Isaac Babel biography. Isaac Babel, short biography

Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel

Isaac Babel.
Photo from the site www.klassika.ru

Babel Isaac Emmanuilovich (1894/1940) - Soviet writer. Known under such pseudonyms as Bab-El, K. Lyutov. During the years of Soviet power he was repressed and rehabilitated only posthumously. The most famous works: collections of stories “Cavalry” and “ Odessa stories", as well as the plays "Sunset" and "Maria".

Guryeva T.N. New literary dictionary/ T.N. Guryev. – Rostov n/d, Phoenix, 2009, p. 26.

Babel Isaac Emmanuilovich (1894-1940) - Soviet writer.

He began publishing in 1916. In 1917, he participated in the First World War of 1914-1918 on the Romanian front. After October revolution 1917 served in Cheka, People's Commissariat for Education, food detachments, fought on the Northern Front and in the 1st Cavalry Army, worked in the Odessa Provincial Committee of the RCP (b), was a reporter.

In 1921-1931 wrote two cycles of works - “Cavalry” and “Odessa Stories”, the plays “Sunset” (1928) and “Maria” (1935). In 1927-1933. lived in France and Italy. The last story published during his lifetime was "Di Grasso" (1937).

Master short story, he strove for brevity, restrained imagery and accuracy. For excessive naturalism, emphasizing the spontaneous beginning in the depiction of the Civil War in Russia in 1918-1922. repeatedly subjected to harsh criticism.

In 1939 he was arrested and executed (1940). Rehabilitated posthumously.

Orlov A.S., Georgieva N.G., Georgiev V.A. Historical Dictionary. 2nd ed. M., 2012, p. 26.

Babel Isaac Emmanuilovich (1894, Odessa - 1940) - writer. The son of a wealthy merchant. He studied at the Odessa Commercial School, where he actually received a gymnasium education, but instead of ancient languages he studied chemistry, political economy, modern. At the age of 15, he began writing his first stories in French, but then gave up. In 1915 he graduated from the Commercial Institute in Kyiv. Having not received the right to reside outside the Pale of Settlement, he tried to publish his works in Petrograd. With the assistance of A. M. Gorky, he appeared in the journal. "Chronicle" with stories for which he was prosecuted under Art. 1001 (pornography) and for attempting to overthrow the existing system. February rev. 1917 spared B. from trial. In 1917-1924 he worked in the Cheka and collaborated with gas. "New Life", was a soldier at the front, in the First Cavalry Army, served in the Odessa Provincial Committee. From 1924 he lived in Moscow, wrote plays, film scripts, stories, and did translations.

After the publication of Cavalry, Babel was subjected to fierce attacks for de-heroizing history, but was defended by Gorky. Wrote the series "Odessa Stories". “The tragic was combined in his stories with the funny, sincerity coexisted with slyness. The magic of his imagination was so strong that... they listened to him with bated breath” (T. Tess). In 1939 Babel was arrested. During his arrest, all his manuscripts were taken away, which were never found later. Was shot. Rehabilitated posthumously. Book materials used: Shikman A.P. Figures

national history

. Biographical reference book. Moscow, 1997

At the beginning of 1924, the writer's first stories appeared - "Salt", "Letter", "King". Together with those written later, they made up two cycles - “Cavalry” (separate publication 1926) and “Odessa Stories” (separate publication 1931). "Cavalry" was received ambiguously by contemporaries: literary criticism was enthusiastic; Army Commander Budyonny called it "slander" and "women's gossip." M. Gorky came to the writer’s defense.

In 1928 Babel wrote the play "Sunset", thematically related to "Odessa Stories".

Babel's interest in French culture and his repeated trips to Paris gave rise to gossip in Moscow literary circles.

The suspicious attitude towards Babel especially intensified when in June 1935 Babel went to Paris to participate in the International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture and, neglecting caution, communicated with representatives of the Russian emigration.

At the end of the 1930s, a wave of repression swept across the country. At that time, Babel was published extremely rarely, since he did not highlight the successes of the party and did not express love for the leader (as was required of writers). At the writers' congress, he was sharply criticized for being "cut off from life, becoming heavy, becoming an observer...". For Babel this was not a surprise. After the death of M. Gorky, he said: “Well, that’s it now, it’s a mess. They won’t let me live.” On May 15, he was arrested on charges of belonging to a Trotskyist terrorist organization and espionage for French and Austrian intelligence.

Materials used from the book: Russian writers and poets. Brief biographical dictionary. Moscow, 2000.

Writer of the 20th century Babel Isaac Emmanuilovich ( real name

Born in Odessa, on Moldavanka, in the family of merchant Emmanuel (Manya) Isaakovich (Itskovich) Babel (Bobel). In early childhood he lived in Nikolaev, near Odessa. At the age of nine he entered the 1st grade of the Commercial School named after. Count S.Yu. Witte in Nikolaev. The next year he became a student at the Odessa Commercial School. Emperor Nicholas the First, from which he graduated in 1911. During these years, he took violin lessons from the famous musician P.S. Stolyarsky, became interested in French literature, became close to the French colony in Odessa, and wrote his first student stories in French. At the same time, at the insistence of his religious father, he seriously studied the Hebrew language and the Jewish sacred books. After successfully graduating from the Odessa Commercial School, he was awarded the class title of honorary citizen. In the same year, he applied for admission to the Kiev Commercial Institute in the economics department. He was accepted and lived in Kyiv for several years. In 1916 he graduated from the institute with honors - with the title of candidate.

There, in Kyiv, in the magazine “Ogni” the story “Old Shloyme” was first published.

After the start of the Russian-German war, Babel was enlisted in the second-class militia warriors, but did not take part in hostilities.

In 1915, Babel was admitted to the 4th year of the law faculty of the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute, but did not graduate from the institute.

In 1915 he lived for some time in Saratov, where he wrote the story “Childhood. At Grandma’s,” then returned to Petrograd.

In the fall of 1916, he met with M. Gorky at the editorial office of the Chronicle magazine. In this magazine, in No. 11 (November) for 1916, 2 stories were published: “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna” and “Mother, Rimma and Alla.” Also in 1916, a series of essays under the general title “My Leaves” was published in the Petrograd “Journal of Journals”.

In his “Autobiography” (1928), Babel wrote about his first acquaintance with M. Gorky: “... I owe everything to this meeting and still pronounce the name of Alexei Maksimovich with love and gratitude... He taught me incredibly important things and then, when it turned out that two or three of my tolerable youth experiences were just random luck, and that nothing was working out for me with literature, and that I wrote surprisingly poorly, Alexey Maksimovich sent me to the people. And I went into public life for seven years - from 1917 to 1924."

