Isaac Babel
Isaac Babel Исаак Бабель | |
---|---|
Russian SFSR, Soviet Union | |
Occupation | journalist, short story writer and playwright |
Citizenship | Russian Empire Soviet Union |
Notable works | Red Cavalry Odessa Stories |
Signature | |
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Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель, romanized: Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel; Ukrainian: Ісак Еммануїлович Бабель, romanized: Isak Emmanuilovych Babel; 13 July [O.S. 1 July] 1894 – 27 January 1940) was a Soviet writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, and has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry".[1] Babel was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940.
Early years
Isaac Babel was born in the
Although Babel's short stories present his family as "destitute and muddle-headed", they were relatively well-off.[2] According to his autobiographical statements, Babel's father, Manus, was an impoverished shopkeeper. Babel's daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, stated that 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 pre-teens, Babel hoped to get into the preparatory class of the
In addition to regular school subjects, Babel studied the
His attempt to enroll at
Work
Early writings
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Isaac_Babel_1908.jpg)
In 1915, Babel graduated and moved to Petrograd, in defiance of laws restricting Jews from living outside the Pale of Settlement. Babel was fluent in French, besides Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish, and his earliest works were written in French. However, none of his stories in that language have survived.
In St. Petersburg, Babel met Maxim Gorky, who published some of Babel's 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 the name of Alexey Maksimovich Gorky with love and admiration." One of his most famous semi-autobiographical short stories, "The Story of My Dovecote" (История моей голубятни, Istoriya moey golubyatni), was dedicated to Gorky.
There is very little information about Babel's whereabouts during and after the
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."[6]
October's Withered Leaves
During the
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 Tbilisi. In one of his articles, he expressed regret that Lenin's controversial New Economic Policy had not been more widely implemented.
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.[7]
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
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—
Flaubert."[9]
Red Cavalry
In 1920, Babel was assigned to Komandarm (Army Commander)
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 in 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, Marshal Budyonny was infuriated by Babel's unvarnished descriptions of marauding Red Cossacks and demanded Babel's execution without success.[10] However, Gorky's influence not only protected Babel but also helped to guarantee publication. In 1929 Red Cavalry was translated into English by J. Harland and later was translated into a number of other languages.[11]
Argentine author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges 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.[12]
Odessa Stories
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Benya_Krik.jpg/220px-Benya_Krik.jpg)
Back in Odessa, Babel started to write
According to Nathalie Babel Brown,
"Sunset premiered at the
bourgeois stance and its interesting 'fathers and sons' theme. But in Moscow, 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 Theatre.[15]
However, Sunset continued to have admirers. In a 1928 letter to his
According to Pirozhkova, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was also an admirer of Sunset and often compared it to the writings of Émile 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 unusually terse text."[17]
Maria
Babel's play Although intended to be performed in 1935, the Maria's performance was cancelled by the NKVD 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,
"The play is very controversial. [It] shows the stories of both sides clashing with each other during the
Life in the 1930s
In 1930, Babel travelled in Ukraine 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 Ukraine and the destruction of the village across our land."[21]
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 protégé, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, "In six months time, they'll leave the formalists in peace and start some other campaign."[22]
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.[23] However, according to Nathalie Babel Brown, his life was tolerable:
"The young writer burst upon the literary scene and instantly became the rage in Moscow. 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 1930s, he was given a villa in the writer's colony of Peredelkino, outside Moscow. No secret was ever made of his having a wife and daughter in Paris. 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."[24]
In 1932, after numerous requests, he was permitted to visit his estranged wife Yevgenia in
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."[26]
After his return to the Soviet Union, Babel decided to move in with Pirozhkova, beginning a
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 Europe. 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 Union. My mother described to me these last conversations with my father many times."[27]
Arrest and execution
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Babel_NKWD.png/220px-Babel_NKWD.png)
On May 15, 1939, Antonina Pirozhkova was awakened by four
According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Babel's arrest became the subject of an urban legend within the NKVD. NKVD agents, she explains, were fond of "telling stories about the risks they ran" in arresting "enemies of the people". Babel had, according to NKVD lore, "seriously wounded one of our men" while "resisting arrest". Mrs. Mandelstam contemptuously declared, "Whenever I hear such tales I think of the tiny hole in the skull of Isaac Babel, a cautious, clever man with a high forehead, who probably never once in his life held a pistol in his hands."[29]
According to Peter Constantine, from the day of his arrest, Isaac Babel "became a nonperson in the Soviet Union. 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 Donskoi's famous Gorky trilogy premiered the following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplay, had been removed from the credits."[30]
According to his file, "Case #419, Babel, I.E.", the writer was held at the Lubyanka and Butyrka Prisons for a total of eight months as a case was built against him for Trotskyism, terrorism, and spying for Austria and France. At his initial interrogations, "Babel began by adamantly denying any wrongdoing, but then after three days he suddenly 'confessed' to what his interrogator was suggesting and named many people as co-conspirators. In all likelihood, he was tortured, almost certainly beaten."[31] His interrogators included Boris Rodos, who had a reputation as a particularly brutal torturer, even by the standards of the time, and Lev Schwartzmann, who tortured the renowned theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold.[32] Among those he accused of conspiring with him were his close friends Sergei Eisenstein, Solomon Mikhoels, and Ilya Ehrenburg.[33]
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."[34] This led to further delays as the NKVD frantically attempted to salvage their cases against Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and Eisenstein.
