The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

About the Book

A literary cult figure on a par with Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel has remained an enigma ever since he disappeared, along with his archive, inside Stalin's secret police headquarters in May of 1939. Made famous by Red Cavalry, a book about the Russian civil war (he was the world's first "embedded" war reporter), another book about the Jewish gangsters of his native Odessa, and yet another about his own Russian Jewish childhood, Babel has been celebrated by generations of readers, all craving fuller knowledge of his works and days. Bringing together scholars of different countries and areas of specialization, the present volume is the first examination of Babel's life and art since the fall of communism and the opening of Soviet archives. Part biography, part history, part critical examination of the writer's legacy in Russian, European, and Jewish cultural contexts, The Enigma of Isaac Babel will be of interest to the general reader and specialist alike.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents Preface by Gregory Freidin ii Acknowlegements vii I. Attempting a Biography 1. Patricia Blake 2 Researching Babel's Biography: Adventures and Misadventures 2. Gregory Freidin 21 Two Babels'Two Aphrodites: Autobiography in Maria and Babel's Petersburg Myth II. Babel in the Context of Russian History 3. Oleg Budnitskii 92 The Reds and the Jews, or the Comrades in Arms of the Military Reporter Liutov 4 Carol J. Avins 122 Isaac Babel and the Jewish Experience of Revolution 5. Michael S. Gorham 150 Writers At the Front: Language of State in the Civil War Narratives of Isaac Babel and Dmitrii Furmanov 6. Marietta Chudakova 180 Thinned and Diluted: Babel in Published Russian Literature of the Soviet Period III. Babel in the World of Letters and on Stage 7. Robert Alter 215 Babel, Flaubert, and the Rapture of Perception 8. Alexander Zholkovsky 229 Towards a Typology of "Debut" Narratives: Babel, Nabokov, and Others 9. Elif Batuman 240 Pan Pisar': Clerkship in Babel's First-Person Narration 10. Zsuzsa Hetenyi 272 The Child's Eye: Isaac Babel in Russian-Jewish, American, and European Literature of Assimilation 11. Efraim Sicher 304 Text, Intertext, Context: Babel, Bialik, and Others 12. Carl Weber 337 Staging Babel's Maria'for Young American Audiences, Seventy Years After. Notes Index 482

About the Author :
Gregory Freidin, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University, is the author of a critical biography of the poet Osip Mandelstam, A Coat of Many Colors (1987), and the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Isaac Babel's Selected Writings (2008, forthcoming).

Review :
"The Enigma of Isaac Babel is infused with a sense of loss: Babel's manuscripts and correspondence were arrested with him, presumed lost in the wake of his execution at the age of forty-five... Highlighting the complexities of what it meant for Babel to be a Jew from Odessa who wrote in Russian in the Soviet Union, the volume successfully demonstrates his centrality to European, Soviet, and Jewish literary and historical traditions... In its reverence for the relics of a writer who left so little to posterity, The Enigma of Isaac Babel includes excellent examples of such scholarship." - Lauren Kaminsky, Shofar: Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies "This collection of articles by some of the leading scholars working on Isaac Babel in recent times represents a veritable treasure trove for anyone researching or teaching Babel's works ... A volume that sheds light on this most enigmatic of Soviet writers from so many angles is both overdue and welcome; readers of Babel should devour it with relish." - Rebecca Stanton, Slavic and East European Journal "Greogry Freidin's collection of the articles, The Enigma of Isacc Babel, covers an impressive range and includes much of value." - Donald Rayfield, Times Literary Supplement "This volume is motivated by the need for a reassessment of the literary legacy of Isaak Babel given the rich trove of materials that has become available in the last two decades ... [I]t is a welcome contribution to the study of Babel." - Patricia Carden, Cornell University, Slavic Review "The authors reflect on questions about [Issac Babel's] life and his death at Stalin's hands, but also throughly explore and analyze the ambiguous meanings in his stories and plays, often indecipherable to the modern reader." - Merrily F. Hart, AJL