During these years, Babel was a soldier on the Romanian front, served as a translator in the foreign department of the Cheka in Pg.; in 1918 it was published in the newspaper “New Life”; in the summer of the same year he participates in food expeditions of the People's Commissariat for Food, etc.

At the end of 1919 - beginning of 1920 he lived in Odessa, working as the head of the editorial and publishing department of the State Publishing House of Ukraine. In the early spring of 1920, as a correspondent for Yugrost, under the name of Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov, Babel ended up in the First Cavalry army. He served there for several months, kept diaries, and published in the newspaper “Red Cavalryman” (articles, essays).

At the end of 1920, after suffering from typhus, the writer returned to Odessa.

In 1922-23, he began to actively publish his stories in Odessa newspapers and magazines: “Lava”, “Silhouettes”, “Izvestia”, “Sailor”. Among them are the story “The King” (from the series “Odessa Stories”) and the story “Grishuk” (from the series “Cavalry”). Almost all of 1922 Babel lived in Batumi and traveled to other cities of Georgia.

In 1923 he established connections with writers in Moscow, published in Lef, Krasnaya Novy, Searchlight, and Pravda (short stories from Cavalry and Odessa Stories). While still in Odessa, Babel met V. Mayakovsky; after his final move to Moscow, he met many Moscow writers - S. Yesenin, A. Voronsky, D. Furmanov. At first he lives near Moscow, in Sergiev Posad.

In the mid-1920s, Babel became one of the most popular Soviet writers. In 1925 alone, three collections of stories were published as separate editions. The following year, the first collection of his short stories from “Cavalry” was published, which was replenished in subsequent years. (50 short stories were conceived, 37 were published, the last one being “Argamak.”)

In 1925 he began working on the script for Benya Krik and wrote the play Sunset.

In the mid and second half of the 1920s, Babel created (at least published) almost all the works with which he entered Soviet literature and remained in it. The next 15 years of his life added very little to this main core: the play “Maria” (1932-33), several new “cavalry” short stories, several stories, mostly autobiographical (“The Awakening”, “Guy de Maupassant”, etc. ). He created a film script based on the prose of Sholom Aleichem (“Wandering Stars”, etc.).

Babel's entry into literature in the mid-1920s was sensational. The short stories of his “Cavalry” were distinguished by a sharpness and directness of depiction of the bloody events of the Civil War, unprecedented even for the harsh realistic prose of that time - and all this with an emphasized sophistication of style and rare elegance of words. With particular sharpness, Babel conveys a picture of a catastrophic collision in the chaos of the revolution and the Civil War of three contrasting cultural “fields”, previously, in essence, hardly touching in Russian history - the fate of Jewry, the quest of the Russian intelligentsia and the people's “grassroots” understanding of life. The effect of this paradoxical collision creates an artist full of spiritual suffering and hopes, tragic mistakes and insights. and the moral world of B.’s “cavalry” prose. This book immediately caused an extremely heated debate in which irreconcilable points of view collided (in particular, S.M. Budyonny, commander of the First Cavalry, who perceived B.’s prose as slander against the Red soldiers, with on the one hand, and M. Gorky, A. Voronsky - on the other, who believed that the truth and depth of the depiction of the destinies of people in the conflicts of the Civil War, and not propaganda, is the main task of the writer).

In “Odessa Stories,” Babel created the image of a romanticized Odessa Moldavian woman, whose soul was the “noble” bandit Benya Krik. The book colorfully, ironically, pathetically and lyrically depicts the life of Odessa raiders and traders, sages and dreamers as a vanishing exoticism. “Odessa Stories” (a version of the plots of the 2nd book was the play “Sunset”) was one of the most notable events in literature of the mid-1920s; the book influenced the work of some writers, in particular I. Ilf and E. Petrov.

Beginning in 1925, B. traveled especially a lot around the country (Leningrad, Kyiv, Voronezh province, southern Russia), where he collected materials about the Civil War, and worked as secretary of the village council in the village of Molodenovo on the Moscow River. In the summer of 1927, he traveled abroad for the first time - to Paris, then to Berlin. From that time on, his foreign trips became almost annual: 1927, 1928, 1932, 1933, 1935, 1936.

In 1935, B. made a report in Paris at the Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture.

He met with Gorky many times, who always closely followed his path in literature and supported him. After the death of Maxim Peshkov, the writer’s son, Gorky invited Babel to his place in Gorki, where Babel lived in May-June 1934. In Aug. the same year, Babel gave a speech at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. His work in the mid and second half of the 1930s was mainly associated with literary adaptations of the works of other writers: he was working on a film script based on N. Ostrovsky’s novel “How the Steel Was Tempered”, a script based on Vs. Bagritsky’s poem “The Thought about Opanas”, a film script about M. Gorky, writes the script for the film “Bezhin Meadow” for S.M. Eisenstein (the film was banned and destroyed as “ideologically vicious.”).

In 1937, Babel announced in the press that he had completed the play about G. Kotovsky, and in 1939 - about the completion of the script “Old Square”. None of these works were published during the writer's lifetime. Babel's last collection of stories was published in the fall of 1936. His last appearance in print was New Year's wishes, published in Literaturnaya Gazeta on December 31. 1938 under the heading “Literary Dreams”.

On May 15, 1939, a search was carried out at the writer’s Moscow apartment and at the same time at his dacha in Peredelkino near Moscow, where he was at that time. During the search, 24 folders with manuscripts were seized, which were subsequently not found in the FSK archives. After a series of continuous interrogations on June 29-30, Babel was forced to give evidence, from which he subsequently made statements in a number of statements, incl. and during the court hearing of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on January 26. 1940, refused. In a statement at the trial, Babel asked to be given the opportunity to “complete<...>latest literary works" He was sentenced to death and executed on January 27. 1940. On the same day, his body was committed to fire in the crematorium of the Donskoy Monastery.

In 1954, Babel was completely rehabilitated “for lack of evidence of a crime.”

The controversy surrounding Babel's creativity and fate resumed after his rehabilitation and continues to this day.

V.M.Akimov

Materials used from the book: Russian literature of the 20th century. Prose writers, poets, playwrights. Biobibliographical dictionary. Volume 1. p. 145-147.

Read further:

Russian writers and poets (biographical reference book).