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Left: Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities." Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "За" (affirmative). Number 12 on the list is Isaac Babel. Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin. |
On 16 January 1940,
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 Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others... I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.
He was shot the next day, and his body was thrown into a
According to the early official Soviet version, Isaac Babel died in the Gulag on March 17, 1941. Peter Constantine, who translated Babel's complete writings into English, has described the writer's execution as "one of the great tragedies of 20th century literature."[38]
Rehabilitation
On December 23, 1954, during the Khrushchev thaw, 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."[39]
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
Lost writings
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Sholom_Aleichem_listens.jpg/220px-Sholom_Aleichem_listens.jpg)
After his rehabilitation, Antonina Pirozhkova spent almost five decades campaigning for the return of Babel's manuscripts. These included Babel's translations of
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,
"In 1987, when so much was changing in our country, I again made an official request that the KGB 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 commiserate. We understand how precious Babel's manuscripts would be.'"[42]
Legacy
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Ilya_Ehrenburg_Russian_writer.jpg/170px-Ilya_Ehrenburg_Russian_writer.jpg)
According to John Updike, Maxim Gorky said to André Malraux that Babel was "the best Russia has to offer." A quarter of a century later, Babel's contemporary Konstantin Paustovsky wrote in his reminiscences, "He was, for us, the first really Soviet writer."[43]
Judith Stora-Sandor, one of Babel's first biographers, wrote in 1968, that Babel's "literary sensibility was French, his vision Jewish, and his fate all too Russian."[44][45]
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 Ehrenburg, 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 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 W.W. Norton published Babel's Complete Works in 2002, Nathalie edited the volume and provided a foreword. She died in Washington, D.C., in 2005.[46]
Lydia Babel, the daughter of Isaac Babel and Antonina Pirozhkova, also emigrated to the United States and currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland.[47]
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 1966 in a translation by Michael Glenny in Three Soviet Plays (Penguin) under the title "Marya". Maria's American premiere, directed by Carl Weber, took place at Stanford University in 2004.[48]
Several American writers have valued Babel's writings.
Memorials
A memorial to Isaac Babel was unveiled on the north-west corner of the intersection of Rishelievska Street and Zhukovskoho Street in Odesa 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 Isaac Schwartz, in the Philharmonic Hall in Pushkinska Street on September 6, 2011. The city also has an already existing Babelya Street in the Moldavanka.
Bibliography
Books
- Конармейский дневник 1920 года (written 1920, published 1990). ISBN 0-300-09313-6)
- Конармия (1926). Red Cavalry
- Закат (play, written 1926, performed 1927, published 1928). Sunset
- Одесские рассказы (published individually 1921–1924, collected in 1931). Odessa Stories
- Мария (play, written mid-1930s, not performed in USSR). Maria
Short stories
- "Story of My Dovecote" (1925)
- "Crossing the Zbruch" (as "I. Babiel") (1926)[50]
Screenplays and film collaborations
- Salt (1925). Directed by Pyotr Chardynin; short film based on the short story of the same name.[51]
- Jewish Luck (1925). Directed by Alexander Granovsky; based on screenplay from Sholem Aleichem with intertitles by Babel.[52]
- Беня Крик (1926, screenplay). Benya Krik (1927), directed by Vladimir Vilner, filmed in Ukraine and available on DVD from National Center for Jewish Film.[53] Translation of screenplay published as Benia Krik: A Film-Novel, trans. Ivor Montagu and S. S. Nolbandov (1935).
