Isaac Babel
Born	July 13, 1894(1894-07-13) Odessa, Russian Empire
Died	January 27, 1940 (aged 45) Butyrka prison, Moscow, USSR
Occupation	journalist, playwright, and short story writer
Ethnicity	Jewish
Citizenship	Russian, Soviet

Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаа́к Эммануи́лович Ба́бель, 13 July [O.S. 1 July] 1894 – January 27, 1940) was a Soviet journalist, playwright, and short story writer acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry."^[1] Despite being an enthusiastic supporter of Marxist-Leninism, Babel was arrested, tortured and executed as part of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

Contents 1 Early years 2 Early career 3 Red Cavalry 4 Odessa Tales 5 Glory days 6 Clashes with the authorities 7 Maria 8 Paris 9 Escape clause 10 Relationship with the Yezhovs 11 Arrest and Death 12 Rehabilitation 13 Lost writings 14 Legacy 15 Bibliography 16 Quotes 17 References 18 External links 19 Further reading

[edit] Early years

Babel was born into a Orthodox Jewish family in Odessa during a period of pogroms and mass exodus of Jews from the Russian Empire. Although he survived Odessa's 1905 pogrom with the help of Russian Orthodox neighbors, his great uncle Shoyl was one of about 300 Jews murdered.^[2]

In his teens, Babel hoped to get into the preparatory class of the Nicolas I Odessa Commercial School. However, he first had to overcome the Jewish quota (10% within the Pale of Settlement, 5% outside and 3% for both capitals). Despite the fact that Babel received the passing grades, his place was given to another boy, whose parents had bribed the school officials. As a result he was schooled at home by private tutors.

In addition to regular school subjects, Babel also studied the Talmud and music. According to Cynthia Ozick,

"Though he was at home in Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with the traditional texts and their demanding commentaries, he added to these a lifelong fascination with Maupassant and Flaubert. His first stories were composed in fluent literary French. The breadth and scope of his social compass enabled him to see through the eyes of peasants, soldiers, priests, rabbis, children, artists, actors, women of all classes. He befriended whores, cabdrivers, jockeys; he knew what it was like to be penniless, to live on the edge and off the beaten track."^[3]

After an unsuccessful attempt to enroll at Odessa University (again due to the quota), Babel entered Kiev Institute of Finance and Business. There he met Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein, his future wife.

[edit] Early career

In 1915, Babel graduated and moved to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), in defiance of laws restricting Jews to residence within the Pale of Settlement. In the capital he met the Russian writer Maxim Gorky who published some of his stories in his literary magazine Letopis' ("Летопись", "Chronicle"). Gorky advised the aspiring writer to gain more life experience and later Babel wrote in his autobiography: "... I owe everything to that meeting and still pronounce Alexey Maksimovich (Gorky's) name with love and admiration." One of his most famous autobiographical short stories, "The Story of My Dovecot" ("История моей голубятни"), is dedicated to Gorky.

The story "The Bathroom Window" was considered obscene by censors and Babel was charged with violating criminal code article 1001.

After the October Revolution, Babel sided with Lenin's Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Later, he worked for the Cheka as a translator for the counter-intelligence service, in the Odessa Gubkom (regional Bolshevik party committee), in the food requisitioning unit, in the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education), in a typographic printing office, and served as a newspaper reporter in Petersburg and Tiflis.

Isaac Babel married Yevgenia Gronfein on August 9, 1919 in Odessa. Their marriage produced a daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, who grew up to become the foremost scholar of her father's life and work. In 1925, Yevgenia Babel, disgusted by her husband's infidelities and motivated by her increasing hatred of communism, emigrated to France. Although Babel paid several visits to his estranged wife in Paris, he simultaneously began an long term extra-marital affair with Antonina Pirozhkova. Babel's relationship with Pirozhkova also produced a daughter. However, this did not did not interfere with his affairs with other women.

According to Pirozhkova,

"Before I met Babel, I used to read a great deal, though without any particular direction. I read whatever I could get my hands on. Babel noticed this and told me, 'Reading that way will get you nowhere. You won't have time to read the books that are truly worthwhile. There are about a hundred books that every educated person needs to read. Sometime I'll try to make you a list of them.' And a few days later he brought me a list. There were ancient writers on it, Greek and Roman -- Homer, Herodotus, Lucretius, Seutonius -- and also all the classics of later European literature, starting with Erasmus, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Coster, and going on tonineteenth century writers such as Stendhal, Mérimée, and Flaubert."^[4]

