briefly attempted to reconcile with Yevgenia and they had their daughter Natalie in 1929. In 1932, Babel met a Siberian-born Gentile
named Antonina Pirozhkova (1909–2010). In 1934, after Babel failed to convince his wife to return to Moscow, he and Antonina began living together. In 1939, their common law marriage produced a daughter, Lydia Babel.
According to Pirozhkova,
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 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 propaganda
, earned him some powerful enemies. According to recent research, Marshall Budyonny was infuriated by Babel's unvarnished descriptions of marauding Red Cossacks and demanded Babel's execution without success. However, Gorky's influence not only protected Babel, but also helped to guarantee publication, and soon Red Cavalry was translated into many languages.
Argentine author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges
once wrote of Red Cavalry,
Back in Odessa, Babel started to write the Odessa Tales, a series of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto
of Moldavanka
. At their core, the stories describe the life of Jewish gangsters, both before and after the October Revolution
. Many of them directly feature the fictional mob boss Benya Krik
, who remains one of the great anti-hero
es of Russian literature
. These stories were later used as the basis for the stage play Sunset
, which centers on Benya Krik's self appointed mission to right the wrongs of Moldavanka. First on his list is to rein in his alcoholic, womanizing father, Mendel.
According to Nathalie Babel Brown,
According to Pirozhkova, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein
was quite fond of Sunset and often compared it to the writings of Emile Zola
for, "illuminating capitalist relationships through the experience of a single family." Eisenstein was also quite critical of the Moscow Art Theatre, "for its weak staging of the play, particularly for failing to convey to the audience every single word of its unually terse text."
and witnessed the brutality of forced collectivisation and dekulakisation. Although he never made a public statement about this, he privately confided in Antonina,
As Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet intelligentsia
and decreed that all writers and artists must conform to socialist realism
, Babel increasingly withdrew from public life. During the campaign against, "Formalism
", Babel was publicly denounced for low productivity. At the time, many other Soviet writers were terrified and frantically rewrote their past work to conform to Stalin's wishes. However, Babel was unimpressed and confided in his protege, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg
, "In six months time, they'll leave the formalists in peace and start some other campaign."
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." American Max Eastman
describes Babel's increasing reticence as an artist in a chapter called "The Silence of Isaac Babyel" in his 1934 book Artists in Uniform.
candidly depicts both political corruption
, prosecution of the innocent, and black marketeering within Soviet society. Noting the play's implicit rejection of socialist realism
, Maxim Gorky
accused his friend of having a "Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat." Gorky further warned his friend that "political inferences" would be made "that will be personally harmful to you." According to Pirozhkova,
during rehearsals. Despite its popularity in the West, Maria was not performed in Russia until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union
.
Carl Weber, a former disciple of Bertolt Brecht
, directed Maria at Stanford University
in 2004.
According to Weber,
. While visiting his wife and their daughter Nathalie, Babel agonized over whether or not to return to Soviet Russia. In conversations and letters to friends, he expressed a longing of being "a free man," while also expressing fear at no longer being able to make a living solely through writing. On July 27, 1933, Babel wrote a letter to Yuri Annenkov
, stating that he had been summoned to Moscow and was leaving immediately.
Babel's common-law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, recalled this era,
After his return to Russia, Babel decided to move in with Pirozhkova, beginning a common law marriage which would ultimately produce a daughter, Lidya Babel. He also collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein
on the film Bezhin Meadow
, about Pavlik Morozov
, a child informant for the Soviet secret police. Babel also worked on the screenplays for several other Stalinist propaganda films.
, the married Babel began an affair with Yevgenia Feigenberg, who was then a translator at the Soviet embassy. Simon Sebag Montefiore
has dubbed Yevgenia an, "irrepressible literary groupie
." According to Babel's interrogation transcripts, she began her seduction of the writer with the words, "You don't know me, but I know you well." Even after Yevgenia married NKVD
boss Nikolai Yezhov
the affair continued and Babel frequently presided over Mrs. Yezhov's literary gatherings, which often included such luminaries as Solomon Mikhoels
, Leonid Utesov, Sergei Eisenstein
, and Mikhail Koltsov
. On one such occasion, Babel was heard to say, "Just think, our girl from Odessa
has become the first lady of the kingdom!"
In her memoirs, Antonina professes complete ignorance of her common law husband's affair with Mrs. Yezhov. Babel informed her that his interest in the Yezhovs was, "purely professional," and was tied to his desire to understand the Party elite.
In retaliation for Babel's affair with his wife, Yezhov ordered the writer placed under constant NKVD surveillance. As the Great Purge
began during the late 1930s
, Yezhov was informed that Babel was spreading rumors about the suspicious death of Maxim Gorky
and alleging that his former mentor had been murdered on orders from Stalin. Babel had also been heard to say of Leon Trotsky
, "It's impossible to imagine the charm and strength of his influence on anyone who encounters him." Babel further commented that Lev Kamenev
was, "...the most brilliant connoisseur of language and literature."
As the number of Purge victims skyrocketed, however, Nikolai Yezhov's overenthusiastic pursuit of suspected "enemies" began to be thought a liability by Stalin and his inner circle. In response, Lavrenti Beria was assigned as Yezhov's assistant and swiftly usurped the leadership of the NKVD.
According to Montefiore,
On May 15, 1939, Antonina Pirozhkova was awakened by four NKVD
agents pounding upon the door of their Moscow apartment. Although surprised, she agreed to accompany them to Babel's dacha in Peredelkino
. Babel was then placed under arrest. According to Pirozhkova: "In the car, one of the men sat in back with Babel and me while the other one sat in front with the driver. 'The worst part of this is that my mother won't be getting my letters', and then he was silent for a long time. I could not say a single word. Babel asked the secret policeman sitting next to him, 'So I guess you don't get too much sleep, do you?' And he even laughed. As we approached Moscow
, I said to Babel, 'I'll be waiting for you, it will be as if you've gone to Odessa
... only there won't be any letters....' He answered, 'I ask you to see that the child not be made miserable.' "But I don't know what my destiny will be." At this point, the man sitting beside Babel said to me, "We have no claims whatsoever against you." We drove to the Lubyanka Prison
and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed me hard and said, "Someday we'll see each other..." And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door.
According to Peter Constantine,
Interrogated under torture, 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." This, however, was not enough for Stalin and his minions. In his confession paper, which still contains blood stains, Babel "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux
to spy for France. He named Sergei Eisenstein
, Ilya Ehrenburg
and Solomon Mikhoels
as co-conspirators.