- Wandering Stars (1926, screenplay). Directed by Grigori Gritscher-Tscherikower in 1927; based on the novel by Sholem Aleichem.
- Jimmie Higgins (1928). Directed by Georgi Tasin, screened in 1929; based on the novel by Upton Sinclair.
- The Chinese Mill (1928)
- Old Square, No. 4 (written in 1939)
Posthumous compilations
- Benya Krik, the Gangster and Other Stories, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, with translations by Walter Morison, Bernard Guilbert Guerney and the editor (Schocken, 1948)
- The Collected Stories, trans. Walter Morison and others (1955)
- Lyubka the Cossack and Other Stories, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (1963)
- The Lonely Years: 1925–1939: Unpublished Stories and Correspondence, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew and Max Hayward (Farrar, Straus & Company, 1964)
- You Must Know Everything, Stories 1915-1937, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Max Hayward (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969)
- The Forgotten Prose, ed. and trans. Nicholas Stroud (Ardis, 1978)
- Collected Stories, trans. David McDuff (Penguin, 1994)
- The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, trans. Peter Constantine, ed. Nathalie Babel, intro. Cynthia Ozick (Norton, 2002)
- Odessa Stories, trans. Boris Dralyuk (Pushkin Press, 2016)
- The Essential Fictions, trans. Val Vinokur (Northwestern University Press, 2017)
- Of Sunshine and Bedbugs: Essential Stories, trans. Boris Dralyuk (Pushkin Press, 2022)
In popular culture
British writer Bernard Kops wrote a poem, and later a play, about Babel: "Whatever Happened to Isaac Babel?"[54]
Brazilian writer Rubem Fonseca wrote a novel about the search for a lost manuscript from Babel: "Vastas emoções e pensamentos imperfeitos" (1988).[55]
American author Travis Holland wrote his debut novel "The Archivist's Story” about an archivist, Pavel Dubrov, in Lubyanka Prison who has to authenticate a Babel manuscript. In the novel his meeting with Babel prompts him to save the story at great risk to himself.[56]
Playwright Rajiv Joseph won an Obie Award for Best New American Play for his 2017 Describe the Night, which follows Babel from his role as a journalist in Poland through and beyond his execution, and the role his personal journal plays in uniting people across time and place.[57][58]
References
- The Jewish Daily Forward, July 6, 2007, p. B2.
- ISBN 0-14-044997-3.
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, page 15.
- ISBN 5-9691-0154-0.
За это время я был солдатом на румынском фронте, потом служил в Чека, в Наркомпросе, в продовольственных экспедициях 1918 года, в Северной армии против Юденича, в Первой Конной армии, в Одесском губкоме, был выпускающим в 7-й советской типографии в Одессе, был репортером в Петербурге и в Тифлисе и проч.
- ^ Freidin, Gregory. "Isaac Babel, Russian author". Britannica. Retrieved 11 June 2021.
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, page 486.
- ^ "babel son painter Ivanov". www.pseudology.org.
- ^ William Grimes, "Antonina Pirozhkova, Engineer and Widow of Isaac Babel, Dies at 101," New York Times, September 22, 2010.
- ^ Antonina Pirozhkova, At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel, p. 45.
- ^ Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, page 217
- ^ The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th Edition. Edited by Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 2000
- ^ Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Nonfictions, page 164.
- JSTOR 40870776.
- ISBN 978-0-253-22328-9.
- ^ "The Complete Works of Isaac Babel," pages 753–754.
- Hoover Press, 2011. Page 107.
- ^ At His Side, page 83.
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, page 754.
- ^ Antonina Pirozhkova, At His Side; The Last Years of Isaac Babel, Steerforth Press, 1996. Page 47.
- ^ Maria's American Debut Archived September 15, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Antonina Pirozhkova, "At His Side; The Last Years of Isaac Babel," page 18.
- ^ Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs, 1921–1941, page 328.
- ^ Max Eastman, Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934) pp. 101–103
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, page 21.
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, page 25.
- ^ At His Side, pages 9–10.
