⋙ [PDF] Free Collected Stories Modern Classics Isaac Babel 9780140015225 Books

Collected Stories Modern Classics Isaac Babel 9780140015225 Books

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Collected Stories Modern Classics Isaac Babel 9780140015225 Books

I'm glad that I found Babel's work, at last. There is a level of brilliance at work here that one encounters but rarely. He writes of life as a Jew in Tsarist Russia, the pogroms, the threats of violence and death that lurk all around and that can fall at any instant. Then the tales of revolution and the Bolsheviks, his rise and fall in and out of favor with those who led that revolution. These stories are uniformly excellent.


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Collected Stories Modern Classics Isaac Babel 9780140015225 Books Reviews

This guy mint be a "classic" but his subjects and style are definitely NOT "timeless". They are very Russian, very Jewish and very turn of the century. If you are into that go for it. I was looking for another Hemingway, very accessible to a modern audience, this guy is unfortunately not.
Many years ago, as an undergraduate, I read these stories for a class on Soviet Literature. We had to do a lot of reading and I'm afraid I read these more as an assignment. Also, I was young, I hadn't really absorbed the process of thinking about literature, so I judged them according to the plots, nothing more. They were OK, I thought, but I hadn't grokked them in their fullness, to steal a phrase from Robert Heinlein. Now, over half a century later, I've just re-read them. What an impressive body of work! Who knows what Babel might have written if he hadn't been done away with in the massive Stalinist purges of the later 1930s?
There are three varieties of story. One, perhaps the most famous, is the body of work he wrote about his service with a Cossack regiment in the long-forgotten war between Russia and Poland in 1920-21. (Forgotten at least in most of the world.) Though Babel was a Jew and served with people who in some way were polar opposites to the Jews of that time, he does not make much of the differences, rather writing of incidents and the sad or terrible beauty of nature and human existence in those circumstances. The beauty of his descriptions and his penetrating insights into human character bring all these stories to life. The second variety of story concerns life in Odessa, then a vibrant port city with connections all over the world, with a mixed population of Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Romanians, Roma, Tatars, and more. He dwells more on the lower depths, the criminals, and grifters, though the upper class gets a look-in as well. These stories tend to be wryly humorous, though hardly knee-slappers. There are only a few of the third type of story, the autobiographical ones, how it was to grow up Jewish in a lower-middle class family in that time and place with one thrown in about France.
All in all, these are wonderful stories, written by a master little known in America. If literature is your bag, you can't afford to miss them.
Who wrote the most distinctive short stories of the twentieth century? Candidates might include James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Jorge Luis Borges. Here's another name for consideration -- Isaac Babel (b. 1894, d. 1940). Witness the first two paragraphs of Babel's "The Sin of Jesus"

“Arina was a servant at the hotel. She lived next to the main staircase, while Seryoga, the janitor’s helper, lived over the back stairs. Between them there was shame. On Palm Sunday Arina gave Seryoga a present—twins. Water flows, stars shine, a man lusts, and soon Arina was big again, her sixth month was rolling by—they’re slippery, a woman’s months. And now Seryoga must go into the army. There’s a mess for you!

“So Arina goes and says ‘No sense, Seryoga. There’s no sense in my waiting for you. For four years we’ll be parted, and in four years, whichever way you look at it, I’ll be sure to bring two or three more into this world. It’s like walking around with your skirt turned up, working at the hotel. Whoever stops here, he’s your master, let him be Jew, let him be anybody at all. By the time you come home, my insides will be no good any more. I’ll be a used-up woman, no match for you.’”

When did you last read anything like that? My edition of THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ISAAC BABEL (first published by Meridian Books in 1960) contains 57 stories. Not all are brilliant gems. Several are no more than short sketches; about a dozen are of middling quality and ideally would have been culled so that the book was "selected" stories rather than "collected" ones; and I did not sufficiently understand approximately another dozen (my edition is not annotated; I for one would have appreciated a light gloss). But as for the remaining stories, which is more than half of them -- WOW.

Isaac Babel was a Jew from Odessa. Many of his stories reflect the plight of being a Jew in Russia. ("But wasn't it a mistake on the part of God to settle Jews in Russia, for them to be tormented worse than in Hell? How would it hurt if the Jews lived in Switzerland, where they would be surrounded by first-class lakes, mountain air, and nothing but Frenchies? All make mistakes, God not excepted.") A handful of the stories are set in Odessa and star the colorful Benya Krik ("the King") or other Jewish gangsters.

In 1920, Babel found himself a supply officer in the Soviet 1st Cavalry Army, fighting in Poland and the Ukraine. His experiences as a bespectacled egghead with the Cossacks of the Red Cavalry form the basis for more than half of these stories (originally issued as a collection entitled "Red Cavalry"). In one of them, "The Death of Dolgushov", the first-person narrator, who clearly is the alter ego of Babel, encounters a horribly wounded Dolgushov, sitting by the road with his belly "torn out", his "entrails [hanging] over his knees, and the heartbeats visible." Dolgushov asks the narrator to finish him off, before the Poles turn up "and play their dirty tricks". The narrator won't do it. Up rides Afonka Bida, the Cossack platoon commander, who as soon as he understands the situation shoots Dolgushov in the mouth. When the narrator later tries to explain to Afonka, with an ingratiating wry smile, that he just couldn't do it, Afonka explodes and levels a rifle at him "Get out of my sight or I'll kill you. You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat has for a mouse."

Babel was a member of the Communist Party, and for a period he held prominent positions with the Party. He was one of the speakers at the first Writers' Congress held in 1934. Like tens of thousands of other loyal Party members, however, Babel fell victim to Stalin's purges. He was arrested in 1939, tried in twenty minutes in one of Beria's secret chambers, and executed almost immediately thereafter.

It is surprising that he lived as long under Stalin as he did, considering several of these stories. For example, in "Oil", the Central Committee decides that, instead of the former version of the Five Year Plan, oil production in 1932 should be increased to forty million tons. Victor Andreyevich, the fellow responsible for oil production on Sakhalin Island, writes a letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council "I regard the figure of forty million tons as so much eyewash. It is proposed to get more than a third from unprospected regions, which means counting chickens not merely before they're hatched but even before they're laid. Furthermore, from the three cracking-plants at work today we are, according to the new proposal, jumping to a hundred and twenty in the last year of the Plan. And this with a deficit of metal and the fact that we've still not acquired the cracking process."

And so it goes. Or, so it went. But Russia seems to be on the rise once more. I wonder if there are any Isaac Babels writing about it.
Truly a classic by a great writer.
one of the towering works of literature of the 20th century
The Master of the Short Story. His Red Cavalry collection is a must-read historical classic. A fearless free speaker through his stories, his life was cut short in early 1940 (at 46) by offending the Russian Oppressors. A great collection for anyone who enjoys a good story.
A superbly written insider's look at the Russian revolution. Babel can convey the horrors of war with very few words. I enjoyed the best his sarcastic treatement of the bombastic communist rhetoric in such stories as "Salt" and "Treason" (maybe because I was exposed to it myself at one time).
I'm glad that I found Babel's work, at last. There is a level of brilliance at work here that one encounters but rarely. He writes of life as a Jew in Tsarist Russia, the pogroms, the threats of violence and death that lurk all around and that can fall at any instant. Then the tales of revolution and the Bolsheviks, his rise and fall in and out of favor with those who led that revolution. These stories are uniformly excellent.