[edit] Red Cavalry

In 1920 Babel was assigned to Field Marshal Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army, witnessing a military campaign of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. Poland was not alone in its newfound opportunities and troubles. Virtually all of the newly independent neighbours began fighting over borders: Romania fought with Hungary over Transylvania, Yugoslavia with Italy over Rijeka, Poland with Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn Silesia, with Germany over Poznań and with Ukrainians over Eastern Galicia (Galician War). He documented the horrors on the war he witnessed in the 1920 Diary (Konarmeyskiy Dnevnik 1920 Goda) which he later used to write the Red Cavalry (Конармия), a collection of short stories such as "Crossing the River Zbrucz" and "My First Goose". The legendary violence of the Red Cavalry seemed to harshly contrast the gentle nature of Babel himself.

Babel wrote: "Only by 1923 I have learned how to express my thoughts in a clear and not very lengthy way. Then I returned to writing." Several stories that were later included into Red Cavalry, were published in Vladimir Mayakovsky's LEF ("ЛЕФ") magazine in 1924. Babel's honest description of the brutal realities of war, far from revolutionary propaganda, earned him some powerful enemies. According to recent research, Marshall Budyonny was infuriated by Babel's unvarnished descriptions of marauding Red Cossacks and demanded Babel's execution without success.^[5] However, Gorky's influence not only protected Babel, but also helped to guarantee publication, and soon Red Cavalry was translated into many languages.

[edit] Odessa Tales

Back in Odessa, Babel started to write the Odessa Tales, a series of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka. At their core, the stories describe the life of Jewish gangsters, both before and after the October Revolution. Many of them directly feature the fictional mob boss Benya Krik, who remains one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature. These stories were later used as the basis for the play Sunset (play).

According to Nathalie Babel Brown,

"Sunset premiered at the Baku Worker's Theatre on October 23, 1927 and played in Odessa, Kiev, and the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre. The reviews, however, were mixed. Some critics praised the play's 'powerful anti-bourgeois stance and its interesting 'fathers and sons' theme. But in Moscow, particularly, critics felt that the play's attitude toward the bourgeoisie was contradictory and weak. Sunset closed, and was dropped from the repertoire of the Moscow Art Theatre.^[6]

[edit] Glory days

According to Nathalie Babel Brown,

"The young writer burst upon the literary scene and instantly became the rage in Moscow. The tradition in Russia being to worship poets and writers, Babel soon became one of the happy few, a group that included Soviet writers who enjoyed exceptional status and privileges in an otherwise impoverished and despotic country. In the late 1930s, he was given a villa in the writer's colony of Peredelkino, outside Moscow. No secret was ever made of his having a wife and daughter in Paris. At the same time, hardly anyone outside of Moscow knew of two other children he had fathered. As a matter of fact, Babel had many secrets, lived with many ambiguities and contradicitions, and left many unanswered questions behind him."^[7]

[edit] Clashes with the authorities

In 1930, Babel travelled in Ukraine and witnessed the brutality of the forced collectivisation and the resulting Terror Famine. Although he never made a public statement about this, he privately confided in his mistress, Antonina Pirozhkova,

"The bounty of the past is gone -- it is due to the famine in Ukraine and the destruction of the village across our land."^[8]

As Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet intelligentsia and decreed that all writers and artists must conform to socialist realism, Babel increasingly withdrew from public life. During the campaign against, "Formalism," Babel was publicly denounced for low productivity. At the time, many other Soviet writers were terrified and frantically rewrote their past work to conform to Stalin's wishes. However, Babel was unimpressed and confided in his protege, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, "In six months time, they'll leave the formalists in peace and start some other campaign."^[9]

At the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934), Babel noted ironically, that he was becoming "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence." American Max Eastman describes Babel's increasing reticence as an artist in a chapter called "The Silence of Isaac Babyel" in his 1934 book Artists in Uniform.^[10]

[edit] Maria

Babel's stage play Maria, which candidly depicted both political corruption and black marketeering within Soviet society, caused Babel to be chided by Maxim Gorky. Gorky accused his friend of having a "Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat." Gorky further warned his friend that "political inferences" would be made "that will be personally harmful to you."^[11] According to Pirozhkova,

"Once Babel went to the Moscow Art Theater when his play Mariya was being given its first reading, and when he returned home he told me that all the actresses had been impatient to fing out what the leading female role was like and who would be cast in it. It turned out that there was no leading female character present on the stage in this play. Babel thought that the play had not come off well, but it should be noted that he was always critical of his own work."^[12]

Although intended to be performed in 1935, the Maria's performance was cancelled by the NKVD during rehearsals.

