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Two Babels—Two Aphrodites: Autobiography in Maria and Babel's Petersburg Myth

Gregory Freidin

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter looks for the autobiographical “message in a bottle” in Babel's own writing, especially the little-understood play Maria as well as the stories of the 1920s and 1930s leading up to it. ... More

This chapter looks for the autobiographical “message in a bottle” in Babel's own writing, especially the little-understood play Maria as well as the stories of the 1920s and 1930s leading up to it. The result is a patchwork of historical fact and fiction from which the complicated and contradictory figure of Isaac Babel begins to emerge.Less

The Child's Eye: Isaac Babel's Innovations in Narration in Russian-Jewish, American, and European Literary Contexts

Zsuzsa Hetényi

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

The narrative method of the child's eye, reflecting the dual identity of succeeding generations, is a phenomenon that seems to be the most outstanding achievement of the Jewish literature of ... More

The narrative method of the child's eye, reflecting the dual identity of succeeding generations, is a phenomenon that seems to be the most outstanding achievement of the Jewish literature of assimilation. This chapter attempts to define the substance of this innovation by focusing on the parallel motifs in the works of Isaac Babel, his Russian–Jewish literary predecessors, and his successors or followers in world literature, sometimes moving back and forth in time in order to isolate these overlapping motifs of different authors. These cross-national literary links, some of which can be followed up to this day, are a living proof that Russian–Jewish literature may be justly considered a particular tradition within world literature and one that is important in its own right.Less

Isaac Babel and the Jewish Experience of Revolution

Carol J. Avins

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter examines Babel's work, especially his story “The Road,” in the context of the written record of the Jewish experience of the Russian Revolution, and offers a fresh reading of one of the ... More

This chapter examines Babel's work, especially his story “The Road,” in the context of the written record of the Jewish experience of the Russian Revolution, and offers a fresh reading of one of the most enigmatic stories of Babel's career.Less

Text, Intertext, Context: Babel, Bialik, and Others

Efraim Sicher

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter contextualizes Babel's writings in the contemporary Yiddish and Hebrew literature, drawing attention to another instance of Babel's “double bookkeeping”: the subtexts in his writings ... More

This chapter contextualizes Babel's writings in the contemporary Yiddish and Hebrew literature, drawing attention to another instance of Babel's “double bookkeeping”: the subtexts in his writings that could only be appreciated by a certain trilingual segment of his audience, namely, those who were conversant in all the three languages in use by the Jews of the Russian empire: Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew.Less

Thinned and Diluted: Babel in Published Russian Literature of the Soviet Period

Marietta Chudakova

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter presents a fascinating view of Babel's evolution as a writer and stylist in his interaction with the body of Russian and Soviet Russian literature. Contrary to the prevailing view of ... More

This chapter presents a fascinating view of Babel's evolution as a writer and stylist in his interaction with the body of Russian and Soviet Russian literature. Contrary to the prevailing view of Babel as a sui generis author with a limited genealogy in Russian letters and practically no following among Soviet Russian writers, it is shown that Babel, in fact, had a tremendous impact on Soviet Russian prose, which absorbed elements of his style even as it diluted its intensity and pungency to “safe” consumption levels. Paradoxically or not, Babel, too, found himself caught up in the “taming of Babel”: as the author of his 1937 story, “The Kiss,” he was coming close to resembling his own Soviet epigones.Less

Researching Babel's Biography: Adventures and Misadventures

Patricia Blake

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter sketches out a portrait of Issac Babel using as a backdrop the early days of her biographer's journey—an American writer researching a book on Babel's life and death in Moscow during the ... More

This chapter sketches out a portrait of Issac Babel using as a backdrop the early days of her biographer's journey—an American writer researching a book on Babel's life and death in Moscow during the cold war as she herself was being watched by the Soviet secret police.Less

Pan Pisar': Clerkship in Babel's First-Person Narration

Elif Batuman

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter presents specific readings of five of Babel's “metaliterary” stories—“Guy de Maupassant,” “The Ivan-and-Maria,” “The Story of My Dovecote,” “My First Fee,” and “Pan Apolek”—wherein the ... More

This chapter presents specific readings of five of Babel's “metaliterary” stories—“Guy de Maupassant,” “The Ivan-and-Maria,” “The Story of My Dovecote,” “My First Fee,” and “Pan Apolek”—wherein the narrator's double identity as clerk and writer, and the epistemological accounting for literature through the materials of life, are examined.Less

