The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Book
Review: A superbly written insider's look at the Russian revolution. Babel can convey the horrors of war with very few words. I enjoyed the best his sarcastic treatement of the bombastic communist rhetoric in such stories as "Salt" and "Treason" (maybe because I was exposed to it myself at one time).

Rating:
Summary: Tales of a crude reality
Review: Babel's tales are a mirror of his own personal life dilemma staged in a period of Russian history when horror and uncertainty prevailed. He takes an uncompromising political attitude, sympathizing with and at the same time describing the horrors of Bolshevism. This same "duality" is reflected in his love and admiration for his Jewish upbringing and at the same time shows a critical approach to a retrograde, out-of-date Jewish society. It would not be far from the truth to say that Babel's creative power emanates from this same ambivalence. To read this collection of his short stories is certainly not a very pleasant experience (especially the "Red Cavalry"); there is enough pessimism, horror, and a constant manifestation of human nature's negative side. It is worth questioning: is there another side to Babel's personality and literary production? Not much is known about the author, and when he was arrested some of his writings were confiscated and to this date never made public. On this missing link might rest a better understanding of his work and personality.

Rating:
Summary: The sickest and the best
Review: I am sorry, but I don't think Babel ever questions the revolution or war in general. Traumatized to a nervous shock by a pogrom in Nikolaev ("The Story of my Dovecot"), he carried this trauma to the end of his life. I know him well, I myself was there (and to some degree still am): this fear of the brutes and envy of them, envy of their devil-may-care freedom to kill and to spare life, of the epic quality of their horrible deeds and attitudes (straight out of the Illiad, the Nibelungenlied, the epics of Shevchenko and just about any other epic). This fear of a miserable little cultured Jew of the primal forces all around him, in all their brutality and ugliness. And the envy. When given a half-chance (and a false half-chance) to become one of them, he throws away his culture, his principles and his morals and grabs it with both hands. He knows that our most basic civilization, our civility, our peacefulness, our culture, mercy, compassion don't stand a chance when confronted by an idiot with a gun. He knows that violence is what really rules.
But he has trouble remaking himself. Though he wants to brutalize, at first he cannot. His upbringing is too deep within him. Others feel it too, and stay away from him. He is very dedicated to ideas of revolution, he is as friendly and supportive of the "revolutionaries" (i.e. bandits) around him, but they now he is not one of them. He begins to realize that not being "one of them" has become enough to get a bullet. Finally he takes a peasant woman's goose, kills it for no reason, then tells the peasant woman to kook it ("My First Goose"). This wins him a bit of respect from the others. But not much. To win real respect, a person must be killed or raped for no reason. Even then, Babel for a short while celebrates this victory over his humane side. Only his heart hurts, bun no one cares about that, not even he.
Who knows what else there was? Did Babel manage to kill someone for no reason? If he did, he does not write about that. Perhaps through some encounters with better people ("Gedali"), Babel begins to realize that his new friends are not exactly the best of humanity. But it is too late. He is now too mired to have a clean look at the work of his hands. So he tells Gedali that the International (the Communist anthem) is eaten with gunpowder and spiced with blood, and invents himself a new lie: "These people are trash, but The Party [the Communist Party] will set them straight".
And so on goes the story of this brilliant and pathetic man, who allowed a pogrom to define his life and who wasted it in service of the revolution that killed him. Brilliantly written, both extremely poetic and extremely documentary, the book is an ultimate testament both to the obscenity and the savagery of the epic and to the epicity of the obscene and the savage. It is a great irony that Babel was murdered by the same revolution he fought for, that his International became spiced with his own blood. But the greatest irony is that now his sincere pro-revolutionary book has become the greatest testament against revolutions and wars. This is a legacy, but not the one he was trying to achieve.
What does all this have to do with our contented life in America? A great deal. Imperial Russia too was considered a civilized country, until revolution and civil war changed its face. When 500,000 Jews were killed just in Ukraine by just one army (Petlyura's), the world remade its image into that of an eternal savage. We here are also capable to become the same brutes as Babel's co-fighters. Here too there are places where one wins respect by killing and not by mercy. Here too people waste their lives in service to false gods. Here too some get into false freedom of devil-may-care attitude and into epic savagery and obscenity. And underneath it all, violence rules us all.