Despite months of pleading and letters sent directly to Beria, Babel was denied access to his unpublished manuscripts. In October 1939, Babel was again summoned for interrogation and denied all his previous testimony. A statement was recorded, "I ask the inquiry to take into account that, though in prison, I committed a crime. I slandered several people." This led to further delays as the NKVD frantically attempted to salvage their cases against Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and Eisenstein.
According to Nathalie Babel Brown,
According to Simon Sebag Montefiore
, Babel's ashes were buried with those of Nikolai Yezhov
and several other victims of the Great Purge
in the necropolis
of Moscow's Donskoi Monastery. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union
, a plaque was placed there which reads, "Here lie buried the remains of the innocent, tortured, and executed victims of political repressions. May they never be forgotten." The grave of Yevgenia Yezhov, who committed suicide in a mental institution, lies less than twenty paces away.
According to the early official Soviet version, Isaak Babel died in the Gulag
on March 17, 1941. His archives and manuscripts were confiscated by the NKVD. Peter Constantine
, who translated Babel's writings into English, has described the writer's execution as "one of the great tragedies of twentieth century literature."
, a typed half sheet of paper ended the official silence. It read,
, and a volume of Babel's selected works was published in 1957 with a laudatory preface by Ilya Ehrenburg
. New collections of selected works by Babel were published in 1966, 1989 and 1990. Still, certain "taboo
" parts such as mentions of Trotsky were censored until the Perestroika
period shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union
. The first collections of the complete works of Babel were prepared and published in Russia in 2002 and 2006.
After his rehabilitation, Antonina Pirozhkova spent almost five decades campaigning for the return of Babel's manuscripts. These included Babel's translations of Sholem Aleichem's writings from Yiddish into Russian, as well as several unpublished short stories and novellas. According to Pirozhkova,
However, even requests by Ilya Ehrenburg
and the Union of Soviet Writers produced no answers from the Soviet State. The truth was not revealed until the advent of Perestroika
.
According to Pirozhkova,
, Yevgenia further believed that her husband was still alive and living in exile. In 1956, however, Ehrenburg told her of her husband's execution while visiting Paris. After also informing Mrs. Babel of her husband's daughter with Antonina Pirozhkova, Ehrenburg asked Yevgenia to sign a false statement attesting to a pre-war divorce from her husband. Enraged, Yevgenia Babel spat in Ehrenberg's face and then fainted.
Her daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, believes that Ehrenburg did this under orders from the KGB
. With two potential contenders for the role of Babel's widow, the Soviet State clearly preferred Babel's common-law wife Antonina to his legal wife Yevgenia, who had emigrated to the West.
Although Babel's play Maria
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, translated by Peter Constantine
and edited by Nathalie Babel Brown. Marias American premiere, directed by Carl Weber, took place at Stanford University
two years later.
Although she was too young to have many memories of her father, Nathalie Babel Brown went on to become one of the world's foremost scholars of his life and work. When a Norton Anthology of his writings was published in 2002, Nathalie edited the volume and provided a foreword. She died in Washington DC in 2005.
American writer Hubert Selby has called Babel "the closest thing I have to a literary influence."
Lydia Babel, the daughter of Isaak Babel and Antonina Pirozhkova, also emigrated to the United States
and currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland
.
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry
Red Cavalry
Red Cavalry is a collection of short stories by Russian author Isaac Babel about the 1st Cavalry Army. The stories take place during the Polish-Soviet war and are based on Babel's own diary, which he maintained when he was a journalist assigned to the Semyon Budyonny's First Cavalry Army.First...
, Story of My Dovecote, and Tales of Odessa, all of which are considered masterpieces of Russian literature
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...
. 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
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
, Isaak Babel fell victim to Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
due to his longterm affair with the wife of NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
chief Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...
. Babel was arrested by the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
at Peredelkino
Peredelkino
Peredelkino is a dacha complex situated just to the southwest of Moscow, Russia.-History:The settlement originated as the estate of Peredeltsy, owned by the Leontievs , then by Princes Dolgorukov and by the Samarins. After a railway passed through the village in the 19th century, it was renamed...
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 world literature
World literature
World literature refers to literature from all over the world, including African literature, American literature, Arabic literature, Asian literature, Australasian literature, Caribbean Literature, English literature, European literature, Indian literature, Latin American literature, Persian...
.
Early years
Moldavanka
Moldavanka is a historical part of Odessa in the Odessa Oblast of southern Ukraine, located jointly on Malinovskiy and Primorskiy city districts. Before 1820 a settlement just outside of Odessa which later engulfed it...
section of Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
. His parents were Manus and Feyga Bobel. Soon after his birth, the Babel family moved to the port city of Nikolayev
Mykolaiv
Mykolaiv , also known as Nikolayev , is a city in southern Ukraine, administrative center of the Mykolaiv Oblast. Mykolaiv is the main ship building center of the Black Sea, and, arguably, the whole Eastern Europe.-Name of city:...
. They later returned to live in a more fashionable part of Odessa in 1906. However, Babel subsequently used Moldavanka as the setting for The Odessa Tales
The Odessa Tales
The Odessa Tales is a collection of short stories by Isaac Babel, situated in Odessa in the last days of the Russian empire and the Russian Revolution. Published individually in magazines throughout 1923 and 1924 and collected into a book in 1931, they deal primarily with a group of Jewish thugs...
and the play Sunset
Sunset (play)
The play Sunset was written by Isaac Babel in 1926 and based on his short story collection The Odessa Tales.-Plot:The play is sent in Moldavanka, Odessa's Jewish Quarter in 1913...
.
Although Babel's short stories present his family as "destitute and muddle-headed" (as he wrote in the story "In the Basement"), they were in fact relatively well-off. According to Babel's autobiographical statements, his father Manus was an impoverished shopkeeper. According to Nathalie Babel Brown, her father fabricated this and other biographical details in order to "present an appropriate past for a young Soviet writer who was not a member of the Communist Party
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
." In fact, Babel's father was a dealer in farm implements and owned a large warehouse.
In his teens, Babel hoped to get into the preparatory class of the Nicolas I
Nicholas I of Russia
Nicholas I , was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855, known as one of the most reactionary of the Russian monarchs. On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its historical zenith spanning over 20 million square kilometers...
Odessa Commercial School. However, he first had to overcome the Jewish quota
Jewish quota
Jewish quota was a percentage that limited the number of Jews in various establishments. In particular, in 19th and 20th centuries some countries had Jewish quotas for higher education, a special case of Numerus clausus....
