Isaac Babel was perhaps the first Soviet prose writer to achieve a truly stellar stature in Russia, to enjoy a wide-ranging international reputation as grand master of the short story, and to continue to influence—through his own work as well as through criticism and scholarship—literature produced in our own day. All this acclaim notwithstanding, Babel, whom contemporaries remember as a man with a penchant for mystification, remains one of the more enigmatic figures of Russian modernism. Even the corpus of his writings is uncertain and may never be firmly established. The works by which he wished to be known, however, indeed his best-known works, have gone through thirty-five editions in the Soviet Union alone and, beginning in 1926, have been translated into all the major European tongues. In contrast to this renown, Babel's "authorized" legacy is quite compact. Begun and finished, for the most part, between 1921 and 1926, it consists of three major story cycles, two plays, and several pieces of short fiction—all fitting comfortably into an average-sized volume. Together they account for approximately half of Babel's extant output: movie scripts, early short fiction, journalistic sketches, one translation, and a few later stories that remained unpublished in Babel's lifetime (they were considered offensive either to the party or to the censor's sense of public delicacy).

His most famous work, the cycle of short stories and vignettes Konarmiia (Red Cavalry), was first published in a separate edition in 1926. It dealt with the experiences of the Russo-Polish War of 1920 as seen through the bespectacled eyes of a Russian Jewish intellectual working, as Babel himself had, for the newspaper of the Red Cossack army. This autobiographical aura was critical to the success and popularity of the cycle. The thirty-three jewel-like pieces, strung together to form the first edition of Red Cavalry, were composed in a short period of time, between the summer of 1923 and the beginning of 1925, and together constitute Babel's longest work of fiction (two more pieces would be added subsequently). They also represent his most innovative and daring technical accomplishment. For the first time in Russian letters at least, the opulence and subtlety of modernism lent themselves to the expression of the cruelest and basest sensibility. An instant success, Red Cavalry met with virtually universal acclaim as the first true masterpiece of Russia's postrevolutionary prose fiction; it had generated a critical response that had exceeded Babel's own output even before the appearance of the separate edition. Clearly he touched the raw nerve of contemporary culture.

Another cycle, Odesskie rasskazy (Odessa Tales), contains four novellas: "Korol"' ("The King," 1921), "Kak eto delalos' v Odesse" ("The Way It Used to Be Done in Odessa," 1923), "Otets" ("The Father," 1924), and "Liubka Kozak" ("Liubka the Cossack," 1924). Although completed between 1921 and 1923, for a long time the cycle was believed to have preceded Red Cavalry. United, like the stories of Red Cavalry by their protagonists, the setting, and the narrator, Odessa Tales presented a larger-than-life, Rabelaisian picture of the city's Jewish underworld, whose members go about their carnivalesque business, meting out poetic justice to the melancholy powers of prudery, capital, and the local police. Inherently theatrical, Odessa Tales had an easy time crossing over into film and drama. In 1925 and 1926, Babel wrote a script based on the story cycle, naming it Benia Krik after the chief protagonist of the Odessa stories. By contrast with Odessa Tales, where the action takes place in the years 1905 to 1907 and the king of the Odessa gangsters reigns unchallenged, the script stretches to include the 1917 revolution and the civil war. It ends with a close-up of the back of Benia Krik's head as it is being shattered—deservedly, we are supposed to think—by a Red executioner's bullet. Perhaps by coincidence, the characters in the script fall without exception into two groups: the traders and the criminals are Jews (like the author of the script and the film director), whereas the proletarian revolutionary activists, who finish off the gangs, are ethnic Russians. Produced in 1926, the film ran into brief trouble with the censors but was released in January 1927 to enjoy considerable popularity.

Also in 1927, Babel completed his first play, Zakat (Sunset, 1928). Thematically different, it was in other respects closely related to the Odessa Tales; from this common milieu derives some of the most comical dialogue known to Russian theater. As the title suggests, Sunset offered a melancholy meditation on the passage of time as revealed through a bloody conflict between a brutal father who refuses to act his age and his children, who do not hesitate to use force in order to age him. Although the younger generation prevails and the play ends with the children's triumph, theirs is a Pyrrhic victory, and not only because it anticipates their eventual defeat at the hands of their own children. The small Jewish, bourgeois, and criminal world in which such a victory possessed some relative value would soon be ground up by the revolution and the new Soviet state. Babel's contemporaries understood this without any prompting from the playwright. In print, the play made for good reading; on stage, the response was mixed. In Odessa Sunset played to packed audiences in two theaters simultaneously (in Yiddish and in Russian), but the Moscow production of 1928, staged while Babel was in Paris, ended in disaster, largely, it seems, because the director tuned it to a crudely ethnic and anecdotal key.

After Sunset came out in February 1928, Babel published very little that had not appeared previously, although editions of his writings, revised and expanded to include a most recent story or two, kept being issued with what was surely an enviable regularity. Close to thirty separate editions, among them a volume of collected works, rolled off the presses during the decade following the publication of Red Cavalry. One work not related to the three cycles, the play Mariia (Maria, 1935), represented a rather uninspired attempt to appease Babel's official "creditors"—the high cultural and, it seems, political establishment that had allowed the "silent" author to continue maintaining a remarkably high profile. With its pathos directed against the remnant of the aristocracy and the unscrupulous Jewish bourgeoisie under the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-1928), the play arrived long after the NEP, with all of its remnants, had been obliterated in the Stalinist revolution. Babel worked too slowly, political winds were changing fast, and the play misfired, although it may have earned him a brief respite—just for trying—from the intense official pressure to produce.

In the 1930's Babel devoted much of his energy to film, random journalistic work, and almost compulsive travel, roaming ceaselessly across the Soviet Union, ostensibly in search of new material for his work in progress. Throughout this period he assured his family and friends in correspondence as well as in conversation that he was working on a major project—a novel, perhaps. In 1925 he told Dmitrii Furmanov, a fellow writer, he was considering a novel about the Cheka. Possibly some echoes of this project may be discerned in the rumors, circulating in Russia in the late 1920's and reported in the émigré press, that the Cheka had stopped the publication of a new piece by Babel. According to several memoirists, including Ilya Ehrenburg, in the late 1920's and early 1930's Babel was working on a novel, "Kolia Topuz," in which a con man successfully reforms himself through work in socialist construction. During the period of the first Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), when the prison population engaged in forced labor was rapidly expanding, such topics were in the air. Babel's patron and protector, Gorky, at the time the most important figure in Soviet culture, actively encouraged fellow writers to explore this subject. Whether Babel tried his hand at it or merely wished to appear to is a question that will most likely remain unanswered.

His tendency to subtitle his stories as part of a larger work in progress—a consistent practice beginning with Odessa Tales—confuses matters further. "V shchelochku" ("Through the Crack"), an odd piece about a scene observed by the narrator through a peephole in a bordello, was published in 1923 and came, according to its subtitle, "From the Book Etchings." It has no acknowledged companions in the published Babel, although it resembles his two stories published by Gorky in 1916. Some fifteen years later, "Gapa Guzhva" (1931, in The Lonely Years), a story about a Ukrainian village whore caught up in the collectivization of agriculture, was published as "The First Chapter of Velikaia Krinitsa." Its companion piece, "Kolyvushka," published posthumously in 1963, also in The Lonely Years, and yet to appear in the Soviet Union, bore a slightly different subtitle: "From the Book Velikaia Stantsa." There are no traces of other chapters. In response to the harsh criticism of Mariia, Babel declared that he was revising the play as part of a trilogy covering the period 1920 to 1935. But in the words of the Soviet commentator on the play, "No materials testifying to Babel's continued work on the trilogy have been preserved." When Babel was arrested on 15 May 1939, all the papers that were with him at his dacha in Peredelkino were confiscated. Now they are presumed lost, destroyed together with a portion of the NKVD (as the KGB was known in the 1930's) archive in 1941, when the seizure of Moscow by the German armies seemed imminent. For years, Antonina Pirozhkova, the writer's widow, had been pressing the KGB to reveal the fate of Babel's papers only to be informed in 1988 that the KGB possessed no record of Babel's papers. Thus we may never know whether Babel was writing for the drawer or trying to produce literature that could be officially accepted. Nor will we ever know whether any of his efforts, if indeed there were such efforts, led to substantial results.

The only extant manuscript of an unfinished work of fiction, Evreika (The Jewess, 1979), lends credence to the claims that Babel had indeed tried his hand at a different genre and a different thematic material. A third-person narrative with an unmarked, "objective" style, it tells the story of a recently widowed woman who leaves her decaying shtetl for Moscow to settle there with her only son. He insists on this move and she follows him, but apprehensively; for as she puts it, the capital already has too many Jews. A civil war hero, a decorated Red Army commander, and a student at a military academy, her son belongs to the new Soviet elite, and yet, he also acknowledges, if only to himself, the unease he feels in his new prestigious surroundings. The manuscript breaks off just as the narrative reaches its first potential conflict: the more cultivated neighbors are beginning to complain about the smell of his mother's Jewish cooking. It is a bitter but fitting irony that the unfinished novella was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988, not in the original Russian, but in Yiddish, in Yiddish-language journal Sovietish Heimland. The fate of the work itself has remained enigmatic. Did Babel abandon this project for reasons of censorship or for fear that its publication might damage his reputation? Or could it be that he simply failed to sustain the narrative style that seems alien to the rest of his known fiction? Or did he complete Evreika only to lose it once and for all in the incinerators of the Lubyanka prison?