Writers at the Front: Language of State in the Civil War Narratives of Isaac Babel and Dmitrii Furmanov

Michaels Gorham

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter offers a historical context for understanding Babel—the struggle for the authoritative postrevolutionary language of state, which ultimately came to dominate public discourse in Russia. ... More

This chapter offers a historical context for understanding Babel—the struggle for the authoritative postrevolutionary language of state, which ultimately came to dominate public discourse in Russia. The juxtaposition of Babel's Red Cavalry and Furmanov's Chapaev goes a long way toward explaining Babel's “silence” in the 1930s, when the “Furmanov model”—a paired language of command adopted by the top-down ideological party state—came to dominate the print media as well as the officially sanctioned Soviet letters.Less

Staging Babel's Maria—For Young American Audiences, Seventy Years After

Carl Weber

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

In this chapter, the author, who directed the Stanford production of Maria, shares his thoughts both on his direction of the play and the special concerns of a director producing the work for the ... More

In this chapter, the author, who directed the Stanford production of Maria, shares his thoughts both on his direction of the play and the special concerns of a director producing the work for the twenty-first-century American audience.Less

The Stillbirth of Revolution

in Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia

The Russian Revolution of 1917 smashed all the boundaries dividing class, gender, nationality, language, the sacred from the profane, and art from life. It is no wonder that this momentous event in ... More

The Russian Revolution of 1917 smashed all the boundaries dividing class, gender, nationality, language, the sacred from the profane, and art from life. It is no wonder that this momentous event in history was celebrated by Jewish and non-Jewish authors alike in the new Soviet Union. The 1920s witnessed the emergence of new movements in literature, the visual arts, film, and criticism in which Jews occupied prominent roles. This chapter explores the trauma of the civil war years by focusing on Russian-Jewish and Soviet Yiddish literature that celebrates the revolution, focusing on the works of such authors as Perets Markish, Isaac Babel, Semen Gekht, David Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko, and Osip Mandelshtam. It offers a reading of two poems published in 1929: Markish's Brider (Brothers) and Kvitko's “In roytn shturem” (In a red storm).Less

Babel, Flaubert, and the Rapture of Perception

Robert Alter

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter focuses on the emergence of a modern literary sensibility, juxtaposing the aestheticizing gaze implied in Flaubert's le style indirect libre with Babel's first-person narrator. Babel, ... More

This chapter focuses on the emergence of a modern literary sensibility, juxtaposing the aestheticizing gaze implied in Flaubert's le style indirect libre with Babel's first-person narrator. Babel, whose experience encompassed considerably more in the way of historical horrors than Flaubert's, remained ultimately an enthusiast, an enthralled observer of life's spectacle, and that enthusiasm vividly informs the celebratory moments of his fiction. Enthusiasm is an attitude quite alien to Flaubert's profoundly disenchanted imagination of the world. What Flaubert was able to show Babel, as well as a number of other writers of the earlier twentieth century, was the possibility of breaking out of the limits of conventional aesthetic categories through a studied descriptive art of fiction.Less

Toward a Typology of “Debut” Narratives: Babel, Nabokov, and Others

Alexander Zholkovsky

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter sketches out a framework of invariant parameters that inform fictionalized treatments of “creative debuts,” drawing primarily on Nabokov's “First Poem” and Babel's “My First Fee”/“Answer ... More

This chapter sketches out a framework of invariant parameters that inform fictionalized treatments of “creative debuts,” drawing primarily on Nabokov's “First Poem” and Babel's “My First Fee”/“Answer to Inquiry” with occasional reference to Chekhov's, Andreev's, and Sholom Aleichem's stories. Despite obvious differences (for example, the absence in Nabokov's text of the “sexual initiation” motif, so central to Babel's), the two stories share several constitutive topoi: semi-ironic first-person reminiscing mode; acknowledgement of juvenile imitativeness; role of parent figures; subversive Bloomian play with literary “fathers”; and some others.Less

Catastrophic narratives

Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler

in A History of Russian Literature

The chapter considers how, beginning with the Revolution and continuing across the centry, new narrative forms in prose and poetry fashion a discourse of national destiny. As narratives conceptualize ... More