Essays:

Works: in 2 volumes / comp. and preparation text by A.N. Pirozhkov; entry article by G. Belaya; comm. S. Povartsova. M., 1991;

Works: in 2 volumes. M., 2002;

Favorites. M., 1957;

Favorites / comp., preface, comments. E. Shklovsky; Reference and methodological materials by L. Strakhovoy. M., 2002;

Diary. 1920. M., 2000;

Prose. Drama / intro. article by B. Sarnov. M., 2000;

Odessa stories. M., 2001. (Names. Classics).

Literature:

Levin F. I. Babel: Essay on creativity. M., 1972;

Zholkovsky A.K., Yampolsky M.B. Babel // Babel. M.: Carteblanche, 1994;

Povartsov S.N. Cause of death: execution; Chronicle last days I. Babel. M.: Terra, 1996;

Memories of Babel / comp. A.N. Pirozhkova, N.N. Yurgeneva; afterword S. Povarova. M., 1989.

Russian Soviet writer, journalist and playwright, known for his “Odessa Stories” and the collection “Cavalry” about Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army.

Babel’s biography, known in many details, still has some gaps due to the fact that the autobiographical notes left by the writer himself are largely embellished, altered, or even “pure fiction” for a specific purpose that corresponded to the political moment of that time. However, the established version of the writer’s biography is as follows:

Childhood

Born in Odessa on Moldavanka in the family of a poor merchant Many Itskovich Bobel (Emmanuel (Manus, Mane) Isaakovich Babel), originally from Bila Tserkva, and Feiga (Fani) Aronovna Bobel. The beginning of the century was a time of social unrest and a mass exodus of Jews from Russian Empire. Babel himself survived the pogrom of 1905 (he was hidden by a Christian family), and his grandfather Shoil became one of the three hundred Jews killed then.

To enter the preparatory class of the Odessa commercial school of Nicholas I, Babel had to exceed the quota for Jewish students (10% in the Pale of Settlement, 5% outside it and 3% for both capitals), but despite the positive marks that gave the right to study , the place was given to another young man, whose parents gave a bribe to the school management. During the year of education at home, Babel completed a two-class program. In addition to traditional disciplines, he studied the Talmud and studied music.

Youth

After another unsuccessful attempt enroll in Odessa University(again due to quotas) he ended up at the Kiev Institute of Finance and Entrepreneurship, where he graduated under his original name Bobel. There he met his future wife Evgenia Gronfein, the daughter of a wealthy Kyiv industrialist, who fled with him to Odessa.

Fluent in Yiddish, Russian and French, Babel wrote his first works in French, but they have not reached us. Then he went to St. Petersburg, without, according to his own recollections, the right to do so, since the city was outside the Pale of Settlement. (A document issued by the Petrograd police in 1916, which allowed Babel to reside in the city while studying at the Psychoneurological Institute, was recently discovered, which confirms the writer’s inaccuracy in his romanticized autobiography). In the capital, he managed to immediately enroll in the fourth year of the law faculty of the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute.

Babel published his first stories in Russian in the journal “Chronicle” in 1915. “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna” and “Mother, Rimma and Alla” attracted attention, and Babel was about to be tried for pornography (Article 1001), which was prevented by the revolution. On the advice of M. Gorky, Babel “went into the public eye” and changed several professions.

In the fall of 1917, Babel, after serving for several months as a private, deserted and made his way to Petrograd, where in December 1917 he went to work in the Cheka, and then in the People's Commissariat for Education and in food expeditions. In the spring of 1920, on the recommendation of M. Koltsov, under the name of Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov, he was sent to the 1st Cavalry Army as a war correspondent for Yug-ROST, where he was a fighter and political worker. He fought with her on the Romanian, northern and Polish fronts. Then he worked at the Odessa Provincial Committee, was the producing editor of the 7th Soviet printing house, and a reporter in Tiflis and Odessa, at the State Publishing House of Ukraine. According to the myth he himself voiced in his autobiography, he did not write during these years, although it was then that he began to create the cycle “ Odessa stories».

Writer's career

In 1924, in the magazines “Lef” and “Krasnaya Nov” he published a number of stories, which later formed the cycles “Cavalry” and “Odessa Stories”. Babel managed to masterfully convey in Russian the style of literature created in Yiddish (this is especially noticeable in “Odessa Stories”, where in some places the direct speech of his characters is an interlinear translation from Yiddish).

Soviet criticism of those years, while paying tribute to the talent and significance of Babel’s work, pointed to “antipathy to the cause of the working class” and reproached him for “naturalism and apology for the spontaneous principle and romanticization of banditry.” The book “Cavalry” was sharply criticized by S. M. Budyonny, who saw in it slander against the First Cavalry Army. Kliment Voroshilov in 1924 complained to Dmitry Manuilsky, a member of the Central Committee and later the head of the Comintern, that the style of the work about the Cavalry was “unacceptable.” Stalin believed that Babel wrote about “things that he did not understand.” Gorky expressed the opinion that the writer, on the contrary, “decorated from the inside” the Cossacks “better, more truthfully than Gogol the Cossacks.”

In “Odessa Stories,” Babel depicts in a romantic way the life of Jewish criminals of the early 20th century, finding thieves in everyday life

Raiders, as well as artisans and small traders have exotic features and strong characters. The most memorable hero of these stories is the Jewish raider Benya Krik (his prototype is the legendary Mishka Yaponchik), in the words of the “Jewish Encyclopedia” - the embodiment of Babel’s dream of a Jew who knows how to stand up for himself.

In 1926, he edited the first Soviet collected works of Sholem Aleichem, and the following year he adapted Sholem Aleichem’s novel “Wandering Stars” for film production.

In 1927, he took part in the collective novel “Big Fires,” published in the magazine “Ogonyok.”

In 1928 Babel published the play “Sunset” (staged at the 2nd Moscow Art Theater), and in 1935 - the play “Maria”. Babel also wrote several scripts. A master of the short story, Babel strives for laconicism and accuracy, combining enormous temperament with external dispassion in the images of his characters, plot collisions and descriptions. His flowery, metaphor-laden language early stories later it is replaced by a strict and restrained narrative style.

In the subsequent period, with the tightening of the situation and the onset of totalitarianism, Babel published less and less. Despite his doubts about what was happening, he did not emigrate, although he had the opportunity to do so, visiting his wife, who lived in France, in 1927, 1932 and 1935, and the daughter born after one of these visits.

Arrest and execution

On May 15, 1939, Babel was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino on charges of “anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activity” and espionage (case No. 419). During his arrest, several manuscripts were confiscated from him, which turned out to be lost forever (15 folders, 11 notebooks, 7 notebooks with notes). The fate of his novel about the Cheka remains unknown.