We do know, however, that with the exception of Mariia, the unfinished Evreika, and two or three later stories, Babel's major fiction is all of a piece. The three cycles share the same narrator, although they emphasize his different facets, and we continue to encounter him in the later stories, which, accordingly, borrow their settings, or sets, from Red Cavalry, The Story of My Dovecote, and Odessa Tales. Even the two novellas dealing with the collectivization—both third-person narratives—recall with such pungency and vividness the style of Red Cavalry that a knowing reader of Babel would find the absence of that bungling and humane intelligent—who failed to acquire the hoped-for "simplest of human skills," the ability to kill—at least conspicuous and at most profoundly telling. It is this narrator who represents the chief protagonist of what has reached us of Babel's fiction. The author's mask, he came with time to be identified with the name of Isaac Babel, blending into one the man, the character, and the persona that straddled the two—the writer.

Babel's posthumous "rehabilitation," the official clearing of his name of all charges in 1954, and the subsequent reissuing of his work in the Soviet Union at the time of de-Stalinization made him an attractive symbolic figure to the less orthodox members of the Soviet cultural elite. They eagerly promoted his name and his writings, eliciting protest from the diehard Stalinists whose interference made it easier for the champions of Babel to dissociate themselves retrospectively from the worst brutalities of the Soviet state. But in identifying with this "martyred" star of Soviet literature (and by implication with the more tolerant 1920's, when Babel made his spectacular debut), these advocates tended to magnify the author's tragic demise while underplaying his—and by implication, their own—loyalty to the regime during the period of worst terror.

As a Russian Jew who in his writings thematized the advantages and liabilities of this double designation, Babel attracted a substantial Jewish readership both in his own country and abroad, and especially in the United States. For this audience, too, and with special poignancy after World War II, he served not only as a storyteller and playwright, but as a powerful symbolic figure whose life reproduced the recent history of the Jews of Europe, with all their accomplishments and tragic fate. Because there is no more consensus regarding this history than that of modern Europe or Russia, Babel has been alternately called upon to provide evidence for the failure or success, or merely the complexity, of the attempts made by Diaspora Jews to identify with the political or cultural agenda of their native country. More recently, Babel's biography and his writings, in which Jewish characters often assert themselves with vigor and militancy, provided a stimulus for a new sense of collective identity among the Jews of the Soviet Union—an unanticipated consequence of the coming together of de-Stalinization, awareness of the Holocaust, and Israel's 1967 victory in the Six-Day War.

Equally important, the exemplary character of Babel's achievement goes beyond the properly Jewish theme to encompass other forms of what sociologists call the phenomenon of cultural marginality. A member of the intelligentsia, a Jew, and because of this doubly different from his fictional setting, Babel's author-narrator rejected some aspects of his Jewish heritage and combined others, openly and skillfully, with powerful strands in his adopted milieu. In the process he produced a master script for future writers who, whether Jewish or not, wished to play the role of the other at the very center, and not the margins, of their country's culture.

A protagonist in the drama of his own making (although he had to share the directing with the times), Isaac Babel not only produced some of the best short fiction of this century, he also performed the role of a "marginal" writer with consummate skill. Indeed, he was able to maintain the illusion of authorship during those years when, by his own sardonic admission made from the stage of the First Congress of Soviet Writers, he was practicing "silence—the most difficult of all literary genres." Thus the oeuvre alone, especially its "authoritative" version, cannot account with sufficient fullness for the whole complex of ideas, texts, and events that have come to be associated with Babel's name. His background, the cultural tradition that he entered when he embarked on a career of literary authorship, the expectations of the more powerful segment of the reading public, his fiction, and his strategy for achieving and maintaining a high literary profile—all have contributed to the formation of what constitutes Babel's legacy for us.

Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel or, according to the records of the Odessa rabbinate, Isaac Manievich Bobel, was born to Man' Yitzkhovich and Feiga Bobel in the city of Odessa on 30 June 1894. His only sibling, Meri (after her emigration to Belgium, Madame Marie Chapochnikoff), was born in 1900. Even these two facts, which should be as innocuous as any birth certificate, are hard to disentangle from the two sets of narratives we associate with Isaac Babel. One of them, his own fiction, follows the autobiographical convention and centers on the narrator whose biographical attributes identify him (apparently) with the author himself. The other set is harder to circumscribe: simply put, it consists of what the reading public knows about the history of culture, politics, and society in modern Russia, including the history of Russia's Jews.

The two narratives impart a specific meaning to the fact that Babel's family was Jewish, secular, and, at the time of his birth, well on its way toward joining the middle class. Although lacking in systematic education, the parents identified with the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement that had accepted Russian as the language of emancipation. And so it was embraced in the Babel household, functioning as the intergenerational lingua franca, with Yiddish reserved for the parents as their private tongue. Obviously, the culture of the shtetl and the ghetto, inseparable from Yiddish, was still very much their culture. Born and raised in an enclosed, small, homogeneous community which they later fled, Babel's family nevertheless experienced it as an irreducible place of origin, one where they had once wholly belonged, and one whose spiritual and emotional resources were still accessible to them. By contrast, their children, who were expected to make the final break with this culture, would never be part of either that or any other undivided world. With his wife and daughter living in France, his mother and sister in Belgium, another wife and another daughter in Russia, scores of relatives in Odessa and Kiev, and his own career as a Soviet writer now reaching for the stars, now descending into silence, Babel was the mobile (or homeless) man of the twentieth century par excellence.

Mobility had already distinguished his parents' generation. The comfortable financial position his father achieved early in his son's life placed the family in a distinct minority among the subjects of the Russian empire. It belonged to an even more distinct minority among Russia's Jews, who had to contend with the official and informal, but officially sponsored, anti-Semitism as well as severe legal disabilities. The latter included the prohibition to dwell outside the Pale of Settlement, specially designated urban areas in Russia's southwest, and rigid restrictions on access to education. "In Odessa, there is a very poor, populous and suffering Jewish ghetto, a very self-satisfied bourgeoisie, and a very pogromist city council," wrote Babel in 1917 about the city of his birth, fully aware of the misery and humiliation he was spared because his parents belonged to the second, fortunate category.

To be born in Odessa, or rather to have lived there in the years 1905 to 1915, was another stroke of luck Babel frequently acknowledged. The revolution of 1905, although it failed to destroy the old regime, immensely strengthened civil society, creating in the urban centers of Russia a heady atmosphere replete with political debate, strikes and demonstrations, a pluralistic press, and a thriving market for art and literature. Under these conditions, no matter how hostile the official policy, the Jewish community of Odessa was too large (in 1900, a third of Odessa's half a million citizens were Jewish), too well organized, and too varied to be kept in a state of hopeless oppression. On this count alone, Odessa was unique. As Simon Markish tells us in his essay on Babel, the city resembled Jewish communities in turn-of-the-century America more than it did those in Russia. The effect of the government policy regarding Jews was further limited by the heterogeneity of the city population, the rest of which constituted a mélange of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Greeks, and, in addition, small but culturally important enclaves of French, German, and English merchants. The pungent, freewheeling atmosphere of a major port city and industrial center, the remarkable ethnic mix, and a considerable, heavily Jewish bourgeoisie supporting a network of secondary schools, newspapers and journals, several theaters, an opera company, and a university provided an Odessa Jew in search of a worldly fortune with an opportunity to breach the isolation of third-class citizenship and the ghetto milieu. Surmounting the legal and social obstacles would have been much harder in a smaller, less cosmopolitan place and would have involved more painful compromises with the official policies in St. Petersburg or Moscow, the two capitals kept largely free of Jews.

Equally important, in a country that was growing weary of the old regime—symbolized by the aristocratic, decorous, northern St. Petersburg—the thoroughly middle-class, southern Odessa could be seen as one of the sources of the country's social and cultural rebirth. True, a Petersburg snob was likely to turn his nose up at this "very awful city," but the growing contribution to Russian culture by the provincial artists and writers gave substance to Babel's prediction in "Moi listki: Odessa" ("My Notes: Odessa," 1917) that the spirit of Odessa, bright, merry, and bourgeois, would soon be challenging the dominant Petersburg sensibility, its Dostoevskian moodiness, classical splendor, and imperial chill:

Babel's optimism was, in part, borne out by the history of Russian literature and society in the 1920's. As soon as the imperial center ceased to hold, the provincial intelligentsia quickly stepped in to fill the vacancy, with the "men of Odessa" marching stylishly in the forefront. Some of the better-known writers and poets of the postrevolutionary decade, indeed, the "classics" of Soviet literature, including Valentin Kataev, Konstantin Paustovsky, Illia Ilf, Eduard Bagritsky, and, of course, Babel himself, came from Odessa. What was happening in literature paralleled the postrevolutionary reshuffling of the empire's social and demographic deck. Together with the limited free enterprise permitted under the New Economic Policy, these changes may well have imparted to Petrograd or Moscow some of the Levantine commercial atmosphere of Odessa during its most thriving period, inaugurated by the 1905 revolution and brought to a close by World War I.

This was the Odessa Babel knew and liked best, and credit for the city's reputation as the Russian Marseille, which is how some imagined it in its halcyon days, must go to Odessa Tales. Conceived in the austere world of 1920 and 1921, these tales paint a picture of the city as Babel remembered or wished to remember it during his school years, 1905 to 1911. But books have their own fate, and in the imagination of Babel's readers, this cycle of four stories has forever transformed Odessa, or, more precisely, its Jewish ghetto, with its underworld, into a romantic pays de Cocagne, historically the first Jewish or, for that matter, Russian Jewish or, simply, Russian version of such a place.

Few facts are available on which to base a reconstruction of Babel's childhood or family. His own autobiographical writings have often proved to be misleading sources, as least when compared to the recollections of his sister, to those of two Odessa poets who had some contact with his family, and to his own, only partially published, correspondence. A writer, above all a writer with a cultivated public persona, he was more concerned with following the spirit of the truth than its letter. He admitted as much in a 1931 note to his mother that accompanied his autobiographical fiction: "All the stories are from the childhood years, with lies added, of course, and much that is altered." More important, by modifying the facts of his childhood, Babel was not simply exercising the prerogative of a writer of fiction; he was, it seems, carrying out a deliberate strategy—one with significant consequences for an author with a high public profile. "When the book is finished, then it will become clear why I needed all that," he ended the explanation, suggesting, cryptically, that the four stories were only a part of a larger cycle. Indeed, a 1937 story, "Di Grasso," would have fitted neatly with the earlier four, whereas most of the stories that appeared in the 1930's fill the "autobiographical" gap between childhood years and Red Cavalry.