. Despite the fact that Babel received passing grades, his place was given to another boy, whose parents had bribed school officials. As a result he was schooled at home by private tutors.
In addition to regular school subjects, Babel also studied the Talmud
Talmud
The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....
and music. According to Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. She is the niece of the Hebraist Abraham Regelson.-Background:Cynthia Shoshana Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children...
,
"Though he was at home in Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with the traditional texts and their demanding commentaries, he added to these a lifelong fascination with Maupassant and Flaubert. His first stories were composed in fluent literary FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
. 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 befriended whores, cabdrivers, jockeys; he knew what it was like to be penniless, to live on the edge and off the beaten track."
After the Jewish quota also foiled an attempt to enroll at Odessa University
Odessa University
The I. I. Mechnikov Odessa National University , located in Odessa, Ukraine, is one of the country's major universities. It was founded in 1865, by an edict of Czar Alexander II of Russia, reorganizing the Richelieu Lyceum of Odessa into the new Imperial Novorossiya University. In the Soviet...
, Babel entered the Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
Institute of Finance and Business. There he met Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein, a daughter of a wealthy industrialist. She eventually eloped with him to Odessa. Babel graduated from the Institute under his original surname of Bobel.
Early career
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
, in defiance of laws restricting Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement
Pale of Settlement
The Pale of Settlement was the term given to a region of Imperial Russia, in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed, and beyond which Jewish permanent residency was generally prohibited...
. Babel was fluent in French, besides Russian and Yiddish, and his earliest works were written in French. However, none of his stories in that language have survived.
Also in St. Petersburg, Babel met Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
, who published some of his stories in his literary magazine Letopis ("Летопись", "Chronicle"). Gorky advised the aspiring writer to gain more life experience; 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 semiautobiographical short stories, "The Story of My Dovecot" ("История моей голубятни"), was dedicated to Gorky.
The story "The Bathroom Window" was considered obscene by censors and Babel was charged with violating criminal code article 1001.
There is very little information about Babel's whereabouts during and after the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
. According to one of his stories, "The Road" (Дорога), he served on the Romanian front until early December 1917. He resurfaced in Petrograd in March 1918 as a reporter for Gorky's Menshevik
Menshevik
The Mensheviks were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The dispute originated at the Second Congress of that party, ostensibly over minor issues...
newspaper, Novaya zhizn (Новая жизнь). Babel continued publishing there until Novaya zhizyn was forcibly closed on Lenin's orders in July 1918.
Babel later recalled,
"My journalistic work gave me a lot, especially in the sense of material. I managed to amass an incredible number of facts, which proved to be an invaluable creative tool. I struck up friendships with morgue attendants, criminal investigators, and government clerks. Later, when I began writing fiction, I found myself always returning to these 'subjects', which were so close to me, in order to put character types, situations, and everyday life into perspective. Journalistic work is full of adventure."
October's Withered Leaves
During the Russian Civil WarRussian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
, which led to the Party's monopoly on the printed word, Babel worked for the publishing house of the Odessa Gubkom (regional CPSU Committee), in the food procurement unit (see his story "Ivan-and-Maria"), in the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education), and in a typographic printing office.
After the end of the Civil War, Babel worked as a reporter for The Dawn of the Orient (Заря Востока) a Russian-language newspaper published in Tiflis
Tbilisi
Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936...
. In one of his articles, he expressed regret that Lenin's controversial New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
had not been more widely implemented.
Isaak Babel married Yevgenia Gronfein on August 9, 1919 in Odessa. In 1929, their marriage produced a daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, who grew up to become a scholar and editor of her father's life and work. By 1925, the Babels' marriage was souring. Yevgenia Babel, feeling betrayed by her husband's infidelities and motivated by her increasing hatred of communism
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
, emigrated to France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. Babel saw her several times during his visits to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. During this period, he also entered into a long-term romantic relationship with Tamara Kashirina. Together, they had a son Emmanuil Babel, who was later adopted by his stepfather Vsevolod Ivanov
Vsevolod Ivanov
Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov was a notable Soviet writer praised for the colourful adventure tales set in the Asiatic part of Russia during the Civil War.-Biography:...
. Emmanuil's name was changed to Mikhail Ivanov, and he later became a noted artist.
After the final break with Tamara, Babel briefly attempted to reconcile with Yevgenia and they had their daughter Natalie in 1929. In 1932, Babel met a Siberian-born Gentile
Gentile
The term Gentile refers to non-Israelite peoples or nations in English translations of the Bible....
named Antonina Pirozhkova (1909–2010). In 1934, after Babel failed to convince his wife to return to Moscow, he and Antonina began living together. In 1939, their common law marriage produced a daughter, Lydia Babel.
According to Pirozhkova,
"Before I met Babel, I used to read a great deal, though without any particular direction. I read whatever I could get my hands on. Babel noticed this and told me, 'Reading that way will get you nowhere. You won't have time to read the books that are truly worthwhile. There are about a hundred books that every educated person needs to read. Sometime I'll try to make you a list of them.' And a few days later he brought me a list. There were ancient writers on it, Greek and Roman -- HomerHomerIn the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
, HerodotusHerodotusHerodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
, LucretiusLucretiusTitus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying out the beliefs of Epicureanism, De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".Virtually no details have come down concerning...
, Seutonius -- and also all the classics of later European literature, starting with Erasmus, Rabelais, CervantesCervantes-People:*Alfonso J. Cervantes , mayor of St. Louis, Missouri*Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, 16th-century man of letters*Ignacio Cervantes, Cuban composer*Jorge Cervantes, a world-renowned expert on indoor, outdoor, and greenhouse cannabis cultivation...
, SwiftJonathan SwiftJonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
, and CosterCharles De CosterCharles-Theodore-Henri De Coster was a Belgian novelist whose efforts laid the basis for a native Belgian literature....
, and going on to 19th century writers such as StendhalStendhalMarie-Henri Beyle , better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme...
, Mérimée, and Flaubert."
Red Cavalry
Semyon Budyonny
Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny , sometimes transliterated as Budennyj, Budyonnyy, Budennii, Budenny, Budyoni, Budyenny, or Budenny, was a Soviet cavalryman, military commander, politician and a close ally of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.-Early life:...
's 1st Cavalry Army
1st Cavalry Army
The 1st Cavalry Army was the most famous Red Army сavalry formation. It was also known as Budyonny's Cavalry Army or simply as Konarmia ....
