Isaac Babel - Complete Works and Letters (8 books)

ISAAC BABEL (1894-1940) was a Russian short-story writer, journalist, and playwright who is today acclaimed as one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Born into multicultural Odessa's thriving Jewish community, his works have for decades exemplified both the achievement of Russia's literature of the revolutionary Soviet period and the dilemmas faced by a modern intellectual, a Russian, a European, and a Jew, caught in the swell of a violent social upheaval. Babel's innovative prose is distinguished by aphoristic precision, combined with the metaphoric extravagance of Modernist poetry.

Working as a journalist, Babel witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, and accompanied the Cossack horsemen of the Red Cavalry during the 1920 Polish-Soviet War. His direct exposure to violence, marked by the visceral brutality of a low-tech war and the intensity of the battlefield comradeship, transformed him as a writer. An author who had eschewed violence before, he now placed it at the centre of his fiction, beginning with THE RED CAVALRY cycle of short stories (1926, enlarged 1933), a lyrical and unflinching depiction of the horrors of war. A classic of modern fiction, the collection was one of the Russian people's first literary exposures to the dark, bitter reality of the conflict.

THE TALES OF ODESSA (1926) is a series of Rabelaisian stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka that describe the life of Jewish gangsters, both before and after the October Revolution. Many of them directly feature the fictional mob boss Benya Krik — a mock Jewish messiah and one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature. In these stories, Babel found his unique narrative persona and voice.

In 1925 Babel began publishing a series of semi-autobiographical stories in which his familiar narrator was implicitly summoned to "recall" his early years. The seminal "Story of My Dovecote" and "First Love" (1925) suggest that Babel conceived of his oeuvre as a set of consecutive autobiographical cycles, and he continued to add to it, as he did to his two other major cycles, throughout the 1930s.

Babel was arrested by the NKVD in May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940.

THE COMPLETE WORKS (2002) traces the entire arc of his literary career, including not only all the short stories but also his Reports from St. Petersburg (1918), the remarkable 1920 Diary, and reports from Soviet Georgia and France. THE LONELY YEARS (1994) contains a large selection of private correspondence from Babel to his mother and sister, 1925-1939.


The following books are in PDF format unless otherwise noted:

* Collected Stories (Meridian, 1974). W. Morison, trans.
* Complete Works (Norton, 2001). P. Constantine, trans. — ePUB/PDF^
* Essential Fictions, The (Northwestern, 2018). V. Vinokur, ed.
* Isaac Babel: The Lonely Years, 1925-1939 (Godine, 1994). N. Babel, ed.
* Odessa Stories (Pushkin Press, 2016). B. Dralyuk, trans. — ePUB
* Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2014). B. Dralyuk, trans. — ePUB
* Red Cavalry & Other Stories (Penguin Classics, 1994). D. McDuff, trans. — ePUB
* You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915-1937 (FSG, 1969). M. Hayward, trans.

PDF^ by Mohamed5438

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