Given Babel's talent for cyclization, it would appear that he had in mind a larger autobiographical frame designed to incorporate his known and future work, enclosing the entire life span of the boy who grew up to be the author-narrator of Red Cavalry and, finally, a major Soviet writer. The great success enjoyed by the autobiographical fiction of Gorky and its elevation to the status of a national epic in the 1930's lend support to this conjecture. Furthermore, in the early 1930's, when Babel's output was diminishing, such a master frame would have helped to allay the pressure to produce, permitting him to present his past achievement, perhaps even the writings he had previously suppressed, in a fresh, more contemporary light. Far from being opportunistic, this strategy would make use of the essential attributes of Babel's art, its apparent autobiographical character. The other, no less significant properties of his writings, especially Red Cavalry—their modernistic fragmentariness and the delirious mixture of pathos and baseness for which the broad reading public and the cultural bureaucracy were losing tolerance—these "outmoded" properties would have lost their prominence, after they were integrated into a more coherent, epic narrative frame.

How early did Babel decide to pursue this strategy? The pressure to follow the ragged and fragmented vision of the post-civil war literature with the Apollonian gaze of an epic masterpiece was already noticeable in the middle 1920's. An epic, it was felt, was needed to certify the revolution as a fait accompli, to transform it from the event of an overwhelming immediate experience into a holiday that all would happily celebrate. Treated in this way, the revolution would be wrapped in the magical aura of Origin, conferring legitimacy on the status quo and constituting the present as a natural order. Some writers, among them Yevgeny Zamyatin, actively resisted this sort of program, but many, if not most, went along with it out of either conviction, opportunism, or sheer exhaustion with the revolutionary flux. This need for a revolutionary epic intensified as the 1920's progressed and became a key issue in the broader political project of nation-and citizenship-building under the new Stalinist order. Babel, whose friendship was appreciated among the discerning members of the Soviet elite, was sensitive to the literary as well as political trends and eager to stay in the forefront of the emerging Soviet Russian literature. This ambition can be seen clearly in many statements both public and private in which he expressed his desire for a new style and a different genre.

"Istoriya moey golubyatni" ("The Story of My Dovecote"), which bore a meaningful dedication to Gorky and gave its name to the entire childhood cycle, was published in 1925. It was also during this time that Babel was trying to make up his mind on the future of Red Cavalry—whether to freeze the cycle in its present form or to expand it until the number of pieces approached fifty (his original plan). That he published it as a separate edition in 1926 shows the project to have been essentially completed. Babel was ready or, better, was compelled to go on to other things if he wished to remain among the key players in Soviet Russian literature. The anxiety of falling behind, indicative of Babel's own ambition, was typical among the Russian literati of the time. The 1920's and early 1930's were a period when neither the reading public nor the cultural establishment, neither the printing nor the distribution of literature, had yet to be stabilized or, rather, Stalinized—that is to say, reach the stage when publishing became strictly regimented and the reading public atomized. True, the inclusion of "Argamak" (1924-1930) in the 1933 and subsequent editions of Red Cavalry and the publication in 1937 of "Potselui" ("The Kiss"), a story clearly associated with it, changed the élan of the book, but these were two master strokes meant to ease the incorporation of Red Cavalry into the larger autobiographical framework.

Needless to say, this complex phenomenon had its own history. Literary expression began to play a pivotal role in the formation of the self-image of the Russian intelligentsia in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when the educated classes grew progressively alienated from the institutions of the autocratic state. Combined with the primacy of the artist in the ideology of European modernism and its corollary, the crisis of faith, this aspect of Russia's cultural history helps explain the facility with which the figure of a Russian writer could acquire the charismatic aura of a secular saint. Indeed, it was (and to a lesser extent still is) a matter of general belief that a writer had his or her hand on the pulse of the nation, which the reader could feel only by keeping his or her hand on the writer's pulse.

Babel was very much part of this tradition, indeed, one of its more masterful vehicles in this century. As a member of the Russian intelligentsia, he was its product; as a writer, he paid tribute to it all his life. This is why in order to bring his fictional construct into a sharper relief and to gain a better understanding of his literary project as a whole, it is important, where possible, to juxtapose the author's own narrative account with historical testimony, including memoirs, documents, and correspondence. Almost everything written on Babel has been done with the awareness of these two interdependent paths, however often writers may have conflated them, as did Lionel Trilling in his influential 1956 essay, or kept them too far apart, treading softly on one and marching merrily along the other.

Soon after Babel's birth, most likely for business reasons, the family moved to Nikolaev, a small port town about a hundred miles northwest of Odessa, where in the course of ten years his father had established himself as a representative of an overseas manufacturer of agricultural equipment. When in Nikolaev, the boy had a dovecote to keep, a yard to play in, and a garden to pick fruit from, and he witnessed a pogrom that happily did not directly affect the Babel household or diminish its fortune. It was also in Nikolaev that at the age of nine or ten he began to attend the Count Witte Commercial School, an institution that did not discriminate on the basis of religion. We do not know whether Babel ever tried to enroll in the less liberal but far more prestigious gymnasium, but his fictional alter ego in "The Story of My Dovecote" does, and more. That boy nearly loses his mind from the pressure of preparing for the entrance examination, which he, a Jew, has to pass with distinction; and having passed and having been admitted, he finds himself in the middle of a pogrom and nearly loses his life.

Thus begins Babel's "Autobiography." The items are carefully selected to produce the highest contrast with the author's present position as a famous Russian writer. The oppressive "ghetto" Jewishness is emphasized through detailed enumeration whereas the cosmopolitan nature of Babel's home education is represented as an indiscriminate agglomeration of anonymous disciplines. But emancipation was not long in coming. By the end of this opening paragraph, the typical product of the traditional ghetto milieu was fluent enough in French to produce what would appear as competent French fiction: "At the age of fifteen, I began writing stories in French. I wrote them for two years and then stopped: my paysans and all sorts of authorial meditations came out colorless; only the dialogue was a success."

The educational fervor, befitting a middleclass family on its way up, was matched by the residence on the second or third floor of an imposing building that stood at the intersection of Post and Richelieu, two of the city's more fashionable avenues. The new address contrasted sharply with their former home in the Moldavanka, the humble Jewish neighborhood where the author was born. Two decades later, he would headquarter his fictional family there after its move from Nikolaev to Odessa ("V podvale" ["In the Basement," 1931], and "Pervaia liubov"' ["First Love," 1925]). Of course, in fiction, what this "populous and suffering Jewish ghetto" ("Odessa," 1917) lacked in life's comforts—and the script Benia Krik paints a horrific picture of Jewish poverty—it made up in the local color that Babel had been applying unsparingly beginning with the first story of the Odessa cycle, "The King," in 1921.

Even a cursory comparison of the biographical details with the autobiographical fiction published between 1925 and 1932 reveals a certain tactic: the author's bourgeois background was an acceptable part of the constructed biography only if it was bourgeois manqué A number of Babel scholars have suggested that the author tried to "proletarianize" his fictional background in order to curry favor with the class-conscious Bolshevik regime. In the 1920's, however, this sort of humbling could yield no more than small change, especially coming from a "fellow traveler" and not a "proletarian" writer. It did, however, make perfect narrative sense: it echoed the tried-and-true "bourgeois" novelistic convention according to which heroes were to be cultivated not in a well-endowed hothouse, but in the open—and preferably on top of a social compost heap. Babel must receive credit for producing a stunningly effective Jewish version of this plot motif, which, after the Soviet climate had turned inhospitable, migrated to New York and Hollywood, where it continued to enjoy a thriving career.

In keeping with this principle, Babel's fictional parents have been completely ruined in a pogrom. In addition to this misfortune, their son has become severely ill, forcing them to move to Odessa in search of a qualified medical cure. Their only child, he has developed a nervous condition in reaction, it seems, to a triple shock caused by the violence, the scene of his father's self-abasement before a cossack officer, and the unexpected proximity of the luscious bosom and hips incautiously paraded by the family's Russian neighbor, Galina. She is the first woman to steal the boy's heart and is kind enough to offer temporary refuge to the Babel family ("First Love"). From the reader's perspective, the story provides a "realistic" (in psychoanalytic terms) motivation for the sensibility Kirill Vasilievich Liutov (meaning literally "The vicious one") displays in Red Cavalry. But in the sense of Babel's emerging bildungs-roman, it was not the child who, as the saying goes, was father to the man. Rather, it was the man who was fathering his own childhood.

According to family lore, Babel's grandmother played an important role in his upbringing. Babel's sister remembers her as quarrelsome. She was excessively strict with her granddaughter and equally indulgent with her grandson. Babel left a portrait of her in a 1915 unfinished story entitled "U babushki" ("At Grandmother's"), which was to be part of a cycle, Detstvo (Childhood). He spent Saturdays at her frightfully overheated home, doing his homework and receiving tutors while she sat and watched. At regular intervals she would interrupt her vigil in order to indulge them both in largely recreational eating. If the story is to be trusted, this formidable woman was rather informal about observing the Sabbath, but worshiped ardently and with complete devotion her grandson's secular education. Illiterate herself, she was in a sense a child of the Enlightenment and believed fervently in knowledge as the sole means of conquering the world. And that, in its turn, was the only end she thought worth pursuing: "'Study,' she says suddenly with great force; 'you will achieve everything—wealth, fame. You must know everything. Do not trust people. Do not have friends. Do not give them your money. Do not give them your heart.'"