During interrogations, Babel was subjected to severe torture. He was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and executed the next day, January 27, 1940. The execution list was signed personally by Joseph Stalin. Among possible reasons Stalin's hostility to Babel is called the fact that "Cavalry" was dedicated to the story of the Polish Campaign of 1920 - a military operation that Stalin failed.

In 1954 he was posthumously rehabilitated. With the active influence of Konstantin Paustovsky, who loved him very much and left warm memories of him, after 1956 Babel was returned to Soviet literature. In 1957, the collection “Favorites” was published with a foreword by Ilya Ehrenburg, who called Isaac Babel one of the outstanding writers of the 20th century, a brilliant stylist and master of the short story.

Babel family

Evgenia Borisovna Gronfein, with whom he was legally married, emigrated to France in 1925. His other (common-law) wife, with whom he entered into a relationship after breaking up with Evgenia, is Tamara Vladimirovna Kashirina (Tatyana Ivanova), their son, named Emmanuel (1926), later became known during the Khrushchev era as the artist Mikhail Ivanov (member of the "Group of Nine" "), and was brought up in the family of his stepfather, Vsevolod Ivanov, considering himself his son. After breaking up with Kashirina, Babel, who traveled abroad, was reunited for some time with his legal wife, who bore him a daughter, Natalya (1929), married to the American literary critic Natalie Brown (under whose editorship it was published on English language full meeting works of Isaac Babel). Babel’s last (common-law) wife, Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova, gave birth to his daughter Lydia (1937), lived in the USA.

Creation

Babel’s work had a huge influence on the writers of the so-called “South Russian school” (Ilf, Petrov, Olesha, Kataev, Paustovsky, Svetlov, Bagritsky) and received wide recognition in the Soviet Union, his books were translated into many foreign languages.

The legacy of the repressed Babel in some ways shared his fate. He began to be published again only after his “posthumous rehabilitation” in the 1960s, however, his works were heavily censored. The writer’s daughter, American citizen Natalie Babel Brown, 1929-2005, managed to collect hard-to-find or unpublished works and publish them with commentaries (“The Complete Works of Isaac Babel,” 2002).

Memory

Currently in Odessa, citizens are collecting funds for a monument to Isaac Babel. Already received permission from the city council; the monument will stand at the intersection of Zhukovsky and Rishelievskaya streets, opposite the house where he once lived. The grand opening is planned for 2010 - on the 70th anniversary of the tragic death of the writer.

Babel Isaac Emmanuilovich, whose biography is presented in the article, is a prose writer, translator, playwright, and essayist. His real name is Bobel, he is also known under the pseudonyms Bab-El and K. Lyutov. This man was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1940. In 1954, Isaac Babel was posthumously rehabilitated.

His biography begins on June 30 (July 12), 1894. It was then that Isaac Emmanuilovich was born in Odessa. His father was Emmanuel Isaakovich Bobel.

Childhood, education period

In the years early childhood the future writer lived in Nikolaev, near Odessa. At the age of 9, he entered the local Commercial School. Count Witte. A year later he transferred to the Odessa Commercial School named after Nicholas I. Babel graduated from it in 1911. His training in playing the violin dates back to this time. Babel's lessons were given by P.S. Stolyarsky, famous musician. The future writer was also interested in the works French authors. At the insistence of his religious father, Babel began to seriously study the Hebrew language at the same time. He read the Jewish holy books. Isaac Emmanuilovich received the title of honorary citizen after successful completion training at the Odessa Commercial School. At the same time, he applied for admission to the economics department of the Kyiv Commercial Institute. Babel was accepted into the institute and lived in Kyiv for several years. He completed his studies with honors in 1916, receiving the title of candidate.

The first published work, life in Saratov

The Kiev magazine "Lights" published Babel's first work - the story "Old Shloyme". After the Russian-German war broke out, Isaac Emmanuilovich was enlisted in the militia, but did not take part in hostilities.

In 1915, Babel was enrolled in the fourth year of the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute (Faculty of Law). However, he did not graduate from this educational institution. In 1915, Babel spent some time in Saratov. Here he created a story called "Childhood. At Grandma's", after which he returned to Petrograd.

First meeting with M. Gorky

The meeting with Maxim Gorky took place in the fall of 1916 at the editorial office of the Chronicle magazine. In November 1916, two stories by Babel were published in this magazine - “Mama, Rimma and Alla” and “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna”. In the same year, a series of essays, united under the title “My Leaflets,” appeared in the “Journal of Journals,” a Petrograd publication.

In his “Autobiography”, created in 1928, Isaac Emmanuilovich, speaking about his first meeting with Gorky, noted that he owed everything to her and still pronounces the name of this writer with gratitude and love.

Babel's life "in people"

I.E. Babel, whose biography is marked by friendship with M. Gorky, wrote that he taught him very important things, and then, when it turned out that several of his youthful experiences were a fluke, that he wrote poorly, Maxim Gorky sent him “to the people.” Babel noted in his “Autobiography” that he “went into the people” for 7 years (1917-24). At this time he was a soldier, on the Romanian front. Babel also worked in the foreign department of the Cheka as a translator. In 1918, his texts were published in the newspaper “New Life”. In the same summer, Isaac Babel took part in food expeditions organized by the People's Commissariat for Food.

In the period from the end of 1919 to the beginning of 1920, Isaac Babel lived in Odessa. The short biography of the writer is supplemented with new important events. The writer served at the State Publishing House of Ukraine, where he was in charge of the editorial and publishing department. In the spring of 1920, under the name of Lyutov Kirill Vasilyevich, a correspondent for Yugrost, Isaac Emmanuilovich went to Here he stayed for several months. The writer kept diaries and also published his essays and articles in the newspaper "Red Cavalryman". After suffering typhus, at the end of 1920, Isaac Emmanuilovich returned to Odessa.

New publications, life in Moscow

In 1922-1923 Babel began actively publishing his stories in Odessa newspapers ("Sailor", "Izvestia" and "Silhouettes"), as well as in the magazine "Lava". Among these works, the following stories should be noted: “The King,” included in the “Odessa Stories” cycle, and “Grishuk” (the “Cavalry” cycle). Babel lived almost the entire year 1922 in Batumi. His biography is also marked by visits to other Georgian cities.

In 1923, the writer established connections with Moscow writers. He began publishing in Krasnaya Novy, Lef, Searchlight, and also in Pravda (Odessa Stories and short stories from Cavalry). While still in Odessa, Isaac Emmanuilovich met Vladimir Mayakovsky. Then, after Babel finally moved to Moscow, he made acquaintance with many writers who were here - with A. Voronsky, S. Yesenin, D. Furmanov. Let us note that at first Isaac Emmanuilovich lived in Sergiev Posad (near Moscow).