[edit] Paris

In 1932, after numerous requests he was permitted to visit his estranged wife Yevgenia in Paris in 1932. While visiting his wife and their daughter Nathalie, Babel agonized over whether or not to return to Soviet Russia. In conversations and letters to friends, expressed longing at the thought of being "a free man," while also expressing fear at no longer being able to make a living solely through writing. On July 27, 1933, Babel wrote a letter to Yuri Annenkov, stating that he had been summoned to Moscow and was leaving immediately.^[13]

Babel's mistress, Antonina Pirozhkova, recalled this era as follows,

"Babel remained in France for so long that it was rumored in Moscow that he was never returning. When I wrote to him about this, he wrote back saying, 'What can people, who do not know anything, possibly say to you, who knows everything?' Babel wrote from France almost daily. I accumulated many letters from him during his 11-month absence. When Babel was arrested in 1939, all of these letters were confiscated and never returned to me."^[14]

After his return to Russia, Babel decided to move in with Pirozhkova, beginning a common law marriage which would ultimately produce a daughter, Lidya Babel. He also collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein on the film Bezhin Meadow, about the informer Pavlik Morozov, and worked on the screenplays for several other Stalinist propaganda movies.

[edit] Escape clause

According to Nathalie Babel Brown,

"Babel came to Paris in the summer of 1935, as part of the delegation of Soviet writers to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace. He probably knew this would have been his last chance to remain in Europe. As he had done numerous times during the last ten years, he asked my mother to return with him to Moscow. Although he knew the general situation was bad, he nevertheless described to her the comfortable life that the family could have there together. It was the last opportunity my mother had to give a negative answer, and she never forgot it. Perhaps it helped her later on to be proven completely right in her fears and her total lack of confidence in the Soviet Union. My mother described to me these last conversations with my father many times."^[15]

[edit] Relationship with the Yezhovs

During a visit to Berlin, the married Babel began an affair with Yevgenia Feigenberg, who was then a translator at the Soviet embassy. Yevgenia, whom Simon Sebag Montefiore has dubbed, "a seasoned literary groupie," reportedly began her seduction of Babel with the words, "You don't know me, but I know you well."^[16] Even after Yevgenia married NKVD boss Nikolai Yezhov the affair continued and Babel frequently presided over Mrs. Yezhov's literary gatherings, which often included such luminaries as Solomon Mikhoels, Leonid Utesov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Mikhail Koltsov. On one such occasion, Babel was heard to say, "Just think, our girl from Odessa has become the first lady of the kingdom!"^[17]

In her memoirs, Antonina professes complete ignorance of Babel's affair with Mrs. Yezhov. Babel informed her that his interest in the Yezhovs was, "purely professional," and was tied to his desire to understand the Party eilte.^[18]

In retaliation for Babel's affair with his wife, Yezhov ordered the writer placed under constant NKVD surveillance. As the Great Purge began during the late 1930s, Yezhov was informed that Babel was spreading rumors about the suspicious death of Maxim Gorky and alleging that his former mentor had been murdered on orders from Stalin. Babel had also been heard to say of Leon Trotsky, "It's impossible to imagine the charm and strength of his influence on anyone who encounters him."^[19] Babel further commented that Lev Kamenev was, "...the most brilliant connoisseur of language and literature."^[20]

As the number of Purge victims skyrocketed, however, Nikolai Yezhov's overenthusiastic pursuit of suspected "enemies" began to be thought a liability by Stalin and his inner circle. In response, Lavrenti Beria was assigned as Yezhov's assistant and swiftly usurped the leadership of the NKVD.

According to Montefiore,

"The darkness began to descend upon Yezhov's family where his silly, sensual wife was unwittingly to play the terrible role of black widow spider: most of her lovers were to die... A pall fell on Yevgenia's literary salon. When a friend walked her home to the Kremlin after a party, she herself reflected that Babel was in danger because he had been friends with arrested Trotskyite generals: 'Only his European fame could save him..."^[21]

[edit] Arrest and Death

On May 15, 1939, Antonina Pirozhkova was awakened by four NKVD agents pounding upon the door of their Moscow apartment. Although surprised, she agreed to accompany them to Babel's dacha in Peredelkino. Babel was then placed under arrest and taken to the Lubianka Prison. According to Pirozhkova,