, witnessing a military campaign of the Polish-Soviet War
Polish-Soviet War
The Polish–Soviet War was an armed conflict between Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine and the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic—four states in post–World War I Europe...
of 1920. Poland was not alone in its newfound opportunities and troubles. Virtually all of the newly independent neighbours began fighting over borders: Romania
Kingdom of Romania
The Kingdom of Romania was the Romanian state based on a form of parliamentary monarchy between 13 March 1881 and 30 December 1947, specified by the first three Constitutions of Romania...
fought with Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
over Transylvania
Transylvania
Transylvania is a historical region in the central part of Romania. Bounded on the east and south by the Carpathian mountain range, historical Transylvania extended in the west to the Apuseni Mountains; however, the term sometimes encompasses not only Transylvania proper, but also the historical...
, Yugoslavia
Kingdom of Yugoslavia
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a state stretching from the Western Balkans to Central Europe which existed during the often-tumultuous interwar era of 1918–1941...
with Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
over Rijeka
Rijeka
Rijeka is the principal seaport and the third largest city in Croatia . It is located on Kvarner Bay, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea and has a population of 128,735 inhabitants...
, Poland with Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
over Cieszyn Silesia
Cieszyn Silesia
Cieszyn Silesia or Těšín Silesia or Teschen Silesia is a historical region in south-eastern Silesia, centered around the towns of Cieszyn and Český Těšín and bisected by the Olza River. Since 1920 it has been divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia, and later the Czech Republic...
, with Germany over Poznań
Poznan
Poznań is a city on the Warta river in west-central Poland, with a population of 556,022 in June 2009. It is among the oldest cities in Poland, and was one of the most important centres in the early Polish state, whose first rulers were buried at Poznań's cathedral. It is sometimes claimed to be...
and with Ukrainians
Polish-Ukrainian War
The Polish–Ukrainian War of 1918 and 1919 was a conflict between the forces of the Second Polish Republic and West Ukrainian People's Republic for the control over Eastern Galicia after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary.-Background:...
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
Red Cavalry
Red Cavalry is a collection of short stories by Russian author Isaac Babel about the 1st Cavalry Army. The stories take place during the Polish-Soviet war and are based on Babel's own diary, which he maintained when he was a journalist assigned to the Semyon Budyonny's First Cavalry Army.First...
(Конармия), a collection of short stories such as "Crossing the River Zbrucz" and "My First Goose". The legendary violence of 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
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...
's LEF
LEF (journal)
LEF was the journal of the Left Front of the Arts , a widely ranging association of avant-garde writers, photographers, critics and designers in the Soviet Union. It had two runs, one from 1923 to 1925 as LEF, and later from 1927 to 1929 as Novy LEF...
("ЛЕФ") magazine in 1924. Babel's honest description of the brutal realities of war, far from revolutionary propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
, earned him some powerful enemies. According to recent research, Marshall Budyonny was infuriated by Babel's unvarnished descriptions of marauding Red Cossacks and demanded Babel's execution without success. However, Gorky's influence not only protected Babel, but also helped to guarantee publication, and soon Red Cavalry was translated into many languages.
Argentine author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
once wrote of Red Cavalry,
The music of its style contrasts with the almost ineffable brutality of certain scenes. One of the stories, -- "Salt" -- enjoys a glory seemingly reserved for poems and rarely attained by prose: many people know it by heart.
Odessa Tales
Ghetto
A ghetto is a section of a city predominantly occupied by a group who live there, especially because of social, economic, or legal issues.The term was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. The term now refers to an overcrowded urban area often associated...
of Moldavanka
Moldavanka
Moldavanka is a historical part of Odessa in the Odessa Oblast of southern Ukraine, located jointly on Malinovskiy and Primorskiy city districts. Before 1820 a settlement just outside of Odessa which later engulfed it...
. At their core, the stories describe the life of Jewish gangsters, both before and after the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
. Many of them directly feature the fictional mob boss Benya Krik
Benya Krik
Benya Krik is a fictional Russian gangster of Jewish descent, whose gang of thugs is the main subject of Isaak Babel's collection of short stories The Odessa Tales. He also plays a prominent role in Babel's play Sunset...
, who remains one of the great anti-hero
Anti-hero
In fiction, an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're...
es of Russian literature
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...
. These stories were later used as the basis for the stage play Sunset
Sunset (play)
The play Sunset was written by Isaac Babel in 1926 and based on his short story collection The Odessa Tales.-Plot:The play is sent in Moldavanka, Odessa's Jewish Quarter in 1913...
, which centers on Benya Krik's self appointed mission to right the wrongs of Moldavanka. First on his list is to rein in his alcoholic, womanizing father, Mendel.
According to Nathalie Babel Brown,
"Sunset premiered at the BakuBakuBaku , sometimes spelled as Baki or Bakou, is the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, as well as the largest city on the Caspian Sea and of the Caucasus region. It is located on the southern shore of the Absheron Peninsula, which projects into the Caspian Sea. The city consists of two principal...
Worker's Theatre on October 23, 1927 and played in OdessaOdessaOdessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
, KievKievKiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
, and the celebrated Moscow Art TheatreMoscow Art TheatreThe Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1898. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas...
. The reviews, however, were mixed. Some critics praised the play's 'powerful anti-bourgeois stance and its interesting 'fathers and sons' theme. But in MoscowMoscowMoscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, particularly, critics felt that the play's attitude toward the bourgeoisie was contradictory and weak. Sunset closed, and was dropped from the repertoire of the Moscow Art TheatreMoscow Art TheatreThe Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1898. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas...
.
According to Pirozhkova, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
was quite fond of Sunset and often compared it to the writings of Emile Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
for, "illuminating capitalist relationships through the experience of a single family." Eisenstein was also quite critical of the Moscow Art Theatre, "for its weak staging of the play, particularly for failing to convey to the audience every single word of its unually terse text."
Glory days
According to Nathalie Babel Brown,"The young writer burst upon the literary scene and instantly became the rage in MoscowMoscowMoscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
. The tradition in Russia being to worship poets and writers, Babel soon became one of the happy few, a group that included Soviet writers who enjoyed exceptional status and privileges in an otherwise impoverished and despotic country. In the late 1930s1930sFile:1930s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson show the effects of the Great Depression; Due to the economic collapse, the farms become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads through America; The Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese...
, he was given a villa in the writer's colony of PeredelkinoPeredelkinoPeredelkino is a dacha complex situated just to the southwest of Moscow, Russia.-History:The settlement originated as the estate of Peredeltsy, owned by the Leontievs , then by Princes Dolgorukov and by the Samarins. After a railway passed through the village in the 19th century, it was renamed...
