Isaac Babel

Biography

Isaac Babel was born in an easy Jewish family from the ghetto from Odessa. The city knows frequent pogroms then. He escapes that from 1905. He attends the business school of Odessa, while studying also in parallel the Jewish religion. He thus learns how to read the Yiddish and acquires also a good control of the language and French literature. Flaubert and Maupassant are the authors who will mark it more and they will have a very strong influence on his literary style. During the First World War it goes to Petrograd. In 1916, it is noticed there by Maxime Gorki which advises to him to give up some time the literature and “to run the world” to garner impressions of the life. It supports the Russian Revolution then engages in the Red Army in 1920.

Babel thus summarizes its activity during the first years of the Soviet mode: And, seven years during, of 1917 to 1924, I entered the world. During this time, I was soldier on the Rumanian face, then I worked in Tchéka, with the Police station of the people to education, I took share with forwardings of requisition of food in 1918, in the combat of the army of North against Youdénitch, in those of Ière armed with cavalry, I took part in the committee of province of Odessa, I was responsible for publication of the 7th Soviet typography of Odessa, I worked like deferring to Pétersbourg and in Tiflis, etc I learned how only in 1923 to express my ideas in a way clear and not too long. At this point in time I recovered to write.

He is denounced in 1939 by Iejov, the chief of the NKVD (of which the woman was the former mistress of Babel) to have disparaged Stalin into private. Probably tortured at the time of the eight month of its detention, he will acknowledge " crimes" retained against him: trotskism, espionage with the profit of France and Austria - one will show it to have been the adviser of André Malraux on Soviet aviation - and for its bonds with the woman of " the enemy of the peuple" Iejov. Babel is secretly shot on January 27th, 1940. Its ashes rest with the Donskoï monastery of Moscow, in the same common grave as those of its Iéjov denouncer, shot little time after him.

Its work is prohibited until the rehabilitation of the writer in 1954, at the time of the destalinization. The manuscripts seized during its arrest were never found.

Analyzes works

Isaac Babel was the author of a series of news gathered in Red Cavalerie ( Konarmiya ), published in 1926, account on its participation, as war correspondent (under the fictionalized name of Lyoutov), in the countryside of Poland in the First Army of cavalry of Boudionny in 1920, in full civil war. It describes courageous but brutal and uncultivated soldiers, whose behavior points out that of the cossacks of the olden days (those, for example, evoked by Nicolas Gogol in Tarass Boulba) and whose political convictions are rather fuzzy. The riders of Babel are able to kill for the Revolution, but they have only rather vague concepts of what can be Communism. This portrait without concession was not taste of Boudionny which did not cease showing Babel to dirty its men.

The narrator, who is not sure of his identity, meets, in the news entitled Ghedali the Jew of the shtetl éponyme which proposes to him to take part in a " International of people of heart . “The revolution, is we will say to him yes, but necessary that we say not to the shabbat?” him-request it.

Babel is also the author of the Récits of Odessa , written in 1927 and published in 1931, collection of news describing with irony the people of modest means, the hollows and the underworld Jewish of Odessa.

According to Maurice Friedberg, it tested all its life of " to reconcile in him the semi-sentimental Jew semi-cynical, émancipé recently of the commands of the orthodoxe Judaism, and the orthodoxe and rigorous Communist, who it was devenu".

Quotations

Works

red Cavalry (translated from Russian with an introduction by Maurice Parijanine), Gallimard, 1959.
red Cavalry, followed accounts of the cycle " Cavalry rouge" , of the fragments of the newspaper of 1920, of the plans and drafts (translation, notes and study of Jacques Catteau), Lausanne, the Old one of Man, 1972. Available also to the Threshold, collection Points, 1986.
red Cavalry (translation Irene Markowicz and Cécile Térouanne) follow-up of Newspaper of 1920 (translation Wladimir Bérélovitch), Arles, Actes Sud, 1997.
Tales of Odessa (translated by A.Bloch and M.Minoustchine), Gallimard, 1967.
Accounts of Odessa and other accounts (translated from Russian by Irene Markowicz and Cécile Térouanne, under the direction of Andre Markowicz), Arles, Actes Sud, 1996.
Chronic of the year 18 (translated from Russian under the direction of Andre Markowicz), Acts South, 1996.

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