In the car, one of the men sat in back with Babel and me while the other one sat in front with the driver. "The worst part of this is that my mother won't be getting my letters," Babel said, and then he was silent for a long time. I could not say a single word. Babel asked the secret policeman sitting next to him, "So I guess you don't get too much sleep, do you?" ANd he even laughed. As we approached Moscow, I said to Babel, "I'll be waiting for you, it will be as if you've gone to Odessa... only there won't be any letters..." He answered, "I ask you to see that the child not be made miserable." "But I don't know what my destiny will be." At this point, the man sitting beside Babel said to me, "We have no claims whatsoever against you." We drove to the Lubyanka Prison and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed me hard and said, "Someday we'll see eachother..." And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door.^[22]

According to Peter Constantine,

"From that day on, Babel, one of the foremost writers of his time, became a nonperson in the Soviet Union. His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi. He became unmentionable in any public venue. When the film director Mark Donskoi's famous Gorky trilogy premiered the following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplay, had been removed from the credits."^[23]

Interrogated under torture in Moscow's Lubyanka, Babel confessed that his "creative impotence, which has prevented me from publishing any significant work for last few years," was, "deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write." This, however, was not enough for Stalin and his minions. In his confession paper, which still contains blood stains, Babel "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux to spy for France.

According to Nathalie Babel Brown,

"As we now know, his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria's private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately. Babel had been convicted of 'active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization,' and of 'being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments.' Babel's last recorded words in the proceedings were, 'I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others... I am asking for only one thing -- let me finish my work.' He was shot the next day and his body was thrown into a communal grave. All of this horrific information was revealed in the early 1990s, a relatively short time ago.^[24]

According to the early official Soviet version, Isaac Babel died in the GULAG on March 17, 1941. His archives and manuscripts were confiscated by the NKVD. Peter Constantine, who translated Babel's writings into English, has described Babel's execution as, "one of the great tragedies of twentieth century literature."^[25]

[edit] Rehabilitation

Left: Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities." Number 12 on the list is Isaac Babel. Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (affirmative). Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin.

On December 23, 1954, during the Khrushchev thaw, a typed half sheet of paper ended the official silence. It read,

"The sentence of the military collegium dated 26 January, 1940 concerning Babel, I.E., is revoked on the basis of newly discovered circumstances and the case against him is terminated in the absence of elements of a crime."^[26]

However, his works were never published in an uncensored form until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[edit] Lost writings

After his rehabilitation, Antonina Pirozhkova spent three decades campaigning for the return of Babel's manuscripts. These included Babel's translations of Sholem Aleichem's writings from Yiddish into Russian and many other items. According to Pirozhkova,

"As Babel put it, he worked on Sholem Aleichem to "feed his soul." Other "food for the soul" came from writing new stories and the novella 'Kolya Topuz.' He told me, 'I'm writing a novella in which the main character is a former Odessa gangster like Benia Krik. His name is Kolya Topuz and so far, at least, that's also the name of the novella. I want to show how this sort of man adapts to Soviet reality. Kolya Topuz works on a collective farm during collectivization, and then he goes to work in a Donbass coal mine. But since he has the mentality of a gangster, he's constantly breaking out of the limits of normal life, which leads to numerous funny situations.' Babel spent a great deal of time writing, and he finished many works. Only his arrest prevented his new works from coming out."^[27]

However, even requests by Ilya Ehrenburg and the Union of Soviet Writers produced no answers from the Soviet State.

According to Pirozhkova,

"In 1987, when so much was changing in our country, I again made an official request that the KGB search for Babel's manuscripts in its underground storage areas. In response to my request, I was visited by two KGB agents who informed me that the manuscripts had been burned. 'And so you've come in person to avoid giving me a written response to my request, am I correct?' 'How could you think such a thing? We came here to commisserate. We understand how precious Babel's manuscripts would be.'"^[28]

[edit] Legacy

After her husband's return to Moscow in 1935, Yevgenia Gronfein Babel remained unaware of his other family with Antonina Pirozhkova. Eventually, however, she was cruelly informed by Ilya Ehrenburg during the 1950s. Enraged, Yevgenia Babel spat in Ehrenberg's face and then fainted.

Her daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, believes that Ehrenburg did this under orders from the KGB. With two potential contenders for the role of Babel's widow, the Soviet State clearly preferred Babel's common-law wife Antonina to his legal wife Yevgenia, who had emigrated to the West.