Popularity, creativity of the second half of the 1920s

In the mid-1920s, he became one of the most popular writers in the USSR. Only in 1925, three collections of his stories were published as a separate publication. The first set of short stories from Cavalry created by Babel was published the following year. Subsequently it was replenished. Isaac Babel planned to write 50 short stories, but 37 were published, the last of them is called "Argamak".

In 1925, Isaac Emmanuilovich began working on the creation of the script for Benya Krik, and also completed the play Sunset. In the second half of the 1920s, Isaac Babel wrote (at least published) almost all of his best works. The next 15 years of Babel's life added only very little to this basic legacy. In 1932-33, Isaac Emmanuilovich worked on the play "Maria". He created a number of new "cavalry" short stories, as well as stories, mostly autobiographical ("Guy de Maupassant", "The Awakening", etc.). At this time, the writer also completed the film script “Wandering Stars” based on the prose of Sholom Aleichem.

"Cavalry"

In the mid-1920s, his entry into literature was sensational. The short stories "Cavalry" created by Babel were distinguished by their extraordinary directness and sharpness in their depiction of the atrocities and bloody events of the Civil War, even for that time. At the same time, his works are characterized by a rare elegance of words and sophistication of style. Babel, whose biography indicates that he was familiar with the Civil War first-hand, conveys its bloody events with particular sharpness. They involved three cultural layers that had hardly intersected in Russian history before. It's about about Jews, Russian intelligentsia and people. The effect of this clash shapes the moral and art world Babel's prose, full of hope and suffering, insights and tragic mistakes. "Cavalry" immediately caused a very heated debate, in which different points of view collided. In particular, the commander of the First Cavalry S.M. Budyonny perceived this work as slander against the Reds. But A. Voronsky and M. Gorky believed that the depth of depiction of human destinies in the conflicts of the Civil War, truth, and not propaganda, was the main task of the writer.

"Odessa Stories"

Babel in his “Odessa Stories” depicted a romanticized Odessa Moldavian woman. Benya Krik, the “noble” bandit, became her soul. The book very colorfully, lyrically and ironically-pathetically presents the life of Odessa merchants and raiders, dreamers and sages. It is depicted as if it were a passing era. "Odessa Stories" (the play "Sunset" became a version of the plots of the second book) is one of the most significant events Russian literature mid-20s of the last century. They had a great influence on the work of a number of writers, including I. Ilf and E. Petrov.

Traveling around the USSR and foreign trips

Since 1925, Isaac Emmanuilovich has traveled a lot around the USSR (southern Russia, Kyiv, Leningrad). He collects materials about the recent events of the Civil War, serves as secretary of the village council in the village of Molodenovo, located on the Moscow River. In the summer of 1927, Babel went abroad for the first time. His biography is marked first after which - to Berlin. From this time on, trips abroad became almost annual until 1936. In 1935, Isaac Emmanuilovich presented a report in defense of culture at the Paris Writers' Congress.

Meetings with Gorky

Babel met many times with Maxim Gorky, who closely followed his work and supported him in every possible way. After Gorky’s son died, Alexey Maksimovich invited Isaac Emmanuilovich to his place in Gorki. Here he lived from May to June 1934. That same year, in August, Babel gave a speech during the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers.

Babel: biography and creativity of the second half of the 1930s.

In the second half of the 1930s, the work of Isaac Emmanuilovich was mainly associated with literary processing of the works of other writers. In particular, Babel worked on the following film scripts: based on the work “How the Steel Was Tempered” by N. Ostrovsky, based on the poem “The Thought about Opanas” by Vs. Bagritsky, as well as on the script for a film about Maxim Gorky. He also created an adaptation of Turgenev’s work for cinema. We are talking about the script for a film called “Bezhin Meadow” for S.M. Eisenstein. This film, it must be said, was banned and destroyed as “ideologically vicious.” However, this did not break such a writer as Isaac Babel. His biography and work indicate that he did not pursue fame.

In 1937, Isaac Emmanuilovich announced in the press that he had completed work on a play about G. Kotovsky, and two years later - on the script for “Old Square”. During the writer's lifetime, however, none of these works were published. In the fall of 1936, the last collection of his stories was published. Last performance Babel in print are New Year's wishes, which were published on December 31, 1938 in the Literary Gazette.

Arrest, execution and rehabilitation

Babel’s biography by date continues with the fact that on May 15, 1939, a search was carried out at Isaac Emmanuilovich’s Moscow apartment, as well as at his dacha located in Peredelkino (where he was at that time). During the search, 24 folders with his manuscripts were seized. Subsequently, they were not found in the FSK archives. On June 29-30, after a series of continuous interrogations, Babel gave evidence. He subsequently renounced them in several statements. In a speech delivered at the trial, Isaac Emmanuilovich asked to be given the opportunity to complete his last works. However, he was not destined to do this. Isaac Emmanuilovich was sentenced to death. On January 27, 1940, Babel was executed. His short biography ends with the fact that the writer’s body was cremated on the same day in the Donskoy Monastery.

After 14 years, in 1954, Isaac Emmanuilovich was completely rehabilitated, since no crime was found in his actions. After this, the controversy surrounding his fate and creativity resumed. They don't stop to this day. Babel, whose biography and work we have reviewed, is a writer whose works are certainly worth getting acquainted with.

original surname Bobel; birth name - Isaac Manyevich Bobel

Russian Soviet writer, translator, screenwriter and playwright, journalist, war correspondent

Isaac Babel

short biography

Babel’s biography has a number of gaps and inaccuracies due to the fact that the corresponding notes left by the writer himself are largely embellished, altered, or even “pure fiction” in accordance with artistic design or the political dictates of the times.

Date of Birth

There is a discrepancy in various sources regarding the exact date of birth of the future writer. In Brief literary encyclopedia Babel's date of birth is July 1 according to the old style, and July 13 according to the new style. However, the metric book of the office of the Odessa city rabbi indicates the date of birth according to the old style - June 30. Babel indicated the same birthday, June 30, in his handwritten autobiography of 1915, preserved in the documents of the Kyiv Commercial Institute. “A short chronicle of the life and work of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel”, compiled by Usher Moiseevich Spector (see: Babel I. Awakening. Tbilisi, 1989. P.491), contains an error in translating the old style into the new: here June 30th Art. Art. corresponds to July 13 A.D. Art., and it should be July 12th. It must be assumed that a similar error has become widespread in reference literature.