Rating:
Summary: The excellence of understatement
Review: I stumbled across Isaac Babel because of a single line quoted in Paul Johnson's "History of the Jews". And then I was forever hooked.

First, a caveat. Be sure you understand when reading Babel's short stories that you are not reading his autobiography or journal. He did in fact listen to our creative writing teachers; he wrote what he knew. He knew the Russian revolution. He knew the Cossacks. He knew war. He knew living inside and outside the pale. His world jumps off the page because he lived it first.

The stories contain autobiographical material, actively mixed with the yeast of fiction. Use this aspect of his writing to chase rabbits. Follow up this book with his biography or find out more about the Russian revolution. Both of those topics will make more sense after reading his collected stories.

As a writer, I stand in awe of Babel's stingy use of words. Some scenes are so hugely horrible that I would have been tempted to throw in appropriate adverbs and adjectives in an attempt to convince you, my reader, just how hugely horrible it really was. Babel simply tells the story, and you gasp when you are done, horrified when you peak through the keyhole (and I would have blasted a hole in the wall).

When you read Babel, you must be willing to go at the stories with an open mind, not expecting him to flatten the Commies, defend the Jews, or paint the picture the way you want him to. He will not do that, no matter how many times you try to make it so. You will hear no overtones of right or wrong, get no definitive answers about the people on either side of the Russian revolution.

For that, I am most grateful to Isaac Babel. Nothing about our world can be easily distilled into sharp black and white. His stories give us the real world in astounding color.

Rating:
Summary: The excellence of understatement
Review: I stumbled across Isaac Babel because of a single line quoted in Paul Johnson's "History of the Jews". And then I was forever hooked.

First, a caveat. Be sure you understand when reading Babel's short stories that you are not reading his autobiography or journal. He did in fact listen to our creative writing teachers; he wrote what he knew. He knew the Russian revolution. He knew the Cossacks. He knew war. He knew living inside and outside the pale. His world jumps off the page because he lived it first.

The stories contain autobiographical material, actively mixed with the yeast of fiction. Use this aspect of his writing to chase rabbits. Follow up this book with his biography or find out more about the Russian revolution. Both of those topics will make more sense after reading his collected stories.

As a writer, I stand in awe of Babel's stingy use of words. Some scenes are so hugely horrible that I would have been tempted to throw in appropriate adverbs and adjectives in an attempt to convince you, my reader, just how hugely horrible it really was. Babel simply tells the story, and you gasp when you are done, horrified when you peak through the keyhole (and I would have blasted a hole in the wall).

When you read Babel, you must be willing to go at the stories with an open mind, not expecting him to flatten the Commies, defend the Jews, or paint the picture the way you want him to. He will not do that, no matter how many times you try to make it so. You will hear no overtones of right or wrong, get no definitive answers about the people on either side of the Russian revolution.

For that, I am most grateful to Isaac Babel. Nothing about our world can be easily distilled into sharp black and white. His stories give us the real world in astounding color.

Rating:
Summary: Short Story Master Stakes Claim to History
Review: Reading Babel is no picnic in the park. His words are often hard to understand, let alone relish. In Red Cavalry, as he evokes heartrending scenes of torture, deprivation, and corruption, it is often hard to read without almost begging the author for a point of view, a call to arms. Yet in his sharp, vivid--yet terse, accounts (somewhat naturalistic as characters succumb to the hideous corollaries of civil stife--hunger, unbridled violence, senseless cruelty, inhumanity) his compact, frugal stories are never sentetious or tendetious.

