Isaac Babel
Personal Information
Description
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель; 13 July) was a Russian writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, and has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry." Babel was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940.
Books
Understanding fiction -- Second Edition
The Attack on the Fort Sir Tatton Sykes Captain Isaiah Sellers Lady Blessington RMS. Titanic The Man Who Would Be King The Secret Life of Walter Mitty The Lottery The Girls in Their Sunnner Dresses The Furnished Room De Mortuis The Necklace [Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge]( A Piece of Neus I See You Never Haircut Crossing into Poland War The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky Tennessee's Partner [Araby]( The Drunkard The Lament Tickets, Please Eventide Old Red Cruel and Barbarous Treatment A Domestic Dilennna Christ in Flanders Love: Three Pages from a Sportsman's Book Love The Killers The Fly I Want to Knou Why The Adulterous Woman [A Rose for Emily]( A Good Man Is Hard to Find In the Penal Colony Through the Quinquina Glass The Bitch A Father-to-Be The Fight The Far and the Near The Sensible Thing A Christmas Memory Realpolitik The Sailor Boy's Tale Amy Foster The Killing of the Dragon Dermuche Disorder and Early Sorro•-w No Place for You, My Love 1 Write Goodbye, My Brother What Happened Noon Wine Blackberry Winter
Short stories
Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe The lightning-rod man / Herman Melville The diamond lens / Fitzjames O'Brien The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte [Damned Thing]( / Ambrose Bierce The turn of the screw / Henry James The Hiltons' holiday / Sarah Orne Jewett The gift of the Magi / O. Henry The moving finger / Edith Wharton The open boat / Stephen Crane Lou, the prophet / Willa Cather The men of Forty Mile / Jack London Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( William Faulkner Big two-hearted river / Ernest Hemingway Flight / John Steinbeck
1920 Diary
The Russian writer Isaac Babel (1894-1940) is widely acknowledged to be one of the great masters of twentieth-century literature, hailed as a genius by such critics as Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. The work for which he is best known is a cycle of stories called Red Cavalry, which depicts the exploits of the Cossack cavalry during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 and is based on Babel's experiences as he rode with the Cossacks during the campaign. Throughout this period Babel kept a diary, in which he recorded the devastation of the war, the extreme cruelty of the Polish and Red armies alike toward the Jewish population in Ukraine and eastern Poland, and his own conflicted role as both Soviet revolutionary and Jew. The 1920 Diary, a vital source for Red Cavalry as well as a compelling narrative, is now published in English for the first time. . The 1920 Diary is the most significant contemporary account of the tragedy of Eastern European Jewry during this period. The Diary also yields important insights into Babel's personal evolution, showing his youthful curiosity and his anguish as, frequently concealing his own Jewish identity, he mingled with the victimized Jews of the region's shtetls and with his Cossack comrades. Finally, the Diary sheds light on Babel's artistic development, revealing the path from observations recorded in excitement and despair to the painstakingly crafted narratives of the Red Cavalry cycle.