Childhood

Born in Odessa on Moldavanka, the third child in the family of merchant Many Itskovich Bobel ( Emmanuel (Manus, Mane) Isaakovich Babel, 1864-1924), originally from Skvira, Kyiv province, and Feiga ( Fani) Aronovna Bobel (née Schwechwel). The family lived in a house on the corner of Dalnitskaya and Balkovskaya streets. In the directory “All Russia” for 1911, Emmanuel Isaakovich Babel is listed as the owner of a store selling agricultural equipment, located at number 17 on Richelieu Street.

Not late autumn In 1895, the family moved to Nikolaev, Kherson province, where I. E. Babel lived until he was 11 years old. In November 1903, he entered the first intake of the preparatory class of the Nikolaev Commercial School named after S. Yu. Witte, which opened on December 9 of the same year, but having passed three oral exams (on the Law of God, the Russian language and arithmetic) with straight marks, he was not accepted “for lack of vacancy." After his father submitted a request for a re-test on April 20, 1904, Isaac Babel took the exams again in August and, based on the test results, was enrolled in the first class, and on May 3, 1905, transferred to the second. According to the autobiography of I. E. Babel, in addition to traditional disciplines, he privately studied the Hebrew language, the Bible and the Talmud.

Youth and early creativity

Fluent in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian and French, Babel wrote his first works in French, but they have not survived.

In 1911, having received a certificate of completion from the Odessa Commercial School, he became a student at the Kyiv Commercial Institute, where he studied at the economics department under his original name Bobel; received his diploma in 1917. During the period of study, he first published his work - the story “Old Shloime” - in the Kiev weekly illustrated magazine “Lights” (1913, signed “I. Babel”). In Kyiv, student Babel met Evgenia Borisovna Gronfain, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, who was legally married to him in 1919.

In 1916, he went to Petrograd, without, according to his own recollections, the right to do so, since Jews were prohibited from settling in the capitals (researchers discovered a document issued by the Petrograd police, which allowed Babel to live in the city only while studying at a higher education institution). educational institution). He managed to immediately enroll in the fourth year of the law faculty of the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute.

In the same year, Babel met M. Gorky, who published the stories “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna” and “Mama, Rimma and Alla” in the journal “Chronicle”. They attracted attention, and Babel was going to be tried for pornography (Article 1001), as well as two more articles - “blasphemy and an attempt to overthrow the existing system,” which was prevented by the events of 1917. On the advice of M. Gorky, Babel “went into the public eye” and changed several professions. The publication in the Chronicle was followed by publications in the Journal of Journals (1916) and Novaya Zhizn (1918).

In the fall of 1917, Babel, having served for several months as a private on the Romanian front, deserted and made his way to Petrograd, where at the beginning of 1918 he went to work as a translator in the foreign department of the Cheka, and then in the People's Commissariat for Education and food expeditions. Published in the newspaper “New Life”. In the spring of 1920, on the recommendation of Mikhail Koltsov, under the name Kirill Vasilievich Lyutov was sent to the 1st Cavalry Army under the command of Budyonny as a war correspondent for Yug-ROST, and was a fighter and political worker there. In the ranks of the 1st Cavalry he became a member Soviet-Polish War 1920. The writer kept notes (“Cavalry Diary,” 1920), which served as the basis for the future collection of stories “Cavalry.” Published in the newspaper of the Political Department of the 1st Cavalry “Red Cavalryman”.

Later he worked in the Odessa Provincial Committee, was the producing editor of the 7th Soviet printing house (Pushkinskaya St., 18), and a reporter in Tiflis and Odessa, at the State Publishing House of Ukraine. According to the myth he himself voiced in his autobiography, he did not write during these years, although it was then that he began to create the cycle of “Odessa Stories.” In 1922, Babel collaborated with the Tiflis newspaper “Zarya Vostoka” and traveled as a correspondent to Adjara and Abkhazia.

Period of literary activity

The cycle “On the Field of Honor” was published in the January issue of the Odessa magazine “Lava” for 1920. In June 1921, Babel’s story “The King” was first published in the popular Odessa newspaper “Sailor”, which became evidence of the writer’s creative maturity. In 1923-1924, the magazines “Lef”, “Krasnaya Nov” and other publications published a number of his stories, which later formed the cycles “Cavalry” and “Odessa Stories”. Babel immediately received wide recognition as a brilliant master of words. His first book, “Stories,” was published in 1925 by the Ogonyok publishing house. In 1926, the first edition of the collection “Cavalry” was published, which was reprinted many times in subsequent years.

“To the thunder of guns, to the ringing of sabers, Babel was born from Zoshchenko”
(epigram, quoted from V. Kataev)

In the stories of the “Cavalry” series, the intelligent author-narrator Kirill Lyutov describes the violence and cruelty of the Red Army soldiers with mixed feelings of horror and admiration. In “Odessa Stories,” Babel depicts in a romantic way the life of Jewish criminals of the early 20th century, finding exotic features and strong characters in the everyday life of thieves, raiders, as well as artisans and small traders. The most memorable hero of these stories is the Jewish raider Benya Krik (his prototype is the legendary Mishka Yaponchik), in the words of the “Jewish Encyclopedia” - the embodiment of Babel’s dream of a Jew who can stand up for himself.

A master of the short story, Babel strives for laconicism and accuracy, combining enormous temperament with external dispassion in the images of his characters, plot collisions and descriptions. The flowery, metaphor-laden language of his early stories is later replaced by a strict and restrained narrative style.

In the spring of 1924, Babel was in Odessa, where his father died on March 2 of the same year, after which he finally settled in Moscow with his mother and sister.

In 1926, he edited a two-volume collection of Sholem Aleichem’s works in Russian translations, and the following year he adapted Sholem Aleichem’s novel “Wandering Stars” for a film production.

In 1927, he took part in the collective novel “Big Fires,” published in the magazine “Ogonyok.”

In 1928, Babel published the play "Sunset". The basis for the play was the unpublished story “Sunset,” which he began in 1923-1924. In 1927, “Sunset” was staged by two theaters in Odessa - Russian and Ukrainian, but the 1928 production at the Moscow Art Theater was unsuccessful, and the play was closed after 12 performances. The play was criticized for its "idealization of hooliganism" and its "tendency to the bourgeois underground."

In 1935 he published the play "Maria". Babel also wrote several scripts and collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein.

