Isaac Babel,
the son of a Jewish
shopkeeper,
was born in Odessa, Ukraine, on 13th July,1894. When he was a child
he witnessed a pogrom and was deeply influenced
by the experience.
After leaving
school Babel moved to Kiev. He began writing but had no success with
his work until he met Maxim Gorky in 1916.
Soon afterwards Gorky printed two of his short stories in his Letopis.
The Russian censors considered the stories to be obscene and Babel
was charged under Article 1001 of the criminal code.
Babel joined
the Bolsheviks
in 1917 and during the Civil War he
served as a political commissar in the Red Army.
A collection of his stories based on his war experiences, Red
Cavalry was published in 1926. The following year he published
Odessa Tales, a collection of
stories about Jewish
life in
Russia. He also wrote two plays, Zakat
(1928) and Mariya (1935).
Babel became
increasingly critical of the rule of Joseph
Stalin and found it increasingly difficult to get his work published.
At the first meeting of the Soviet Writers'
Union in 1934, Babel told the gathering that: "I have invented
a new genre - the genre of silence".
In May,
1939, Babel was arrested and his work was confiscated. According to
the Soviet government Isaac Babel died in a prison camp in Siberia
on 17th March, 1941. However, his family believe he was executed soon
after he was arrested in 1939.
(1)
Issac Babel wrote a brief autobiography
that was published by his daughter, Nathalie Babel in 1964.
In 1915 I began to take my writing around to editorial
offices, but I was always thrown out. Then at the end of 1916 I happened
to meet Gorky. I owe everything to this meeting, and to this day I
speak his name with love and reverence. He published my first stories
in the November, 1916, issue of Letopis. For these stories I was charged
under Article 1001 of the criminal code.
(2)
Nathalie Babel, Isaac Babel (1964)
It was in 1923 during his stay in the mountains that my
father began to work on the stories which eventually appeared in Red
cavalry. Achieving the form that he wanted was an endless torture.
He would read my mother version after version; thirty years later
she still knew the stories by heart. My parents moved to Moscow in
1924. My father's first stories were being published at the time,
and he became famous almost overnight.
(3)
When Osip Mandelstam was being investigated
by the Secret Police he went to see the
short-story writer, Isaac Babel, a leading figure in the Union
of Soviet Writers. The meeting was later recorded by Mandelstam's
wife, Nadezhda
Khazina.
The next
person we consulted was Babel. We told him our troubles, and during
the whole of our long conversation he listened with remarkable intentness.
Everything about Babel gave an impression of all-consuming curiosity
- the way he held his head, his mouth and chin, and particularly his
eyes. It is not often that one sees such undisguised curiously in
the eyes of a grown-up. I had the feeling that Babel's main driving
force was the unbridled curiously with which he scrutinized life and
people.
With his
usual ability to size things up, he was quick to decide on the best
course for us. "Go out to Kalinin," he said, "Nikolai
Erdman is there - his old woman just love him." This was Babel's
cryptic way of saying that all Erdman's female admirers would never
have allowed him to settle in a bad place. He also thought we might
be able to get some help from them - in finding a room there, for
instance. Babel volunteered to get the money for our fare the next
day.
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