However much it anticipates the later Babel, "At Grandmother's" would not have fit the master autobiography without major revisions, for it offered no visible escape route nor any palpable future. The material of the story lacked variety, and its virtual uniformity tended to dominate the story unchallenged, depriving the episodes of relative scale. Under such conditions, hyperbole and contrast were prevented from growing into a Babelian grotesque, and the slightly bizarre sensuality was kept from evolving into something more orgiastic. Even the proverbial detachment of Babel's narrator, so unsettling in his later work and already detectable here, might appear quite natural, given the soporific monotony of the milieu. What seems to be entirely absent but what would distinguish the later stories beginning with "The King" is excess—whether in emotional intensity or affectless detachment—excess born of an unclouded Nietzschean admiration for the beauty and power of life that exists, if not beyond, then to the side of the "accursed" worries about good and evil.

"The Story of My Dovecote" provides an instructive contrast. There a Jewish boy who has finally earned his acceptance by the state and become a student at an elite school runs into a pogrom. The rewards for his efforts, four long-coveted pigeons, are taken away from him and are literally smashed against his head, but this is done by a man whose hands are touched by leprosy, a man who has no legs. These details of the grotesque, one might say excessive, deficiency (absence of legs) and overabundant presence (can there be just the right amount of leprosy?), provide an aesthetic escape hatch, which at first is too narrow to notice but soon becomes as wide as the doors of the church:

Still, the boy gets up. Walking home, he finds his attention drawn to the sight of a young peasant lad smashing the window frames of the house belonging to a certain Kharitos Efrussi. Mentioned only in passing, the address is significant because it transforms the pogrom into an all-too-visible hand of poetic justice. This hand not only punishes Jewish boys who play successfully by the rules of the hated empire, but also takes revenge on the Jewish merchant Efrussi, who does not, and who used bribes the previous year to place his son in the gymnasium at the expense of the more deserving protagonist. Once the economy of vengeance has been established, the reader can begin to enjoy vicariously—through the eyes of the narrator—the sight of the unrestrained natural beauty and pure strength displayed unabashedly by the pogromist:

A dozen or so years later, this Slavic version of Nietzsche's blonde Bestie would be riding with (or against, it does not matter) Budennyi's cavalry, followed by the narrator's admiring gaze.

Like his formidable mother, Man' (or more urbanely, Emmanuel) Babel placed great value on education and the worldly accomplishments it was bound to facilitate. He enforced his convictions with the vigor and excess of a self-made man, creating for his male offspring a studious and extremely tense household. "Resting l did at school," was how Babel qualified his home academic program. Babel's father—moody, sarcastic, and given to memorable fits of anger—was not averse to literary composition and penned satires in Hebrew or Yiddish aimed at the failings of his relatives and friends. In his son's fiction, with its unconcealed oedipal economy, he played the role of a weak man who cared more about property than dignity, as in the following from "First Love":

Because such a character was unworthy of being cast as a closet writer (an anticipation of the author's own vocation), Babel pressed the cherished gift into the hands of an exorbitantly colorful maternal grandfather, Levi-Yitzkhok—a ragtag type stitched together from patches of a bohemian fantasy, Dickensian and Rabelaisian characters, and, perhaps, a boyhood wish ("In the Basement"). A different picture emerges from Babel's letters, in which he could treat his father's memory with conciliation and generosity, even if tinged ever so slightly with the feelings that posthumous effusiveness and forgiveness had not completely effaced:

As far as his public persona was concerned, Babel's father was a well-respected businessman who radiated so much dignity and honesty that his neighbors felt honored to be sharing a building with him.

We know considerably less about Babel's mother, except that she was given to worry, a trait to which her son's correspondence provides repeated testimony. "I think that you and Mama are suffering from an anxiety mania that is becoming pathological," reads one of Babel's letters to his sister, in an oft-repeated epistolary expression of filial exasperation. In another, Babel castigates his mother for a "weakness of character," an especially vexing trait that he believed he had inherited from her. The glimpse afforded by her daughter's reminiscences is less conflicted, if bland: "Mother was kind, had a gentle character, often had to humor father when he was upset; he was quick to anger. Mother ran the household and brought up the children. She taught my brother to read." In his fiction, Babel sketched her as a woman capable of grand emotions, disillusioned in marriage ("our unhappy happiness"), nobly ashamed of her husband's acquisitiveness, and eager to make up for these misfortunes by loving her son much too much ("First Love").

As for Babel's sister, she was denied the role of a protagonist in the family's ambitious script. In her brother's stories she appears not at all except in the plural of the reference in "First Love" to the children that the fictional father had ignored in his capitalist pursuits. It is tempting to think that in acknowledgment of her conspicuous absence, Babel paid her an ironic tribute in naming after her the lead character, who, in turn, gave her name to the play Mariia. Like his sister in his fiction, Mariia never steps out onto the stage but, remaining invisible, exerts a crucial influence on all the other dramatis personae.

However complicated Babel's relationship with his parents and sister, the bonds established in his youth remained powerful throughout his life. They were strong enough for him to accept financial responsibility for his mother and sister after they emigrated to Belgium in 1925 (a little over a year after his father's death); and, more remarkable, he corresponded with them regularly throughout the worst years of terror in the 1930's, insisting, from all indications sincerely, that they join him in the Soviet Union. His last letter to them was postmarked 10 May 1939, antedating his arrest by only five days. Perhaps the clearest echo of Babel's attachment to his mother and sister, so evident in his correspondence, can be found in the unfinished Evreika, in which his nostalgia for his family and his desire to reunite and share a household with them found fictional fulfillment.

A man of broad and varied education, Babel had bypassed the gymnasium and the university, the two elite, although not exclusive, educational institutions of the Russian empire. In 1906 his parents enrolled him in the second grade of the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School No. 1. According to their charter, schools of this type prepared young men for careers in business or industry, or if they wished to continue their studies, for admission to specialized colleges and polytechnics. By contrast with the gymnasium's classical curriculum, commercial schools emphasized "practical knowledge," such as sciences and modern languages. The shibboleth of the higher stratum in the empire's educational system, the study of ancient tongues, was excluded from the curriculum of the commercial schools, an exclusion that made it more difficult for their graduates to go on to a university.

Notwithstanding the obvious liability, some schools of this type, among them the famous Tenishev, had a good academic reputation and were popular. They were also less regimented (Jews, for example, were freely admitted), and they tended to have a more varied student body whose members, as in the case of Babel's class, were distinguished by the impurity of their pedigree, "the sons of foreign merchants, Jewish brokers, titled Polish nobility, Old Believers, and a lot of superannuated billiard players. (The order of Babel's listing may give some idea of the social hierarchy at the empire's outer fringe.) Many "progressive" families, including the aristocratic Nabokovs, the academic Struves, and the well-off Mandelshtams, found this sort of schooling preferable to the "conservative" gymnasium education.

Whether Babel's parents enrolled their son in a commercial school as a matter of choice or for reasons of necessity cannot be determined with certainty. What we know, however, is that Babel completed the course of study two years ahead of his contemporaries, earning the highest grades in such subjects as Russian literature, Russian grammar, German, French, English, commercial geography, law, history, and political economy. It may be tempting to see some residue of bitterness in Babel about being sent to the commercial school in "The Story of My Dovecote," in which the boy protagonist succeeds, under his father's relentless pressure, in being admitted to a gymnasium. But Babel had sufficient narrative reasons for giving his plot a different spin: the admission in the story's first movement serves as a perfect counterpoint for the denouement of the second movement, the pogrom.

Equally significant, among the three languages he learned well at the commercial school, only French happened to become a point of identification for Babel. Even if he made the selection under the influence of an exceptionally gifted teacher, the choice cannot be regarded as accidental, as it fell on the supremely cosmopolitan language, one associated with a nobility of manner and spirit, literary high culture, and diplomatic intercourse. It was a significant move in Babel's strategy of self-presentation to point out that he began to write Russian fiction only after he had tried his hand at producing stories in French under the tutelage of his French teacher. Mr. Vadon was not merely French, he was a native of Brittany, a provincial man, like Babel himself. Babel displayed this attribute prominently during the years when he was lionized in Petrograd and Moscow. It was also around that time that Vladimir Shklovskii, who pronounced Babel the best contemporary author, praised him for "having seen Russia the way a French writer accompanying Napoleon's army could." Emphatic, cultivated identification with what was outside Russia proper served to give Babel the reputation of being a writer who could penetrate to the very heart of things.

Even more important, although Babel had in his possession all the necessary ingredients as early as 1917 (see "My Notes: Odessa"), the particular style emerged only after the civil war, when he returned to his native city after a stint as a war correspondent in Budennyi's cavalry army. The experience of the revolution combined with the ability to see beauty in the exercise of power unrestrained by the notions of good and evil—this is what enabled Babel to produce a feast for the mind's eye rather than a series of rough and wordy collage portraits of desolate and ravaged Russia à la Boris Pilniak or Vsevolod Ivanov. Both Red Cavalry and Odessa Tales embodied the simple twentieth-century discovery—it had been prophesied before, most notably by Nietzsche—that power could be justified by form, not by the measure of evil or goodness, but by the criteria that discriminated against the sick, the weak, and the ugly. What made Babel's version of the superman particularly moving and ethically acceptable to people who identified with the oppressed was his success at endowing lowly characters with all the attributes of life's supreme masters. Hitherto they had been depicted as the humiliated and the wronged, whose credo, in Nietzsche's terms, never went beyond the hissing ressentiment of the down-trodden. In Babel's work these people acquire a joyful Gargantuan stature. A Jew can "pick a fight in the streets and stammer on paper, be a tiger, a lion, a cat, spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied" ("The Way It Used to Be Done in Odessa"). A soldier elevated by the revolution to the rank of division commander can make one wonder at the "beauty of his giant body" (a phrase from "My First Goose"):

Like his Jewish counterpart, the gangster boss Benia Krik, this cossack general "stammered on paper." His irresistible vitality is unaware of civilization's restraint, as the narrator discovers while watching him finish writing out an order:

Already Dostoevsky had acknowledged the supreme seductiveness of the combination of power and beauty (as in the handsome Stavrogin in The Possessed [1871-1872]), and the idea animated the writings of Babel's immediate predecessors, foremost among them Gorky, Blok, and Nikolai Gumilev. But Babel was the first one to surround with a deceptively ethical aura the cruel truth that even the most brutal power could be made palatable if it was beautifully attired.