With the tightening of censorship and the advent of the era of the Great Terror, Babel published less and less. He was engaged in translations from the Yiddish language. Despite his doubts about what was happening, he did not emigrate, although he had such an opportunity. From September 1927 to October 1928 and from September 1932 to August 1933 he lived abroad (France, Belgium, Italy). In 1935 - the last trip abroad to the anti-fascist writers' congress.

Delegate to the First Congress of Writers of the USSR (1934).

Discussion about "Cavalry"

The very first publications of the stories in the “Cavalry” series were in clear contrast with the revolutionary propaganda of that time, which created heroic myths about the Red Army soldiers. Babel had ill-wishers: for example, Semyon Budyonny was furious with the way Babel described the life and way of life of the cavalrymen, and in his article “Babel’s Babism in Krasnaya Novy” (1924) called him “a literary degenerate.” In the same year, 1924, Kliment Voroshilov complained to Dmitry Manuilsky, a member of the Central Committee and later the head of the Comintern, that the style of the work about the Cavalry was “unacceptable.” Stalin believed that Babel wrote about “things that he did not understand.” Viktor Shklovsky put it in a peculiar way: “Babel saw Russia as a French writer seconded to Napoleon’s army could see it.” But Babel was under the patronage of Maxim Gorky, which guaranteed the publication of the book “Cavalry.” In response to Budyonny’s attacks, Gorky stated: “Attentive reader, I don’t find anything “cartoonish and libelous” in Babel’s book, on the contrary: his book aroused both love and respect for the “Cavalry” soldiers in me, showing them truly as heroes, - fearless, they deeply feel the greatness of their struggle.” The discussion continued until 1928.

Collectivization in Ukraine

It is known that Babel collected material for a novel about collectivization. However, only one story “Gapa Guzhva” was published (with the subtitle “The first chapter from the book “Great Krinitsa”) and another one was announced, but never published (the second story from the planned book “Great Krinitsa” - “Kolyvushka” , written in 1930 - was published posthumously); working materials for the novel were confiscated when the writer was arrested.

V.I. Druzhbinsky: “In December 1929, Babel wrote criticism to Vyacheslav Polonsky: “ Dear V.P. I’m looking for a reason to go to Kiev, and from there to areas of complete collectivization, in order to immediately describe this event...“Leaving Kyiv for Boryspil on February 16, 1930, he wrote to his family: “ ...Now there is essentially a complete transformation of the village and rural life... an event that, in terms of interest and importance, surpasses everything that we have seen in our time“. Another letter: “I. Livshits. Boryspil. 20.02.30. I spend the night in the Boryspil region of complete collectivization. Hochst interessant. Tomorrow I am going to go live in one of the most remote villages... I.B.“ From Boryspil Babel moved to the village of Velikaya Staritsa, where he lived in the house of teacher Kirill Menzhegi for almost two months. Staying in this village left the writer, as he told his family, “ one of the sharpest memories of my entire life - to this very minute I wake up in sticky sweat"". And further: “A year later, Isaac Emmanuilovich wrote to his future wife Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova: “ ...During the Civil Brawl I saw a lot of humiliation, trampling and destruction of a person as such, but it was all physical humiliation, trampling and destruction. Here, near Kiev, a good, wise and strong person is turned into a homeless, mangy and disgusting dog, which everyone shuns like the plague. Not even a dog, but something not a mammal...“».

According to S.I. Lipkin, returning to Moscow in April 1930, Babel told his friend E.G. Bagritsky: “Would you believe it, Eduard Georgievich, I have now learned to calmly watch how people are shot.” According to V.V. Kozhinov, collectivization delighted him. At the beginning of 1931, Babel again went to those places, and in December 1933 of the famine year he wrote in a letter from the village of Prishibskaya to his sister in Brussels: “The transition to collective farms occurred with friction, there was a need, but now everything is developing with extraordinary brilliance. In a year or two we will have prosperity that will eclipse everything that these villages saw in the past, and they lived comfortably. The collective farm movement has made decisive progress this year, and now truly boundless prospects are opening up, the land is being transformed. I don’t know how long I’ll stay here. Witness new relationships and economic forms- interesting and necessary".

On the contrary, according to the memoirs of M. Ya. Makotinsky (in whose Kyiv apartment the writer lived during these trips), in 1930 Babel returned from the Kyiv region excited: “You can’t imagine! It’s indescribable what I observed in the village! And not in just one village! It’s impossible to describe! I do not understand anything!" “It turns out,” writes M. Makotinsky, “Babel encountered excesses in collectivization, which later received the name “dizziness from success.” Writes a researcher of I. Babel’s creativity, professor at Stanford University G. M. Freidin: “According to Babel’s friend Ilya Lvovich Slonim, who shared his memories with the author of this article in the 1960s, Babel, returning from another trip to the collectivization areas, said him that what was happening in the village was much worse than what he had seen during the civil war. Babel’s stories about collectivization that have come down to us, “Gapa Guzhva” and “Kolyvushka,” can serve as indirect confirmation of this evidence.”

The name of the village of Velikaya Staritsa, in which the writer lived, was replaced by Velikaya Krinitsa in preparation for the publication of the story “Gapa Guzhva”. Sending the corrected manuscript of “Gaps of Guzhva” to V. Polonsky in October 1931, Babel, who anticipated a possible reaction to the publication, wrote: “I had to change the name of the village to avoid excessive vilification.”

In an attempt to break the creative silence, in the early 1930s I. E. Babel also traveled to Kabardino-Balkaria, Molodenovo near Moscow, Donbass and Dneprostroy.

Arrest and execution

In the summer of 1938, the Presidium of the USSR Writers' Union approved Babel as a member of the editorial board of the State Publishing House fiction(GIHL).

During interrogations, Babel was tortured. He was forced to admit his connection with the Trotskyists, as well as their pernicious influence on his work and the fact that, supposedly guided by their instructions, he deliberately distorted reality and belittled the role of the party. The writer also “confirmed” that he had “anti-Soviet conversations” among other writers, artists and film directors (Yu. Olesha, V. Kataev, S. Mikhoels, G. Alexandrov, S. Eisenstein), and “spyed” in favor of France. From the protocol:

Babel testified that in 1933, through Ilya Ehrenburg, he established espionage connections with the French writer Andre Malraux, to whom he transmitted information about the state of the Air Fleet.

He was sentenced to capital punishment by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and was shot the next day, January 27, 1940. The execution list was signed by the Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, I.V. Stalin. The writer's ashes are buried in Common grave No. 1 Donskoye Cemetery.