, outside Moscow. No secret was ever made of his having a wife and daughter in ParisParisParis is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. At the same time, hardly anyone outside of Moscow knew of two other children he had fathered. As a matter of fact, Babel had many secrets, lived with many ambiguities and contradictions, and left many unanswered questions behind him."
Clashes with the authorities
In 1930, Babel travelled in UkraineUkraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
and witnessed the brutality of forced collectivisation and dekulakisation. Although he never made a public statement about this, he privately confided in Antonina,
"The bounty of the past is gone -- it is due to the famine in UkraineHolodomorThe Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
and the destruction of the village across our land."
As Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet intelligentsia
Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...
and decreed that all writers and artists must conform to socialist realism
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
, Babel increasingly withdrew from public life. During the campaign against, "Formalism
Formalism
The term formalism describes an emphasis on form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy. A practitioner of formalism is called a formalist. A formalist, with respect to some discipline, holds that there is no transcendent meaning to that discipline other than the literal...
", Babel was publicly denounced for low productivity. At the time, many other Soviet writers were terrified and frantically rewrote their past work to conform to Stalin's wishes. However, Babel was unimpressed and confided in his protege, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
, "In six months time, they'll leave the formalists in peace and start some other campaign."
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." American Max Eastman
Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...
describes Babel's increasing reticence as an artist in a chapter called "The Silence of Isaac Babyel" in his 1934 book Artists in Uniform.
Maria
Babel's play MariaMaria (play)
The play Maria, a portrait of the sordid underbelly of Soviet society during the Russian Civil War, was written by Isaac Babel during the mid 1930s.-Plot:...
candidly depicts both political corruption
Political corruption
Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by...
, prosecution of the innocent, and black marketeering within Soviet society. Noting the play's implicit rejection of socialist realism
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
, Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
accused his friend of having a "Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat." Gorky further warned his friend that "political inferences" would be made "that will be personally harmful to you." According to Pirozhkova,
"Once Babel went to the Moscow Art Theater when his play Mariya was being given its first reading, and when he returned home he told me that all the actresses had been impatient to find out what the leading female role was like and who would be cast in it. It turned out that there was no leading female character present on the stage in this play. Babel thought that the play had not come off well, but it should be noted that he was always critical of his own work."Although intended to be performed in 1935, the Marias performance was cancelled by the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
during rehearsals. Despite its popularity in the West, Maria was not performed in Russia until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...
.
Carl Weber, a former disciple of Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
, directed Maria at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
in 2004.
According to Weber,
"The play is very controversial. [It] shows the stories of both sides clashing with each other during the Russian Civil WarRussian Civil WarThe Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
— the BolshevikBolshevikThe Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
s and the old society membersRussian nobilityThe Russian nobility arose in the 14th century and essentially governed Russia until the October Revolution of 1917.The Russian word for nobility, Dvoryanstvo , derives from the Russian word dvor , meaning the Court of a prince or duke and later, of the tsar. A nobleman is called dvoryanin...
— without making a judgment one way or another. Babel’s opinion on either side is very ambiguous, but he does make the statement that what happened after the Bolshevik Revolution may not have been the best thing for RussiaRussiaRussia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
."
Paris
In 1932, after numerous requests he was permitted to visit his estranged wife Yevgenia in ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. While visiting his wife and their daughter Nathalie, Babel agonized over whether or not to return to Soviet Russia. In conversations and letters to friends, he expressed a longing of being "a free man," while also expressing fear at no longer being able to make a living solely through writing. On July 27, 1933, Babel wrote a letter to Yuri Annenkov
Yuri Annenkov
Yury Pavlovich Annenkov ; in Petropavlovsk, Russian Empire – 12 July 1974 in Paris, France), was a Russian artist mostly known for his book illustrations and portraits. He also worked for theatre and cinema...
, stating that he had been summoned to Moscow and was leaving immediately.
Babel's common-law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, recalled this era,
"Babel remained in France for so long that it was rumored in Moscow that he was never returning. When I wrote to him about this, he wrote back saying, 'What can people, who do not know anything, possibly say to you, who knows everything?' Babel wrote from France almost daily. I accumulated many letters from him during his 11-month absence. When Babel was arrested in 1939, all of these letters were confiscated and never returned to me."
After his return to Russia, Babel decided to move in with Pirozhkova, beginning a common law marriage which would ultimately produce a daughter, Lidya Babel. He also collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
on the film Bezhin Meadow
Bezhin Meadow
Bezhin Meadow is a 1937 Soviet film famous for having been suppressed and believed destroyed before its completion. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein, it tells the story of a young farm boy whose father attempts to betray the government for political reasons by sabotaging the year's harvest and the...
, about Pavlik Morozov
Pavlik Morozov
Pavel Trofimovich Morozov , better known by the diminutive Pavlik, was a Soviet youth praised by the Soviet press as a martyr. His story, dated to 1932, is that of a 13-year old boy who denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family. His story was a subject of reading,...
, a child informant for the Soviet secret police. Babel also worked on the screenplays for several other Stalinist propaganda films.
Escape clause
According to Nathalie Babel Brown,"Babel came to Paris in the summer of 1935, as part of the delegation of Soviet writers to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace. He probably knew this would have been his last chance to remain in EuropeEuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. As he had done numerous times during the last ten years, he asked my mother to return with him to Moscow. Although he knew the general situation was bad, he nevertheless described to her the comfortable life that the family could have there together. It was the last opportunity my mother had to give a negative answer, and she never forgot it. Perhaps it helped her later on to be proven completely right in her fears and her total lack of confidence in the Soviet UnionSoviet UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. My mother described to me these last conversations with my father many times."
Relationship with the Yezhovs
During a visit to BerlinBerlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, the married Babel began an affair with Yevgenia Feigenberg, who was then a translator at the Soviet embassy. Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian and writer.-Family history:Simon's father, a doctor, is descended from a famous line of wealthy Sephardic Jews who became diplomats and bankers all over Europe...
has dubbed Yevgenia an, "irrepressible literary groupie
Groupie
A groupie is a person who seeks emotional and sexual intimacy with a musician or other celebrity. "Groupie" is derived from group in reference to a musical group, but the word is also used in a more general sense, especially in casual conversation....
." According to Babel's interrogation transcripts, she began her seduction of the writer with the words, "You don't know me, but I know you well." Even after Yevgenia married NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
boss Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...
the affair continued and Babel frequently presided over Mrs. Yezhov's literary gatherings, which often included such luminaries as Solomon Mikhoels
Solomon Mikhoels
Solomon Mikhoels ; was a Soviet Jewish actor and the artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Mikhoels served as the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the Second World War...