After graduating from the commercial school in 1911 and finding himself unable to enter the University of Odessa because of the quota for Jews, Babel was sent to Kiev to enroll in economics at the Kiev Commercial Institute. It was in Kiev that he met his future wife, Evgeniia Gronfein. She came from a much richer and far more cultivated family than his own, and Babel appreciated the intellectual and artistic atmosphere that existed in her household, and especially the ease that came with the family's inherited wealth and well-established social status. Her father, an importer of agricultural equipment, had done business with Babel's father and was happy to receive his partner's son in his house, although not happy enough to favor his daughter's interest in the aspiring economist. From both the testimony of Nathalie Babel, the writer's daughter, and his own correspondence, we know that the future in-laws saw in Babel a provincial upstart, an opinion that Mrs. Gronfein was to change only when he became a famous and well-connected Soviet writer.

An echo, and only an echo, of Babel's experience at the Gronfeins may be heard in "Guy de Maupassant" (1932), a story about an aspiring writer who is hired by the wife of a Jewish banker to help her translate the complete Maupassant. Like the Gronfeins, Raisa Bendersky, the banker's wife, is a native of Kiev; she also happens to bear the first name of Babel's sister-in-law. Mrs. Bendersky possesses the "ravishing body" of a Kievan Jewess, literary pretensions supported by a genuine artistic sensitivity, and a bottle of 1883 Muscadet, her husband's favorite and most intoxicating vintage. Predictably, the writer, by contrast with Mr. Bendersky, is poor as a church mouse but has imagination, energy, talent, and style. While working on "L'Aveu" he finds himself reenacting clumsily, together with the banker's wife and in the banker's absence, the novella's artlessly seductive plot. Another glimpse of Babel's Kievan period (1911-1915) is afforded by his daughter's biographical sketch (The Lonely Years), which outlines a complementary picture. Aware of his weakness for the bourgeois opulence and self-indulgence displayed in the Gronfein household, Babel responded by cultivating a heroic stance of life-affirming asceticism. Nathalie Babel writes:

It was also while in Kiev that Babel made his debut in print. "Staryi Shloime" ("Old Shloime," 1913) tells the story of one Jewish family's response to forced resettlement: the younger generation decides to convert rather than be uprooted, but the old man, who discerns the truth through the fog of senility, hangs himself. Written in a sentimental key and in the third person (both uncharacteristic for the later Babel), the three-page story belongs wholly to the genre of bleak "socially aware" Russian prose, including its Jewish variety, in which government oppression and calls for liberation follow one another with the same unimaginative inevitability as night follows day. Nothing about "Old Shloime," not even its violent outcome, is unexpected, and the protest implied by the story is so grimly conventional that instead of challenging the status quo, which was apparently the intention, it tends to do the opposite, implicitly affirming the present as part of the order of things. However, what is significant about "Old Shloime," as well as the far more sophisticated "At Grandmother's," is a lack of hesitation on Babel's part to engage openly the Jewish theme. One would look in vain in the pre-1917 Mandelshtam or Pasternak, roughly Babel's contemporaries, for overt signs of such identification.

In October 1915, the Kiev Commercial Institute was evacuated to Saratov, a town in the provincial heartland of Russia, where Babel remained until graduation in May 1916. Only two years had passed after the publication of "Old Shloime," but "At Grandmother's," completed in Saratov, displayed a different literary sensibility. The protagonist himself narrates the story, and his voice, still hesitant but growing hollow with distance, presents the most intimate milieu, that of his childhood, as a strange world, driven by forces unacknowledged and unmatched by conventional narrative patterns:

At the end of 1915, Babel completed his course work at the commercial institute, but before taking the final examinations, he transferred his credits to the law faculty of the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute. This was a private establishment with the rank of a university that, among other things, qualified its Jewish students for temporary residence in the capital. Living in Petrograd illegally for months at a time, Babel was finally enrolled as a fourth-year student on 10 October 1916, and received his residence permit a few days later. The permit was to expire on 15 February 1917, timed perfectly, as fate would have it, to coincide with the expiration of the issuing body. Although the "Autobiography" creates the impression that he abandoned all plans for a respectable business or professional career as soon as he moved to Petrograd, the record shows otherwise. A certain amount of hesitation is evident in his decision to proceed with qualifying examinations at the commercial institute in the spring of 1916. He did well, receiving "excellent" in political economy, general accounting, and urban and rural economics with statistical analysis, "good" in commercial law, and "satisfactory" in economic geography. On the basis of this performance, he was informed more than a year later, he had been awarded the degree of candidate of economic sciences of the second rank. Such academic diligence, especially in a nonphilological field, was considered unbecoming by the author, whose loyalty could not be divided between material matters and the essential world of art. From the reader's view the clutter of factual detail might have obscured the bohemian and heroic persona that Babel was cultivating during the publication of Red Cavalry.

Whether or not he took seriously his law studies at the Psychoneurological Institute, Babel pursued his literary interests with concentration. In a matter of months after his arrival in Petrograd, a short period for a beginner—even a talented one—without connections, his persistence paid off. At first, he wrote in his "Autobiography," setting up another situation of high contrast, the Petrograd editors gave him the cold shoulder, suggesting that his future was in the retail trade. Then, in 1916, a sudden success: he was discovered by Gorky, who published two of his stories, "Ilia Isaakovich i Margareta Prokofievna" ("Ilia Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna") and "Mama, Rimma, i Alla" ("Mother, Rimma, and Alla"), in the November issue of Letopis' (The Chronicle), a prominent left-wing journal edited by the grand man of letters himself.

The stories are masterly, vintage Babel in subject matter as well as style. Similar to his later writing, they invite the reader to an unblinking examination of the detritus of existence, rewarding the reader who is not too fastidious to persevere with the pleasurable jolt of discovering a shining, if slightly oversized, human pearl. Written in the third person, they project a consciousness (based on the self-image of the Russian intelligentsia) that incongruously combines detached perspectivalism with a delicately muted appeal to a sentimental heart. In the first story, a plump prostitute with a penchant for squeezing her pimples in view of her clients gives grudging refuge to a Jewish businessman without a residence permit who eats herring for supper and has a habit of airing his toes before climbing into bed. As the story winds to a close, each, it turns out, possesses a heart of gold and is capable of striking up a fleeting and touchingly disinterested friendship. The ending of the second story surprises the reader with a lightning glimpse of the emotional treasure concealed under the grimly incautious romances of two adolescent girls and the insidious pressures of middle-class poverty crushing their aging mother. Pointing to the other shore, where the view of human misery and ugliness was unclouded by conventional compassion, Babel was ready to make the crossing.

Throughout his career Babel emphasized Gorky's recognition of his talent to the exclusion of all others, treating it virtually as a divine sanction to practice his art and later invoking it as a talisman for protection. The publication of the two novellas, however, did not pass unnoticed, which shows that in the literary world of Petrograd, Babel had more than one friend. "The stories are simple, full of observation and a sense of measure," wrote a critic on the staff of Zhurnal zhurnalov (Review of Reviews), "qualities that are not as ordinary as one might think. In effect, to learn literary technique means to acquire a sense of measure and an awareness of scale. Here Babel has a gift." This recognition led to an invitation to contribute a regular column to this journal and a productive association with Gorky's postrevolutionary anti-Leninist newspaper Novaia zhizn' (New Life). The first carried Babel's name on its masthead in October-February 1916-1917: "Bab-El' [and later, I. Babel]: Moi listki" ("Bab-El: My Notes"). The second published Babel's "Dnevnik" (Diary), a series of sketches about revolutionary Petrograd, from February to November 1918. These writings stand halfway between Babel's fiction and ordinary reportage, and although not as distinguished as Babel's stories, they firmly established him as a professional writer.

Like most of his contemporaries among the intelligentsia, indeed, like the entire country, Babel led a peripatetic existence during the years of revolution and civil war. In the spring of 1917, he joined the Russian army at the Rumanian front, resurfacing in Petrograd early in 1918 as a reporter for Gorky's Novaia zhizn'. His "Diary," published regularly until the closing of the newspaper by the Bolsheviks at the end of 1918, followed the general direction of Gorky's critical stance, combining pleas for greater humanity with dispassionate observations of the daily cruelties brought about by the revolution and exacerbated by the ruthlessness of the Bolshevik regime. "To hoist a rifle and shoot one another—on occasion, this may not be so stupid, but this is not the whole revolution," Babel wrote in 1918 on the subject of a new maternity hospital. He concluded in a typical Novaia zhizn' fashion with a defense of the noble institution of motherhood: "Who knows, maybe this is not the revolution at all? Children must be born under good conditions. And this—I know for certain—is the real revolution."