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, pages 23-24.
- ^ At His Side, page 115.
- ^ Nadezhda Mandelstam (1999), Hope Against Hope, Modern Library. Pages 5–6.
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, page 29.
- ^ Pirozhkova (1996), page xxix.
- ^ Shentalinsky. The KGB's Literary Archive. pp. 26–27.
- ^ Pirozhkova (1996), page xxxii.
- ^ At His Side, page xxx.
- ^ Shentalinsky. The KGB's Literary Archive. p. 70.
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, pages 27-28
- ^ Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, page 324.
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, page 29
- ^ The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, page 27.
- ^ "Огонек: Перечитывайте заново". Archived from the original on 15 December 2009. Retrieved 14 January 2010.
- ^ At His Side, page 107.
- ^ At His Side, page 154.
- ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 5 October 2023.
- ISBN 0-8057-6637-5.
- ^ Stora-Sandor, Judith (1968). L'Homme et l'oeuvre (in French). Paris: Klincksieck. p. 18.
- ^ Saxon, Wolfgang (13 December 2005). "Nathalie Babel Brown, 76, Dies; Edited Isaac Babel". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 May 2010.
- ^ Ibid
- ^ Michelle Keller: Babel’s ‘Maria’ makes U.S. debut at Pigott The Stanford Daily, 27 February 2004.
- ^ "Interview with George Saunders". 6 February 2017.
- ^ Babiel, I. (November 1926). "Crossing the Zbruch" (PDF). New Masses. Translated by Max Eastman: 14. Retrieved 13 May 2020.
- JSTOR 25748034.
- ^ "Jewish Luck". www.jewishfilm.org. Retrieved 5 October 2023.
- ^ "Benya Krik". jewishfilm.org. Retrieved 5 October 2023.
- ^ Kessler, Sarah (29 October 2010). "Isaac Babel's Last Days in Lubyanka". The Forward. Retrieved 9 December 2015.
- ^ Fonseca, Rubem. Vastas emoções e pensamentos imperfeitos. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1988. English translation: Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts (translated by Clifford Landers). New York: Ecco Press Publisher, 1998.
- ^ "The Archivist's Story” by Travis Holland.
Published by Dial Press Trade Paperback
Apr 29, 2008 | 256 Pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | ISBN 9780385339964
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 26 March 2023.
- ^ "Describe the Night". Atlantic Theater Company. Retrieved 26 March 2023.
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 Charyn, Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel, Random House, 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 Archived 2014-07-01 at the Wayback Machine. Stanford University Press, 2009
- Konstantin Paustovsky, "Reminiscences of Babel", 1962
- Adrien Le Bihan, "Isaac Babel, l'écrivain condamné par Staline", 346 p., Perrin, Paris, 2015.
- Sam Sacks, "A Masterpiece Worth Revisiting" (review of Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, London, Pushkin Press, 219 pp.), The Wall Street Journal, 30 April 2015.
- Nicholas Lezard, “Criminally Good” (review of Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, London, Pushkin Press, 221 pp.), The Guardian, 1 November 2016.
- Times Literary Supplement, 29 March 2017.
- Gary Saul Morson, "The Horror, the Horror" (review of Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions, edited and translated from the Russian by Val Vinokur, Northwestern University Press, 404 pp.; Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, London, Pushkin Press, 219 pp; and Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, London, Pushkin Press, 221 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 2 (8 February 2018), pp. 28, 30.
External links
Media related to Isaac Babel at Wikimedia Commons
Quotations related to Isaac Babel at Wikiquote
- Babel's Biography (PDF) by Gregory Freidin (A version of this essay in Critical Biography was published in European Writer of the 20th 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 Archived 2012-03-18 at the Wayback Machine reading The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel by Tom Teicholz
- Konarmiya, Norman Davies describes Babel in Sarmatian Review, issue 3, 1995
- review of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel in January 2007 issue of Jewish Currents
- Bibliography at BookRags
- Saxon, Wolfgang (13 December 2005). "Nathalie Babel Brown, 76, Dies; Edited Isaac Babel". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 August 2008. (Isaac Babel's daughter and editor)
- Works by or about Isaac Babel at Internet Archive
- Works by Isaac Babel at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Isaak Babel at IMDb
- Finding Babel Documentary film that profiles Isaac Babel's life and impact, with readings by Liev Schreiber