, Leonid Utesov, Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
, and Mikhail Koltsov
Mikhail Koltsov
Mikhail Efimovich Koltsov , born Mikhail Efimovich Fridlyand , was a Soviet journalist.-Biography:...
. On one such occasion, Babel was heard to say, "Just think, our girl from Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
has become the first lady of the kingdom!"
In her memoirs, Antonina professes complete ignorance of her common law husband's affair with Mrs. Yezhov. Babel informed her that his interest in the Yezhovs was, "purely professional," and was tied to his desire to understand the Party elite.
In retaliation for Babel's affair with his wife, Yezhov ordered the writer placed under constant NKVD surveillance. As the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
began during the late 1930s
1930s
File:1930s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson show the effects of the Great Depression; Due to the economic collapse, the farms become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads through America; The Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese...
, Yezhov was informed that Babel was spreading rumors about the suspicious death of Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
and alleging that his former mentor had been murdered on orders from Stalin. Babel had also been heard to say of Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
, "It's impossible to imagine the charm and strength of his influence on anyone who encounters him." Babel further commented that Lev Kamenev
Lev Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Kamenev , born Rozenfeld , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly head of state of the new republic in 1917, and from 1923-24 the acting Premier in the last year of Lenin's life....
was, "...the most brilliant connoisseur of language and literature."
As the number of Purge victims skyrocketed, however, Nikolai Yezhov's overenthusiastic pursuit of suspected "enemies" began to be thought a liability by Stalin and his inner circle. In response, Lavrenti Beria was assigned as Yezhov's assistant and swiftly usurped the leadership of the NKVD.
According to Montefiore,
"The darkness began to descend upon Yezhov's family where his silly, sensual wife was unwittingly to play the terrible role of black widow spiderBlack widow spiderLatrodectus mactans, the Southern black widow, is a highly venomous species of spider in the genus Latrodectus. They are well known for the distinctive black and red coloring of the female of the species and for the fact that she will occasionally eat her mate after reproduction. The species is...
: most of her lovers were to die. She herself was too sensitive a flower for Yezhov's world. Both she and Yezhov were promiscuous but by then they lived in a world of high tension, dizzy power over life and death, and dynamic turmoil as men rose and fell around them. If there was justice is Yezhov's fall, it was a tragedy for Yevgenia and little Natasha, to whom he was a kind father. A pall fell on Yevgenia's literary salonSalon (gathering)A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
. When a friend walked her home to the KremlinMoscow KremlinThe Moscow Kremlin , sometimes referred to as simply The Kremlin, is a historic fortified complex at the heart of Moscow, overlooking the Moskva River , Saint Basil's Cathedral and Red Square and the Alexander Garden...
after a party, she herself reflected that Babel was in danger because he had been friends with arrested Trotskyite generals: 'Only his European fame could save him.' She herself was in greater danger."
Arrest, torture, and execution
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
agents pounding upon the door of their Moscow apartment. Although surprised, she agreed to accompany them to Babel's dacha in Peredelkino
Peredelkino
Peredelkino is a dacha complex situated just to the southwest of Moscow, Russia.-History:The settlement originated as the estate of Peredeltsy, owned by the Leontievs , then by Princes Dolgorukov and by the Samarins. After a railway passed through the village in the 19th century, it was renamed...
. Babel was then placed under arrest. According to Pirozhkova: "In the car, one of the men sat in back with Babel and me while the other one sat in front with the driver. 'The worst part of this is that my mother won't be getting my letters', and then he was silent for a long time. I could not say a single word. Babel asked the secret policeman sitting next to him, 'So I guess you don't get too much sleep, do you?' And he even laughed. As we approached Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, I said to Babel, 'I'll be waiting for you, it will be as if you've gone to Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
... only there won't be any letters....' He answered, 'I ask you to see that the child not be made miserable.' "But I don't know what my destiny will be." At this point, the man sitting beside Babel said to me, "We have no claims whatsoever against you." We drove to the Lubyanka Prison
Lubyanka (KGB)
The Lubyanka is the popular name for the headquarters of the KGB and affiliated prison on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. It is a large building with a facade of yellow brick, designed by Alexander V...
and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed me hard and said, "Someday we'll see each other..." And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door.
According to Peter Constantine,
"From that day on, Babel, one of the foremost writers of his time, became a nonpersonNonpersonA nonperson is a citizen or a member of a group who lacks, loses, or is forcibly denied social or legal status, especially basic human rights, or who effectively ceases to have a record of their existence within a society , from a point of view of traceability, documentation, or existence...
in the Soviet UnionSoviet UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi. He became unmentionable in any public venue. When the film director Mark DonskoiMark DonskoiMark Semyonovich Donskoy was a Soviet film director. His most famous work was the Gorky Trilogy, consisting of The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, My Apprenticeship, and My Universities.-Selected filmography:...
's famous Gorky trilogy premiered the following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplayScreenplayA screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
, had been removed from the credits."
Interrogated under torture, 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." This, however, was not enough for Stalin and his minions. In his confession paper, which still contains blood stains, Babel "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
to spy for France. He named Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
, Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
and Solomon Mikhoels
Solomon Mikhoels
Solomon Mikhoels ; was a Soviet Jewish actor and the artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Mikhoels served as the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the Second World War...
as co-conspirators.
Despite months of pleading and letters sent directly to Beria, Babel was denied access to his unpublished manuscripts. In October 1939, Babel was again summoned for interrogation and denied all his previous testimony. A statement was recorded, "I ask the inquiry to take into account that, though in prison, I committed a crime. I slandered several people." This led to further delays as the NKVD frantically attempted to salvage their cases against Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and Eisenstein.
 |
 |
 |
| Left: Beria's Lavrentiy Beria Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years .... January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Soviet authorities Enemy of the people The term enemy of the people is a fluid designation of political or class opponents of the group using the term. The term implies that the "enemies" in question are acting against society as a whole. It is similar to the notion of "enemy of the state". The term originated in Roman times as ,... " who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities." Number 12 on the list is Isaak Babel. Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (affirmative). Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin. |
According to Nathalie Babel Brown,
"...his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria's private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately. Babel had been convicted of 'active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization,' and of 'being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the FrenchFranceThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and AustriaAustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n governments.' Babel's last recorded words in the proceedings were, 'I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet UnionSoviet UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. 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.' He was shot the next day and his body was thrown into a communal graveMass graves in the Soviet UnionThis page discusses mass graves in the Soviet Union.-Soviet repression and terror:The government of the USSR under Stalin murdered many of its own citizens and foreigners. These mass killings were carried out by the security organisations, such as the NKVD, and reached their peak in the Great Purge...