This early collaboration with Gorky found only a partial acknowledgment in Babel's official self-portrait. A mention of Novaia zhizn' (in 1918, Babel also wrote for Zhizn' iskusstva [Life of Art]) is nowhere to be found. What must have felt as an honor for a beginning writer turned out to be, in retrospect, a politically imprudent association. In addition (and it is difficult to determine which was a more decisive factor), dwelling on a regular literary employment could dull the luster of Babel's cultivated reputation as an extraordinary author who bore the mark of election visible only to the genius of Gorky and who was, as it were, disgorged complete on the literary scene by the revolution itself. He writes in his "Autobiography":

There is a certain irony in the fact that this humble "apprenticeship among the people," the phrase serving as title for the second volume of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, consisted of writing essays and sketches for several newspapers, chief among them Gorky's Novaia zhizn'. The chronology of events, too, is intentionally jumbled, with the Petrograd reporting of 1917 and 1918 sandwiched between the items referring to 1920 and 1922. Such stories as "Khodia: Iz knigi Petersburg 1918," ("The Chinaman: From the Book Petersburg 1918," 1923), an anecdote that possibly planted the seed of Yury Olesha's "Envy," and the hilariously anti-Dostoevskian "Iisusov grekn" ("The Sin of Jesus," 1923), were passed over in silence. Some significant events were omitted, among them Babel's marriage to Evgeniia Gronfein in 1919—an absence that, like his failure to mention the hard-earned degree in economics, served to magnify his commitment to the writer's vocation. Otherwise he would not have been able to write, as he did in "Guy de Maupassant":

Still, however distorted factually, the account conveys the spirit of the truth. A one-time employee of the Cheka and a member of the food requisitioning teams, Isaac Babel must have had a hard time subsisting exclusively on a vegetarian diet. It is tempting to imagine that these experiences as well as his participation in the revolution and the civil war had made him a very different writer. His most astute and least sentimental admirer, Victor Shklovskii, appears to have thought as much:

A whole new horizon opened up when he decided to interpose between the author and the events the figure of Gaston Vidal, whose voice was borrowed, as it were, for the main narrative. Drawing such a clear distinction between the narrator and the author further obviated the necessity for an explicit judgment. Perhaps the most important discovery was made in "Dezertir" ("The Deserter"), a story about an officer who has just offered a shell-shocked young soldier a choice between the firing squad, with its eternal shame, and suicide with honor. When the deserter proves unable to shoot himself, the officer, who does "not take offense at small things," obligingly pulls the trigger. In a postscript added to the story, the author-narrator removes the mask of the Frenchman and repeats Vidal's characterization of the officer verbatim, demonstrating that the same statement, no matter how trite, can generate a new and profound meaning when uttered by a different speaker:

This "discovery" of the interdependence of the voice and statement, and, therefore, of the relativity of meaning, helps account for Babel's mastery over the overwhelming material in Red Cavalry—for his skill in shifting nimbly from one to another voice. The device of narrating in marked voices, which the Russians term skaz if the voice happens to be speaking substandard Russian, was used widely in postrevolutionary prose, a literary and linguistic tribute to the post-1917 social leveling and the saturation of the urban bastions of the intelligentsia culture by members of the semiliterate lower classes and provincial milieu. However, it was contemporary poetry that served Babel as the ultimate model for his narrative technique. Many poets, especially Blok, Mandelshtam, Sergei Esenin, and Mayakovsky, were masters at weaving the voice of the other into the fabric of their verse. What distinguished their use of the voice of the other from skaz was the dominant presence of the dramatically complete figure of the poet. Even if merely implied, this chief protagonist whom the reader identified with the author functioned as the central referent in much the same way as a star's gravitational pull defines the course of the orbiting planet.

In Odessa Tales and Red Cavalry, the function of this Poet (with the capital P) would be performed by the man from Odessa, a Jew and a Russian intelligent who had "autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose" but wished to look at life as a green promenade for "women and horses" and was possessed by a still greater desire to retain the intellectual's central position in the country's culture, the position from which the revolution had threatened to displace him. This narrator would be the first to walk into the verbal ambush of the changing world. Camouflaged from the reader's unaided eye, the author would be moving behind the narrator, maintaining a safe distance for himself (but not necessarily the reader), yet staying close enough to keep the narrator in full sight. If in "The Deserter" Babel went out of the way to emphasize this distance, in Red Cavalry, more sure of his craft, he caused it to emerge imperceptibly and grow from story to story.

Kirill Liutov, the compassionate, humane—all too humane—narrator, cannot grant his mortally wounded comrade the last wish: to be put out of his misery before the attacking Poles take him prisoner ("Smert' Dolgusheva" ["The Death of Dolgushev," 1923). But the author, who remains invisible, can and does—through his emissary, a wild, violent, and only slightly "Red" cossack, Afon'ka Bida. In a sense, Babel reveals the nature of his authorial pathos in the ostensibly autobiographical "Guy de Maupassant," in which the young narrator—more Babel than Liutov—flings down the gauntlet before the venerable ghost of Tolstoy. Drunk on wine bought with his first honorarium, he launches into a monologue:

The question remained unanswered, because the response—only in part to Tolstoy's The Cossacks (1863)—had been provided in Red Cavalry. There the narrator would play the role of a latter-day Count Tolstoy, a distant relative of the noble protagonist of The Cossacks and a spiritual heir to the vegetarian humanism of the late Tolstoy. But the author, who had learned from Nietzsche, not Dostoevsky, about the tragic sense of life and the beauty of power, and who had experienced both, would know no fear, accepting calmly and with majesty all the gifts from the Pandora's box of life. In the adaptations from Gaston Vidal, Babel's author functions as a Russian voice conveying a Frenchman's witness to the carnage at the western front. In Odessa Tales and Red Cavalry, Babel constructed a "foreign" author, foreign in his sensibility, watching with cool curiosity a Russian Jewish intellectual as he picks his way through a minefield of daily life in a cossack army fighting for the "world revolution" and—the overused, bland pathos is spiced up with irony—"a pickled cuke" ("Konkin," 1924).

The spectacular acclaim Babel enjoyed during the publication of Red Cavalry and Odessa Tales helps us to understand why his later writing was dominated by the figure of the autobiographical narrator-protagonist. The intelligentsia, who were sympathetic to the Revolution but shocked and disoriented by the catastrophic events of the preceding decade, embraced his stories as the first true masterpiece of the new era. What they saw in them was above all a new language, a new way of speaking about the world, that made it possible to assimilate revolutionary change without compromising their moral and, even more important, aesthetic sense. "Babel knows about the necessity of cruelty," wrote the influential critic A. Lezhnev in his 1926 essay,

Instead of trying to solve this paradox by conceptual manipulation, Babel opted for a mimetic construct, inventing an exemplary, aesthetically convincing model of the self. As Lezhnev's analysis implied, this model, if internalized, would help one become reconciled to the brutal and unsightly way that power was exercised in the good revolution. But not everyone was able to discern in Babel's art a complex truth and a positive spirit.

The most sophisticated among Babel's detractors accused him of the cardinal sin of the intelligentsia: apologizing for the revolution by appealing to abstract moral principles. That Babel's "bourgeois humanism" was no longer moving sluggishly through the veins of a typical "intelligentsia" hero but was pulsating mightily through the hearts of muscular protagonists—that fact made Babel's stance particularly pernicious. The most impressive bill of particulars, entitled "Poeziia banditizma" (The Poetry of Banditry, 1924), was drawn by V. Veshnev (Vl. Przhetslavskii), a critic associated with the Komsomol journal Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard). Trying to dispel Babel's considerable mystique, Veshnev cautioned youthful readers to be wary of what he believed to be Babel's insidious moral economy:

Paying homage to Babel's craft, Veshnev saw the greatest danger precisely in the effectiveness of his fiction, implying that Babel made the acceptance of the revolution a matter of not ideological or even moral choice, but aesthetic judgment: "The bandit stories with their poetry of anarchism are written simply, transparently, and seductively. They can and they will enjoy ideological success. Are we going to be pleased by this?" Apparently Veshnev was not pleased, but his prediction turned out to be correct. The stories were successful and, what is more, they soon achieved the reputation of the foremost masterpieces of Soviet fiction and maintained this status, despite repeated assaults, throughout the 1930's.

Whatever one might say, the cultural sphere of the revolution belonged to the intelligentsia, and Babel fulfilled, in the Marxist critical parlance of the day, the social command of this "pseudo-class"; he endowed, according to N. Stepanov, the experience of the revolution and the civil war with a heroic and romantic aura. Many were called to the task, but Babel alone was chosen, not least because he had managed to continue looking at the world through the traditional perspective of the Russian intelligentsia, that established in the masterpieces of Russia's literary art. Wrote Ia. Benni (Ia. Cherniak) in 1924:

Benni comes the heart of the matter when he seeks an explanation for the effectiveness of Babel's art and locates it in the "autobiographical" basis of his writings. Nothing could be more convincing, according to him, than the individual experience of an intelligent, mediated though it might be by the invention of fiction:

A writer who was able to justify the revolution morally and aesthetically, who made this justification the matter of self-sacrifice, Babel was likewise credited with the invention of the new linguistic culture. "In the art of using live language, Babel is successfully catching up with the classics," wrote a Marxist literary critic, Georgii Gorbachev, offering what counted, perhaps, as the highest praise for a contemporary writer. He continued in an awkward but, for this reason, more telling manner:

As in an echo chamber, the praise continued to amplify Babel's achievement until Red Cavalry was declared by V. Polonskii to "constitute, alone, a factor determining the development of our art" and a "token of the urban, industrial future of Soviet Russia." The editor of Krasnaia nov', Alexander Voronskii, a pivotal figure in the literary' life of the 1920's, stated clearly and simply that "Babel was strengthening the association of literature with the Soviet republic and the Communist party." Coming from the man whom the party had commissioned to win the intelligentsia to the cause of the Bolshevik Revolution, this was high praise indeed. No wonder Babel dismissed his pre-1917 literary efforts as insignificant, declaring in the "Autobiography" that his career had commenced in 1923 and 1924, when the trend-setting avant-garde LEF and Krasnaia nov' (Red Virgin Soil), the most prestigious and weighty of contemporary journals, began publishing stories from his two major cycles.