The Odessa Tales, the second part of his ouevre, is nearer and dearer to my heart. Immediately, I fell in love with a rabbi's narration of mythical gangster hero Benya Krik. Benya, a Jewish thug with a code of values, who no doubt has the power to empower the young minds of Jewish boys, commands respect as a charismatic desperado, so alien to the preconceptions of Jews as victims and middle-class pushovers, always dependent on the mercy of the ruling elite. Benya wends his way around authorities--whether monarchist or Bolshevik, not only marching to the beat of a different drum, but subjugating others to the beat. Scenes of Odessa, my hometown, are sumptuous though sparing in descriptions of wealthy and lowly merchants, sailors, criminals, and lackeys.

Having read these and other stories in Russian, I look forward to reading the translation in hopes of better understanding them in my adopted tongue. Babel is not the most facile read, but an important and long ignored voice in the Soviet literary canon. Enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Necessary stories
Review: Some of the most brilliant and influential stories of the twentieth century. "Red Cavalry" is the most successful example of the linked-short-story form, a war illuminated in lightning flashes of gruesome brilliance. "Guy de Maupassant" also contains some of the best advice on writing ever put to paper. I read Babel every couple of years to keep me honest. Essential stories for any serious reader, and certainly for anyone who aspires to write.

Rating:
Summary: Staggeringly powerful, beautifully written
Review: The frightfully ugly picture on the cover of this edition (what in the world were the publishers thinking?) might keep a lot of people away, but the few brave souls that look inside will find one of the great 20th century craftsmen of prose. I can't think of another writer than chooses his words more carefully, that can pack more into a single sentence. "Pierced by the flashes of the bombardment, night arches over the dying man." Single words can take your breath away - the choice of "arches" is the one that does it for me - but you'll probably have others. The brutality of the world he describes may seem foreign, but it never becomes oppressive, mainly because the writing is so good. The stories themselves are rather difficult to love - there is very little hope to latch on to, there are very few characters one can feel close to; there are very few real characters at all, except the narrator. Even under these horrific circumstances, though, Babel creates emotions than one can identify with - pride, love, lust, anger. He has a thorough understanding of human character. It is apparent that the circumstances of war don't create new emotions, they just amplify things we feel anyway.

This book is a necessary read for anyone that wants to learn how to write poetically without being florid, compress pages of description into a few words. This compression is one of the reasons that the stories stay in mind long after they've been read. Buy the book - or get the other edition in a used book store, so you don't have to look at that awful picture.

Rating:
Summary: Contains a Masterpiece
Review: The Red Cavalry story sequence is one of the great works of 20th century literature. It is reportedly based on Babel's experience as a Commissar in the Red Army during the post-revolutionary invasion of Poland. Babel's autobiographical narrator reflects profound ambivalence. An urban Jew and intellectual serving with peasant Cossack soldiers whose conduct would have been normative during the 30 Years War, Babel's narrator exemplifies and documents the profound contradictions of the Russian Civil War and revolutionary effort. The stories contain multiple scenes of great power, horror, and punishing irony. Other reviewers, see below, have commented on the unpleasant nature of these stories. These reactions are a tribute to Babel's capacity as a writer. Why should we expect anything pleasant from this subject? This work is intended to be profoundly disturbing. Babel aimed to show clearly some of the horror of his time and did so in a way that no factual chronicler can equal.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Though I've always had a penchant for Russian literature, Babel has a special resonance. Simply put, he is unlike any other. From the first essay to the last in this wonderful collection, he uses his weighty talent with words to not just convey emotion, feelings - but to create and destroy them. He is the premier short-story writer of our time.

What is striking, often, is how he portrays the cruelty of time -the way it passes objectively, without sympathy. He gives it a systemic quality, paralleling the political system in which he lived and by which he was murdered.

Babel saw the immeasurable cruelty of the Soviet Union, and wrote of it with carefully chosen words, phrases and - at times, I think - a slight sense of nihilism.

This is the real heartbreaking work of staggering genius - one that does not rely on overwrought post-modernist phrasing, or predictable bouts of irony. A must read for anyone even remotely interested in books, language, identity and, of course, Russia.