. All of this horrific information was revealed in the early 1990s...
According to Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian and writer.-Family history:Simon's father, a doctor, is descended from a famous line of wealthy Sephardic Jews who became diplomats and bankers all over Europe...
, Babel's ashes were buried with those of Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...
and several other victims of the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
in the necropolis
Necropolis
A necropolis is a large cemetery or burial ground, usually including structural tombs. The word comes from the Greek νεκρόπολις - nekropolis, literally meaning "city of the dead"...
of Moscow's Donskoi Monastery. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...
, a plaque was placed there which reads, "Here lie buried the remains of the innocent, tortured, and executed victims of political repressions. May they never be forgotten." The grave of Yevgenia Yezhov, who committed suicide in a mental institution, lies less than twenty paces away.
According to the early official Soviet version, Isaak Babel died in the Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
on March 17, 1941. His archives and manuscripts were confiscated by the NKVD. Peter Constantine
Peter Constantine
Peter Constantine is a British and American award-winning literary translator who has translated literary works from German, Russian, French, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, and Slovene.-Biography:...
, who translated Babel's writings into English, has described the writer's execution as "one of the great tragedies of twentieth century literature."
Rehabilitation
On December 23, 1954, during the Khrushchev thawKhrushchev Thaw
The Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and...
, a typed half sheet of paper ended the official silence. It read,
"The sentence of the military collegium dated 26 January 1940 concerning Babel, I.E., is revoked on the basis of newly discovered circumstances and the case against him is terminated in the absence of elements of a crime."Babel's works were once again widely published and praised. His public rehabilitation as a writer was initiated with the help of his friend and admirer Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Georgiyevich Paustovsky was a Russian Soviet writer nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.-Early life:Konstantin Paustovsky was born in Moscow. His father, descendant of the Zaporizhia Cossacks, was a railroad statistician, and was “an incurable romantic and Protestant”....
, and a volume of Babel's selected works was published in 1957 with a laudatory preface by Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
. New collections of selected works by Babel were published in 1966, 1989 and 1990. Still, certain "taboo
Taboo
A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...
" parts such as mentions of Trotsky were censored until the Perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
period shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...
. The first collections of the complete works of Babel were prepared and published in Russia in 2002 and 2006.
Lost writings
As Babel put it, he worked on Sholem Aleichem to "feed his soul." Other "food for the soul" came from writing new stories and the novellaNovellaA novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
"Kolya Topuz." He told me, "I'm writing a novella in which the main character is a former Odessa gangster like Benia KrikBenya KrikBenya Krik is a fictional Russian gangster of Jewish descent, whose gang of thugs is the main subject of Isaak Babel's collection of short stories The Odessa Tales. He also plays a prominent role in Babel's play Sunset...
. His name is Kolya Topuz and so far, at least, that's also the name of the novella. I want to show how this sort of man adapts to Soviet reality. Kolya Topuz works on a collective farm during collectivization, and then he goes to work in a Donbass coalCoalCoal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
mine. But since he has the mentality of a gangsterGangsterA gangster is a criminal who is a member of a gang. Some gangs are considered to be part of organized crime. Gangsters are also called mobsters, a term derived from mob and the suffix -ster....
, he's constantly breaking out of the limits of normal life, which leads to numerous funny situations." Babel spent a great deal of time writing, and he finished many works. Only his arrest prevented his new works from coming out."
However, even requests by Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
and the Union of Soviet Writers produced no answers from the Soviet State. The truth was not revealed until the advent of Perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
.
According to Pirozhkova,
"In 1987, when so much was changing in our country, I again made an official request that the KGBKGBThe KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
search for Babel's manuscripts in its underground storage areas. In response to my request, I was visited by two KGB agents who informed me that the manuscripts had been burned. 'And so you've come in person to avoid giving me a written response to my request, am I correct?' 'How could you think such a thing? We came here to commisserate. We understand how precious Babel's manuscripts would be.'"
Legacy
After her husband's return to Moscow in 1935, Yevgenia Gronfein Babel remained unaware of his other family with Antonina Pirozhkova. Based upon statements made by Ilya EhrenburgIlya Ehrenburg
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
, Yevgenia further believed that her husband was still alive and living in exile. In 1956, however, Ehrenburg told her of her husband's execution while visiting Paris. After also informing Mrs. Babel of her husband's daughter with Antonina Pirozhkova, Ehrenburg asked Yevgenia to sign a false statement attesting to a pre-war divorce from her husband. Enraged, Yevgenia Babel spat in Ehrenberg's face and then fainted.
Her daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, believes that Ehrenburg did this under orders from the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
. With two potential contenders for the role of Babel's widow, the Soviet State clearly preferred Babel's common-law wife Antonina to his legal wife Yevgenia, who had emigrated to the West.
Although Babel's play Maria
Maria (play)
The play Maria, a portrait of the sordid underbelly of Soviet society during the Russian Civil War, was written by Isaac Babel during the mid 1930s.-Plot:...
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, translated by Peter Constantine
Peter Constantine
Peter Constantine is a British and American award-winning literary translator who has translated literary works from German, Russian, French, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, and Slovene.-Biography:...
and edited by Nathalie Babel Brown. Marias American premiere, directed by Carl Weber, took place at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
two years later.
Although she was too young to have many memories of her father, Nathalie Babel Brown went on to become one of the world's foremost scholars of his life and work. When a Norton Anthology of his writings was published in 2002, Nathalie edited the volume and provided a foreword. She died in Washington DC in 2005.
American writer Hubert Selby has called Babel "the closest thing I have to a literary influence."
Lydia Babel, the daughter of Isaak Babel and Antonina Pirozhkova, also emigrated to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland
Silver Spring, Maryland
Silver Spring is an unincorporated area and census-designated place in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It had a population of 71,452 at the 2010 census, making it the fourth most populous place in Maryland, after Baltimore, Columbia, and Germantown.The urbanized, oldest, and...
.
Memorial in Odessa
A memorial to Isaak Babel was unveiled on the north-west corner of the intersection of (V)ulitsa Rishelyevskaya and (V)ulitsa Zhukovskaya in Odessa in early September 2011, and, in conjunction with the inauguration of the memorial, a commemorative reading of three of his stories held, with musical interludes from the works of Isaak Schwartz, in the Philharmonic Hall in (V)ulitsa Pushkinskaya on September 6, 2011. The city also has an already existing (V)ulitsa Babelya ("Babel Street") in the Moldavanka.Quotes
- "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in 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."