Although Babel's play Maria was very popular at Western European colleges during the 1960s, it was not performed in Babel's homeland until 1994. The first English translation appeared in 2002, translated by Peter Constantine and edited by Nathalie Babel Brown. Maria's American premiere, directed by Carl Weber, took place at Stanford University two years later.^[29]

Although she was too young to have many memories of her father, Nathalie Babel Brown went on to become one of the world's foremost scholars of his life and work. When a Norton Anthology of his writings was published in 2002, Nathalie edited the volume and provided a foreword. She died in Washington DC in 2008.^[30]

Lidya Babel, the daughter of Isaac Babel and Antonina Pirozhkova, also emigrated to the United States and currently reside in Silver Spring, Maryland.^[31]

[edit] Bibliography

• Конармейский дневник 1920 года, English translation: 1920 Diary, ISBN 0-300-09313-6
• Конармия, (1926), English translation: Red Cavalry, ISBN 0-393-32423-0
• Одесские рассказы, Odessa Tales
• Закат, Sunset, play (1926)
• Benya Krik, screenplay (1926) (filmed in Ukraine and available on DVD from National Center for Jewish Film)
• Мария, Maria, play (1935)
• You Must Know Everything, Stories 1915-1937, Translated from Russian by Max Hayward. Edited, and with notes by Nathalie Babel, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 1966.

[edit] Quotes

• "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."
• "Over the town roamed the homeless moon. I went along with her, warming up in my heart impracticable dreams and discordant songs."
• Benya Krik: "This is my idea: A Jew no longer in the prime of life, a Jew who used to go about naked, barefoot, and filthy like a convict on Sakhalin Island! And now, thank God, he's getting up there in years, it is time to put an end to this life sentence of hard labor -- it is time to turn the Sabbath into Sabbath.^[32]
  • From the 1926 play Sunset (play)
• "He can write, but he's got nothing to say."^[33]
  • Remarking to Ilya Ehrenburg about the promise shown by the White emigre and acclaimed author Vladimir Nabokov.
• "If it was up to me, I wouldn't ask my worst enemy to clean floors after the Revolution! During the Revolution the dirt grew to three inches thick on these floors -- you couldn't shave it off with a plane! I should get a medal for cleaning floors after the Revolution, and all you do is bark."^[34]
  • From the 1935 play Maria (play).
• Captain Viskovsky: "Who knows what can happen, Yasha? They might ask you to blow up the street you were born on, and you would blow it up. Or to blast an orphanage to bits, and you'd say, "A two-zero-eight fuse," and blast that orphanage to bits. That's what you would do, Yasha, as long as they let you live your life, strum your guitar, and sleep with thin women. You're fat but you like them thin. You'll do anything, if they tell you to renounce your mother three times, you would renounce her three times. But that's not the point, Yasha! The point is they will want more: they won't let you drink vodka with the people you like, they'll make you read boring books, and the songs they teach you will be boring, too. Then you'll be mad, my dear Red Artillerist. You'll be furious, your eyes will start rolling! Then two citizens will come visiting: "Let's go, Comrade Kravchenko." "Should I take any personal effects with me or not," you'll ask them. "No, you needn't take any personal effects with you. It'll be a quick interrogation, over in a minute." And that will be the end of you, my dear Red Artillerist. It'll cost them four kopecks. It's been calculated that a Colt bullet costs four kopecks and not a centime more."^[35]
  • A White Army officer turned black marketeer lectures a Red Army associate about the pitfalls of Stalinism. From the 1935 play Maria.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Babel's Biography (PDF) by Gregory Freidin (A version of this essay in Critical Biography was published in European Writer of the Twentieth Century [NY: Scribners, 1990])
• Prose in original Russian language at lib.ru
• Tough Guys reading "The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel" by Tom Teicholz
• Konarmiya, Norman Davies describes Babel in Sarmatian Review, 3/1995 issue
• review of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel in January 2007 issue of Jewish Currents
• "Nathalie Babel Brown, 76, Dies; Edited Isaac Babel". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/arts/13babel.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1134572748-RSE5HIxeweXwnATLoTcYvQ. Retrieved 2008-08-10.  Obituary of Nathalie Babel Brown, Isaac Babel's daughter and editor

Persondata
NAME	Babel, Isaac
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Babel, Isaac Emmanuilovich; Исаак Эммануилович Бабель (Russian)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	journalist, playwright, and short story writer
DATE OF BIRTH	13 July [O.S. 1 July] 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH	Odessa, Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH	January 27, 1940
PLACE OF DEATH	Butyrka prison, Moscow, Soviet Union

[edit] Further reading

• Isaac Babel and Nathalie Babel Brown, Isaac Babel: The Lonely Years 1925-1939 : Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence, David R Godine, 1995.
• Jerome Charyn, Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel, Random House, 2005.
• Antonina N. Pirozhkova, At His Side: The Last Years of Issac Babel, Steerforth Press, 1998.

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