Controversy was an unwelcome part of Babel's celebrity; Red Cavalry was centered on events in the immediate past and had a strong documentary flavor. Not only could the places of action be located on the map of the Polish campaign, but many actors in Red Cavalry retained their prototypes' names. (These would be altered only in the later editions.) However, perhaps because it was risky, this strategy contributed to Babel's success. Even when the notable verity of his civil war cycle impinged on the self-image of Commander of the First Cavalry Army Semyon Budennyi, it was the author, not the warrior, who came out the winner. Unlike his more urbane comrades-in-arms (Kliment Voroshilov, for one), who patronized the arts and knew the value of being made part of Babel's canvas, this semi-educated warrior could not make sense out of Babel's unconventional expression and failed to appreciate his admiration for the mighty barbarians of the revolutionary war. Affronted by the lurid detail in Red Cavalry and exploited by the enemies of Voronskii's journal, he accused Babel in print of vicious libel of the heroes of the First Cavalry Army. The verbal charge, which bore the title "Babizm Babelia iz 'kraznoi novi'" ("Floozy-ism of Babel from Krasnaia nov'"), a clumsy pun on the Russian baba (a common condescending term for a woman), succeeded only in bestowing on Budennyi himself a reputation as a comical Goliath. When another opportunity arose in 1928, after the fall of Voronskii, Budennyi once again stepped into the fray—only to be snubbed in Pravda by Gorky himself. The great man of letters, an undisputed authority on culture at the time, explained to the general with barely concealed exasperation that in a backward country like Russia, it was not the business of undereducated men to meddle in matters concerning enlightenment. Any subsequent attempts to reignite the controversy had little chance of success after Stalin pronounced his laconic verdict: "There is nothing wrong with Red Cavalry."

It is not easy to walk away from a gold mine that has yielded a great treasure, no matter bow scant the present return may be. Babel's gold mine was his invention of a new theme and style, and he was either unwilling or unable to surrender them, even at the risk of becoming a prisoner of his uncommonly good fortune. The theme was that of an emancipated Jewish intellectual who was trying to integrate himself into a world that was his by claim of reason but that could offer him only a dangerous and palpably very alien way of life. Like the narrator of Red Cavalry, Liutov, this character wishes to learn to accept the vibrant brutality and the baseness of existence (the Dionysian element) and to transfix it in the cool, contemplative beauty that, according to Nietzsche, was the gift of Apollonian art (the theme received a narrative development in "Pan Apolek," 1923). Together with his nonfictional contemporaries, Liutov had seen humanistic values pulverized in World War I, and he found the conventional, ultimately Christian ethic unacceptable. To do otherwise was for him tantamount to the loss of sight—symbolic castration—a motif that runs throughout Babel's fiction, especially Red Cavalry ("Perekbod cherez Zbruch" ["Crossing the Zbruch," 1924], "Gedali" [1924], "Liniia i tsvet" ["Line and Color," 1923]).

Indeed, the spirit of the Antichrist is in Liutov's blood. He is described in "Kostel v Novograde" ("The Novograde Cathedral," 1923): "I see you from here, the treasonous monk in lilac habit, the plumpness of your hands, your soul, tender and merciless, like a cat's soul, I see the wounds of your god, oozing semen, the fragrant poison intoxicating virgins."

The more astute among Babel's sympathetic readers recognized in his writings the ethos of Nietzsche, although they avoided pronouncing his name, preferring such code words as "paganism," "nature," and "life." The style was such that it undermined any discourse that could be defined as dominant. "Babel speaks in one voice about the stars and the clap," wrote Shklovskii in 1924 in his essay on Babel, giving what to this day is, perhaps, the sharpest and, certainly, most concise formulation of the Babelian style. That theme and that style, with only slight variations, Babel continued to practice well into the 1930's.

The four novellas of 1937 and 1938, which were his last fiction to appear in Soviet journals in his lifetime, do not suggest that his writing was likely to change. "Sud" ("The Trial," published in Ogonek, vol. 23 [1938]) tells the story of a deracinated White officer who is being convicted of petty fraud by an indifferent French court. Written in a staccato style, thematically it belongs to the genre of exposing the ills of the capitalist West that is practiced by Soviet writers wishing to justify their travels beyond the Soviet borders. Babel, who belonged to a handful of well-traveled authors, must have felt a particular sense of obligation. He had three long sojourns in France between 1928 and 1935, the briefest lasting several months. He had a wife and a daughter in France and a mother and a sister in Belgium, and he had to contend with persistent rumors about his alleged intention to emigrate. "The Trial" was also one of the few third-person stories Babel ever wrote; he ordinarily eschewed the objective authority associated with this narrative stance. But the other three return once again, whether ostensibly or by implication, to the narrator of Red Cavalry.

"The Kiss," the only story about Liutov's successful seduction, ends in the narrator cruelly betraying the woman that he has won by displays of sentimental humanity. "The Kiss" could easily have been integrated into yet another edition of the civil war cycle (the last one came out in 1932), but the central motif of the story represented, if anything, a sign of the more recent times. "Sulak" (1937), named after a peasant rebel killed in the story, fills a chronological gap in the Liutov "epic," placing the bespectacled narrator in the Ukraine in 1928, at the beginning of the collectivization drive. He is accompanying a Cheka officer ordered to seek out, arrest, and, if need be, destroy Sulak. The story is as grotesquely brutal as anything in Red Cavalry. Published, as chance would have it, in the journal Molodoi kolkhoznik (Young Collective Farmer), "Sulak" must have been especially appreciated by the young inhabitants of the terrorized countryside.

"Di Grasso," the fourth story, belongs thematically to the childhood cycle. Seen against the background of the Great Terror, and one of the writer's last stories, it begs to be interpreted as Babel's literary testament: a retrospective allegory of his life in art. The story is set in the familiar Rabelaisian Odessa of the early 1910's and told in the first person—in the voice of a man and writer sharing with his readers a formative episode from his bygone youth. A boy of fourteen, he becomes involved with a gang of scalpers who do a lively business, exploiting the Odessans' weakness for the performing arts. Incautiously, he chooses to obtain the start-up capital by pawning his father's watch with the head scalper, an unscrupulous man who thinks nothing of keeping both the watch and the money. The boy, on the contrary, is terrified by the prospect of facing his father's Jehovah-like wrath. What saves him is the sudden popularity of a visiting Sicilian actor, the tragedian Di Grasso, and not only the money he is able to make by scalping tickets to Di Grasso's performances, but quite literally his art. Night after night, in a spirited interpretation of his role, Di Grasso leaps into the air, flies across the stage, kills his wealthy rival with his bare teeth, and proceeds to drink the enemy's blood, growling and shooting fiery glances at the enraptured audience as the curtain slowly descends on the crime of the heart. This extraordinary display of the power of passion so moves the scalper's wife that she forces her husband to return the watch to the boy, who has already arranged to flee Odessa aboard an English steamer. The story ends with the boy—delivered from his misfortune by the orgiastic art of Di Grasso—transfixed by a sudden experience of an Apollonian epiphany:

Babel's predicament in the 1930's was not unlike that of the boy in "Di Grasso." He, too, was living on borrowed time, hoping for a deliverance through an artistic miracle. Confronted with the choice between the materialist Scylla of the West, with art at the mercy of scalpers, and the revolutionary Charybdis, presided over by the father figure Stalin, he chose not to emigrate (and he had plenty of opportunities to do so) but to remain in Russia, which he continued to see through the eye of his art. By no means blind to the Stalinist repression, he continued to measure the social and political experience of his country, so massively tragic and irreducibly complex, with the aesthetic formula according to which unbridled and violent passion revealed the real world—"quiet and ineffably beautiful." Whether or not Babel ever intended "Di Grasso" to be interpreted in this manner, many of his contemporaries among the intelligentsia, desperate for a rationalization of the Great Terror, could hardly have misread the story's subtle appeal.

It must have seemed for a while that Babel would be spared the fate of millions of his contemporaries who disappeared in the massive waves of arrests in 1937 and 1938. This was not to be. Babel's turn came on 16 May 1939, when he was arrested on unspecified charges at his country home in Peredelkino. Until recently, the circumstances of Babel's arrest and death have been shrouded in mystery. Now we know (Arkady Vaksberg, "Protsessy" [The Trials]) that a warrant for his arrest was issued thirty-five days after he had been taken into custody, that he was charged with belonging to a secret Trotskyist organization since 1927 and, since 1934, serving both French and Austrian intelligence. The litany of fantastic charges contained in the verdict suggests the actual motive for Babel's arrest: his association with Gladun-Khaiutina, a longtime Odessa friend and colleague at the editorial offices of SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction), who also happened to be the wife of the recently deposed head of the secret police, Nikolai Yezhov (he was last seen in public on 31 January 1939). Babel's verdict read in part: "Having been organizationally associated in his anti-Soviet activity with the wife of an enemy of the people Yezhov—Gladun-Khaiutuna—Babel was drawn by the latter into anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activity, shared the goal and tasks of this organization, including terrorist acts . . .against the leaders of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and Soviet government." Even Babel's famous Red Cavalry became an item in the writer's indictment as a "description of all the cruelties and inconsistencies of the civil war, emphasizing only the sensational and rough episodes." In the course of seventy-two hours of continuous interrogation (the "conveyor belt," as it is known in the language of the Gulag), Babel, who at first denied all the charges, finally relented and "confessed" to having been recruited into the spy network by Ilya Ehrenburg and to having provided André Malraux with, of all things, secrets of Soviet aviation. The latter charge must have been suggested by the film script that he had just completed: it dealt with uncovering saboteurs among the Soviet dirigible designers (Falen, pp. 231ff.).

The list of Babel's co-conspirators read like a who's who of Soviet culture. In addition to Ehrenburg, it included such writers as Valentin Kataev, Leonid Leonov, Yury Olesha, Lydia Seifullina, and Vsevolod Ivanov; filmmakers S. Eisenstein and G. Alexandrov; actors S. Mikhoels and L. Utesov, and even one polar explorer, the academician Otto Shmit. As Vaksberg suggests, the NKVD must have been planning a large-scale show trial involving the flower of the Soviet intelligentsia. But plans changed and the operation had to be mopped up. On four separate occasions, in October and November 1939, and finally in January 1940, Babel wrote appeals renouncing the testimony he was forced to give under torture, pleaded to have witnesses called, and asked for an attorney. On 26 January these appeals reached the chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, V. Ul'rikh, who responded to them by signing the death warrant. A day later, Babel was shot. Fourteen years later, in a post-humous review of his case by the same Military Collegium, Babel was cleared of all charges "for lack of any basis" in the original indictment.