- Benya Krik: "This is my idea: A Jew no longer in the prime of life, a Jew who used to go about naked, barefoot, and filthy like a convict on Sakhalin Island! And now, thank God, he's getting up there in years, it is time to put an end to this life sentence of hard labor—it is time to turn the SabbathShabbatShabbat is the seventh day of the Jewish week and a day of rest in Judaism. Shabbat is observed from a few minutes before sunset on Friday evening until a few minutes after when one would expect to be able to see three stars in the sky on Saturday night. The exact times, therefore, differ from...
into Sabbath.- From the 1926 play Sunset (play)Sunset (play)The play Sunset was written by Isaac Babel in 1926 and based on his short story collection The Odessa Tales.-Plot:The play is sent in Moldavanka, Odessa's Jewish Quarter in 1913...
- From the 1926 play Sunset (play)
- Rabbi Ben Zkharia: "Jews! Day is day, and night is night. Day drenches us with the sweat of our toil, but night offers its fans of Divine coolness. Joshua, the son of Nun, who stopped the sun, was nothing but a crazed fool! ...And here is Mendel Krik, a member of our synagogue, who has turned out to be no cleverer than Joshua, son of Nun. He wanted to warm himself in the sun all his life, all his life he wanted to stand where he stood at midday. But God has policemen on every corner, and Mendel Krik has sons in his house. The policemen come and see to it that things are as they should be. Day is day, and night is night. Jews! Everything is as it should be! Let's down a glass of vodkaVodkaVodka , is a distilled beverage. It is composed primarily of water and ethanol with traces of impurities and flavorings. Vodka is made by the distillation of fermented substances such as grains, potatoes, or sometimes fruits....
!"- From the play Sunset.
- "He can write, but he's got nothing to say."
- Remarking to Ilya EhrenburgIlya EhrenburgIlya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
about the promise shown by the White emigreWhite EmigreA white émigré was a Russian who emigrated from Russia in the wake of the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War, and who was in opposition to the contemporary Russian political climate....
and acclaimed author Vladimir NabokovVladimir NabokovVladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
.
- Remarking to Ilya Ehrenburg
- "If it was up to me, I wouldn't ask my worst enemy to clean floors after the Revolution! During the Revolution the dirt grew to three inches thick on these floors -- you couldn't shave it off with a plane! I should get a medal for cleaning floors after the Revolution, and all you do is bark."
- From the 1935 play Maria (play)Maria (play)The play Maria, a portrait of the sordid underbelly of Soviet society during the Russian Civil War, was written by Isaac Babel during the mid 1930s.-Plot:...
.
- From the 1935 play Maria (play)
- Captain Viskovsky: "Who knows what can happen, Yasha? They might ask you to blow up the street you were born on, and you would blow it up. Or to blast an orphanageOrphanageAn orphanage is a residential institution devoted to the care of orphans – children whose parents are deceased or otherwise unable or unwilling to care for them...
to bits, and you'd say, "A two-zero-eight fuseFuseThe word fuse has several meanings:* Fuse , a device used in electrical systems to protect against excessive current....
," and blast that orphanage to bits. That's what you would do, Yasha, as long as they let you live your life, strum your guitarGuitarThe guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
, and sleep with thin women. You're fat but you like them thin. You'll do anything, if they tell you to renounce your mother three times, you would renounce her three times. But that's not the point, Yasha! The point is they will want more: they won't let you drink vodkaVodkaVodka , is a distilled beverage. It is composed primarily of water and ethanol with traces of impurities and flavorings. Vodka is made by the distillation of fermented substances such as grains, potatoes, or sometimes fruits....
with the people you like, they'll make you read boring books, and the songs they teach you will be boring, too. Then you'll be mad, my dear Red Artillerist. You'll be furious, your eyes will start rolling! Then two citizens will come visiting: "Let's go, Comrade Kravchenko." "Should I take any personal effects with me or not," you'll ask them. "No, you needn't take any personal effects with you. It'll be a quick interrogation, over in a minute." And that will be the end of you, my dear Red Artillerist. It'll cost them four kopecks. It's been calculated that a ColtColt's Manufacturing CompanyColt's Manufacturing Company is a United States firearms manufacturer, whose first predecessor corporation was founded in 1836 by Sam Colt. Colt is best known for the engineering, production, and marketing of firearms over the later half of the 19th and the 20th century...
bulletBulletA bullet is a projectile propelled by a firearm, sling, or air gun. Bullets do not normally contain explosives, but damage the intended target by impact and penetration...
costs four kopecks and not a centimeCentimeCentime is French for "cent", and is used in English as the name of the fraction currency in several Francophone countries ....
more."- A White Army officer turned gangster lectures a corrupt Red Guard about the pitfalls of the new Soviet UnionSoviet UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. From the 1935 play Maria.
- A White Army officer turned gangster lectures a corrupt Red Guard about the pitfalls of the new Soviet Union
Further reading
- Isaac Babel and Nathalie Babel Brown, Isaac Babel: The Lonely Years 1925-1939 : Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence, David R Godine, 1995.
- Jerome CharynJerome CharynJerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life...
, Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel, Random HouseRandom HouseRandom House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
, 2005. - Antonina N. Pirozhkova, At His Side: The Last Years of Issac Babel, Steerforth Press, 1998.
- Vitaly Shentalinsky, The KGB's Literary Files, Harvill, 1995
- Gregory Freidin, ed. The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Life, History, Context. Stanford University Press, 2009
External links
- Babel's Biography (PDF) by Gregory Freidin (A version of this essay in Critical Biography was published in European Writer of the Twentieth Century [NY: Scribners, 1990])
- Isaac Babel Workshop (2004) at Stanford University Includes the Bibliography page with Efraim Sicher's "Checklist of Works of Isaac Babel's Works and Criticism" (2008)
- Gregory Freidin's Isaac Babel Page at Stanford University
- Prose in original Russian language at lib.ru
- Tough Guys reading "The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel" by Tom Teicholz
- Konarmiya, Norman DaviesNorman DaviesProfessor Ivor Norman Richard Davies FBA, FRHistS is a leading English historian of Welsh descent, noted for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland, and the United Kingdom.- Academic career :...
describes Babel in Sarmatian Review, 3/1995 issue - review of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel in January 2007 issue of Jewish Currents
- Bibliography @BookRags.com Obituary of Nathalie Babel Brown, Isaak Babel's daughter and editor
- Isaac Babel, in wikilivres.info