The chapter considers how, beginning with the Revolution and continuing across the centry, new narrative forms in prose and poetry fashion a discourse of national destiny. As narratives conceptualize historical change and convey the meanings of catastrophe, they develop new plotlines, metaphoric systems and mythological visions. The chapter argues that Russian literature on the Great Terror, collectivization, and Gulag achieves a focus on historical and personal trauma comparable to Holocaust literature. Soviet narratives of World War II also form an important trend from the 1940s through twenty-first century, serving simultaneously as the source of social criticism and the sustained attempt to redefine national identity.Less

The Reds and the Jews, or the Comrades in Arms of the Military Reporter Liutov

Oleg Budnitskii

in The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context

This chapter offers a new and intriguing context for reading Babel's Red Cavalry and his civil war Diary: the history of the Red Army's attitudes toward the Jews, with a special focus on Semyon ... More

This chapter offers a new and intriguing context for reading Babel's Red Cavalry and his civil war Diary: the history of the Red Army's attitudes toward the Jews, with a special focus on Semyon Budenny's First Cavalry Army for which Babel served as a reporter, propagandist, and staff officer in the Polish campaign in 1920.Less

Diary, 1901–1969

Kornei Chukovsky

in Diary, 1901-1969

This is an abridged version of Kornei Chukovsky's diary, a voluminous document spanning seven decades and three generations (1901–1969), beginning in pre-revolutionary Russia and encompassing almost ... More

This is an abridged version of Kornei Chukovsky's diary, a voluminous document spanning seven decades and three generations (1901–1969), beginning in pre-revolutionary Russia and encompassing almost the entire Soviet era. Contained in twenty-nine notebooks, the diary is a commentary on some of the most important historical events of the period, including the Russian Revolution of 1917. Chukovsky also writes about the literary ferment that began in the late 1950s and persisted into the early 1960s, and how he listened closely and avidly to the new voices in Russian literature. In addition, he speaks about censorship under Joseph Stalin, and describes his friendship with such major literary figures as Anna Akhmatova and Isaac Babel.Less

Patterning a New Life: American Jewish Literature in 1929

Gabriella Safran

in 1929: Mapping the Jewish World

This chapter examines American Jewish literature produced in 1929, with particular emphasis on Michael Gold's “proletarian novel” Jews without Money, Charles Reznikoff's By the Waters of Manhattan, ... More

This chapter examines American Jewish literature produced in 1929, with particular emphasis on Michael Gold's “proletarian novel” Jews without Money, Charles Reznikoff's By the Waters of Manhattan, and the English translation of Isaac Babel's revolutionary Russian story sequence Red Cavalry Stories. It considers how the three texts shed light on and enact some of the changes of 1929 that had affected Jews and non-Jews alike, including the founding of the Jewish Agency, the Hebron riots in Palestine, the U.S. stock market crash, and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 that instituted a quota system for immigrants to the United States. It also explores aspects of the texts that are harder to analyze as historical phenomena in order to understand the culture of American Jews during the period and what made these works successful.Less

Conclusion: Confronting the Legacy of the Stereotype: Babel, Rybakov, and Jewish Death

in The Ridiculous Jew: The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

This chapter discusses the most interesting responses to Gogol's and Turgenev's representation of the Jewish stereotype, particularly their portrayal of Jewish death, in Anatoly Rybakov's novel Heavy ... More

This chapter discusses the most interesting responses to Gogol's and Turgenev's representation of the Jewish stereotype, particularly their portrayal of Jewish death, in Anatoly Rybakov's novel Heavy Sand (Tiazhelyi pesok, 1978) and Isaac Babel's story “Crossing the Zbrucz” (1924), the first story of his famous collection of tales about the Russian-Polish War, Red Cavalry.Less

Introduction

James Loeffler

in The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the Jews' search for modern identity through music, in the late Russian Empire. It explains that the first hints of a ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the Jews' search for modern identity through music, in the late Russian Empire. It explains that the first hints of a broader new relationship between Jews and music in eastern Europe appeared in mid-nineteenth-century Odessa, and that the fabled connection between Jews and music in Odessa was solidified through decades of Russian and Yiddish popular songs and the later writings of Isaac Babel, Alexander Kuprin, and others. The chapter also highlights the role of composer Anton Rubinstein in creating the conditions for the rise of Jewish musicians in Russian society.Less