EDITIONS

INDIVIDUAL WORKS

Liubka Kozak: Rasskazy, (Moscow, 1925).

Rasskazy, (Moscow, 1925).

Benia Krik: Kinopovest', (Moscow, 1926).

Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy: Kinostsenarii, (Moscow, 1926).

Istoriia moei golubiaini: Rasskazy, (Moscow, Leningrad, 1926).

Konarmiia, (Moscow, 1926).

Zakat, (Moscow, 1928).

Odesskie rasskazy, (Moscow, 1931).

Mariia, (Moscow, 1935).

Bezhin lug (vtoroi variant), in Sergei Eizenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 6 vols., Vol. 6. (Moscow, 1971).

Evreika, (Moscow, 1987).

COLLECTED WORKS

Rasskazy, (Moscow, 1936).

Izbrannoe, introduction by I. G. Erenburg (Moscow, 1957).

Izbrannoe, introduction by L. Poliak (Moscow, 1966).

Izbrannoe, (Kemerovo, 1966).

Zabytyi Babel': Sbornik maloizvestnykh proizvedenii I. Babelia, compiled and edited by Nikolas Stroud (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1979).

Evreika, god za godom, Literaturnyi ezhegodnik, 4. (Moscow, 1988).

Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 2 vols., introduction by G. Belaia (Moscow, 1988).

MEMOIRS AND DOCUMENTS

Annenkov, Iurii, Dnevnik moikh vstrech, (New York, 1966).

Anonymous "Vyderzhki iz pisem I. E. Babelia k materi i sestre (1925-1939)" (Yozdushnye puti, 3 1963).

Ehrenburg, Il'ia, Liudi, gody, zhizn', in Sobranie sochinenii, vols. 8-9 (Moscow, 1966). Translated as Men, Years, Life by Tatiana Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (London, 1962-1963).

"Gor'kii—I. E. Babel' [Correspondence]," Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 70 (Moscow, 1963).

Ivanova, T., "Isaak Emanuilovich Babel'." In Moi sovremenniki, kakimi ia ikh znala: Ocherki, (Moscow, 1984).

Nikulin, L., "Isaak Babel," in Gody nashei zhizni: Vospominaniia i portrety (Moscow, 1966).

Paustovskii, K., Povest' o zhizni, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1966). Translated as Years of Hope (The Story of My Life) by Manya Harari and Andrew Thompson. (New York, 1968).

Pirozhkova, A., and N. Turgeneva, eds., Babel': Vospominaniia sovremennikov, (Moscow, 1972).

——————-, and I. Smirin. "I. Babel': Novye materialy," Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 74 (Moscow, 1965).

Sinkó, Ervin, Roman eines Romans: Moskauer Tagebuch, (Cologne, 1962).

Solajczyk, J., "Polzki epizod w biografii Izaaka E. Babla," Zeszyty naukowe wyzszej szkoly pedagogicznej im. Powstancow slaskich w Opolu. Filologia rosyiska, 9 (A) (Opole, 1972).

Souvarine, Boris, Souvenirs sur Isaak Babel, Panait Istrati, Pierre Pascal; suivi de Lettre à Alexandre Soljenitsine (Paris, 1985).

Vaksberg, A., "Protsessy," Literatumaia gazeta (May 4, 1988).

TRANSLATIONS

Benya Krik: A Film-Novel, translated by Ivor Montagu and S. S. Nalbandov (London, 1935).

Benya Krik the Gangster and Other Stories, edited by Avrahm Yarmolinskv (New York, 1948).

The Collected Stories, introduction by Lionel Trilling, edited and translated by Walter Morison (New York, 1955).

The Forgotten Prose, edited and translated by Nicholas Stroud (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1978).

The Lonely Years: 1925-1939, edited by Nathalie Babel, translated by Max Hayward and Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York, 1964) Unpublished stories and private correspondence.

Red Cavalry, translated by John Harland (London, 1929). Translated by Nadia Helstein (London, New York, 1929).

Sunset, Translated by Raymond Rosenthal and Mirra Ginsburg. Noonday 3. (New York, 1960).

You Must Know Everything: Stories, 1915-1937, edited by Nathalie Babel. Translated by Max Hayward (New York, 1966).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

Baak, J. J. van, The Place of Space in Narration:, A Semiotic Approach to the Problem of Literary Space With an Analysis of the Role of Space in Isaak Babel's "Konarmija" Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, 3 (Amsterdam, 1983).

I. Babel': Vospominaniia sowemennikov, (Moscow, 1972).

Benni, Ia., (Ia. Cherniak). "Isaak Babel'," Pechat' i revoliutsiia, 3 (1924).

Bloom, Harold, ed., Isaac Babel, (New York, 1987).

Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views: Isaac Babel, introduction by Bloom (New York, 1987). This anthology of Babel criticism and scholarship (twenty items) is the most comprehensive collection of its kind in any language.

Bydennyi, S., "Babizm Babelia iz Krasnoi novi," Oktiabr', 3 (1924).

Bydennyi, S., "Otkrytoe pis'mo Maksimu Gor'komu," Pravda (October 26, 1928).

Carden, Patricia, The Art of Isaac Babel (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972).

Eastman, M., Writers in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (New York, 1934).

Ehre, M., Isaac Babel, (Boston, 1986).

Falen, James E., Isaac Babel, Russian Master of the Short Story, (Knoxville, Tenn., 1974). Includes comprehensive bibliography.

Freidin, G., "Fat Tuesday in Odessa: Isaac Babel's 'Di Grasso' as Testament and Manifesto," The Russian Review 40/2 (April 1981).

Gorbachev, Georgii, "O tvorchestve Babelia i po povodu nego," Zvezda, 4, (1925).

Gor'kii, M., "Otvet Budennomu," Pravda (November 27, 1928).

Hallett, R. W., Isaac Babel (New York, 1973).

Howe, Irving, "The Right to Write Badly," The New Republic (July 4, 1955).

Howe, Irving, "The Genius of Isaac Babel," New York Review (August 20, 1964).

Hyman, Stanley Edgar, "Identities of Isaac Babel," Hudson Review, 8/4 (1956).

Hyman, Stanley Edgar, "New Voices of Isaac Babel," New Leader (July 20, 1964).

Jovanovic, M., Umetnost Isaka Babelja, (Belgrade, 1975).

Kaun, A., "Babel: Voice of New Russia," Menorah Journal, 15 (November, 1928).

Lelevich, G., "Babel'," Na postu, 1 (1924).

Levin, F., Babel (Moscow, 1972).

Lezhnev, A. Z., "Babel'," Pechat i revoliutsiia, 6 (1926).

Luck, C. D., The Field of Honor: An Analysis of Isaac Babel's Cycle "On the Field of Honor" (Na pole chesti) with Reference to Gaston Vidal's "Figures et anecdotes de la Grand Guerre." Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, 18 (Birmingham, 1987). The study contains the original text of Babel's cycle On the Field of Honor.

Luplow, Carol, Isaac Babel's "Red Cavalry", (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982).

Maguire, Robert A., Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920's (Princeton, 1968).

Marcus, Steven, "The Stories of Isaac Babel," Partisan Review (22/3 1955).

Markish, Simon, "The Example of Isaac Babel," Commentary, 64 (977).

Mendelson, Danuta, Metaphor in Babel's Short Stories, (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982).

Meney, L., L'Art du recit chez Isaac Babel (Quebec, 1983).

Mirsky, D. S., "I. Babel: Rasskazy," Sovremennye zapiski, 26 (1925).

Mirsky, D. S., "Babel", Nation (January 23, 1926).

Morsbach, P., Isaak Babel auf der sowietischen Buhne (Munich, 1983).

Osinskii, N., "Literaturnyi god", Pravda, January 1 (1926).

Polonskii, Viach, "Kriticeskie zametki Babele", Novyi mir, 1 (1927).

Pozner, Vladimir, Panorama de la littérature russe contemporaine, (Paris, 1929).

Rosenthal, Raymond, "The Fate of Isaac Babel: A Child of the Russian Emancipation," Commentary 3, (February, 1947).

Shklovskii, Victor, "I. Babel': Kriticheskii roman," Lef 2/6 (1924). Translated as "Isaac Babel: A Critical Romance," in Edward J. Brown, ed., Major Soviet Writers (London, 1973).

Sicher, E., Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaac Babel (Columbus, Ohio, 1986).

Sinyavsky, A., "Isaac Babel", in Edward J. Brown, ed., Major Soviet Writers (London, 1973).

Spektor, Iu, "Molodoi Babel'," Voprosy literatury 7, 1982).

Stepanov, Nik, "Novella Babelia," in Mastera sovremennoi literatury II: L E. Babel' edited by B. V. Kazanskii and Iu. N. Tyniainov (Leningrad, 1928).

Stora-Sándor, Judith, Isaac Babel': L'Homme et l'oeuvre (Paris, 1968).

Strelets (M. Stoliarov), "Dvulikii lanus", Rossiia, 5 (1925).

Terras, V., "Line and Color: The Structure of I. Babel's Short Stories in Red Cavalry," Studies in Short Fiction, 3/2 (1966).

Trilling, Lionel, "The Fate of Isaac Babel," (London Magazine 7, 1956).

Veshnev, V. (V. Przhetslavskii), "Poeziia banditizma (I. Babel')", Molodaia gvardiia, 7-8 (1924).

Voronskii, A., "Babel', Seifullina", Krasnaia nov', 5 (1924). Selected Bibliography.