From 1939 to 1955, Babel's name was removed from Soviet literature. In 1954 he was posthumously rehabilitated. With the active assistance of Konstantin Paustovsky, who knew Babel well and left warm memories of him, after 1956 Babel was returned to Soviet literature. In 1957, the collection “Favorites” was published with a foreword by Ilya Ehrenburg, who called Isaac Babel one of the outstanding writers of the 20th century, a brilliant stylist and master of the short story.

Family

The writer's father died in 1924, after which Babel's mother and his sister Maria and her husband emigrated and lived in Belgium.

His wife, artist Evgenia Borisovna Gronfain, went to France in 1925.
- Daughter Natalya (1929-2005, married to American literary critic Natalie Brown, under whose editorship the complete works of Isaac Babel were published in English).
Babel’s second (common-law) wife, with whom he became close after breaking up with Evgenia, is actress Tamara Vladimirovna Kashirina (later Ivanova, wife of the writer Vsevolod Ivanov);
- Their son, named Emmanuel (1926-2000, was known in the Khrushchev era as the artist Mikhail Ivanov, a member of the “Group of Nine”), was brought up in the family of his stepfather V.V. Ivanov, considering himself his son. After breaking up with Kashirina, Babel, who traveled abroad, was reunited for some time with his legal wife, who gave birth to a daughter, Natalya.

Babel’s last wife, Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova, gave birth to his daughter Lydia:
- Daughter Lydia (1937), has lived in the USA since 1996. She died in September 2010.
  - The son of Lydia Isaakovna and the grandson of Babel is Andrei Malaev-Babel, director and theater teacher, professor at Florida State University (Sarasota, USA).

Literary influence

The legacy of the repressed Babel in some ways shared his fate. He began to be published again only after his “posthumous rehabilitation” in the 1950s, and his works were heavily censored. The writer’s daughter, American citizen Natalie Babel Brown, 1929-2005, managed to collect hard-to-find and unpublished works and publish them with commentaries (“The Complete Works of Isaac Babel”, 2002).

Babel's works aroused interest all over the world. Thus, Jorge Luis Borges wrote about “Cavalry” in his youth:

His style of music contrasts with the almost unspeakable brutality of some scenes.

Study of life and creativity

One of the first researchers of I. E. Babel’s work was I. A. Smirin and Kharkov literary critic and theater critic L. Ya. Livshits.
After the posthumous rehabilitation of the writer, an essay on his work was prepared by the Moscow literary scholar and critic F. M. Levin.
In late Soviet and early post-Soviet times life path and the literary heritage of the writer was most actively studied by the Moscow engineer, collector of miniature books Usher Moiseevich Spektor (died in 1993).
Literary critic Elena Iosifovna Pogorelskaya, an employee of the State Literary Museum (Moscow), is the author of many articles and publications dedicated to the life, work and epistolary heritage of Babel.
Creative biography of Babel and the circumstances of his tragic death long time investigated by literary critic S. N. Povartsov (Omsk).
Local historian A. Yu. Rosenboim (Rostislav Aleksandrov) dedicated a number of publications to the Odessa pages of Babel’s life, and the historian M. B. Kalnitsky dedicated them to the Kyiv pages.
In April 1989, the “First Babel Readings” took place in Odessa.

Memory

Back in 1968, a group of climbers from Odessa, having conquered an unnamed peak 6007 m high in the Pamirs, named it Babel Peak (the name was approved two years later).
In 1989, one of the streets of Moldavanka was named in honor of Babel.

- The grand opening of the monument to the writer in Odessa took place on September 4, 2011. The author of the monument is People's Artist of the Russian Federation Georgy Frangulyan. The monument was erected at the intersection of Zhukovsky and Rishelievskaya streets, opposite the house where he once lived. The sculptural composition represents the figure of a writer sitting on the steps and a rolling wheel on which “Isaac Babel” is inscribed. The area near the monument is paved with traditional Odessa paving stones. The monument was built on the initiative of the World Club of Odessa residents with funds from sponsors from all over the world.
- In the city of Odessa, on a house located at st. Rishelevskaya 17, where the writer lived, a memorial plaque was installed. The house itself is an architectural monument, built at the beginning of the 20th century according to the design of Samuel Galperson. Initially, the building belonged to engineer S. Reich and was an apartment building. Babel's family settled here after returning from Nikolaev in 1905. Their apartment No. 10 was on the fourth floor, the balcony overlooked Richelieu Street. The apartment was owned by the writer’s father, Emmanuel Babel, an entrepreneur who had an office selling agricultural machines. The writer’s grandmother Mindlya Aronovna lived there until her death in 1913, who became the heroine of one of early works writer "Childhood. By Grandma". In 2015, work on a major reconstruction of this building was completed. The courtyard is decorated with images of Odessa sights and scenes from its history.
- The asteroid (5808) Babel, discovered by astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory on August 27, 1987, is named in honor of I. E. Babel.

Literary heritage

In total, Babel wrote about 80 stories, collected in collections, two plays and five film scripts.

A series of articles “Diary” (1918) about work in the Cheka and Narkompros.
A series of essays “On the Field of Honor” (1920) based on the front-line notes of French officers.
"Cavalry Diary of 1920"
Collection "Cavalry" (1926), reprint. 1933.
Jewish Stories (1927).
"Odessa Stories" (1931).
The play "Sunset" (1928).
The play "Maria" (1935).
The unfinished novel “Great Krinitsa”, from which only the first chapter “Gapa Guzhva” (“New World”, No. 10, 1931) was published.
fragment of the story “The Jewish Woman” (published in 1968).
Cavalry diary of 1920.

Editions of essays

Lyubka Kozak. - M., Ogonyok, 1925
Stories. - M., Ogonyok, 1925. - 32 p.
Stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1925. - 112 p.
Benya Krik. - M., Circle, 1926
Libretto of the film "Benya Krik". Virob of the Odessa factory VUFKU 1926 rock. Kyiv, 1926. - 8 p. - 5000 copies.
Wandering stars. - M., Kinoprint, 1926
The story of my dovecote. - M.-L., ZIF, 1926. - 80 p.
Cavalry. - M.-L., GIZ, 1926
Stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1926
The story of my dovecote. - Paris, 1927
The story of my dovecote. - M.-L., ZIF, 1927
Cavalry. - M.-L., GIZ, 1927
Cavalry. - M., FOSP, 1927
The end of St. Hypatia. - M.-L., ZIF, 1927
Stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1927 - 64 p.
Stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1927. - 128 p.
Sunset. - M., “Circle”, 1928. - 96 pp., 5,000 copies.
Cavalry.- M.-L., GIZ, 1928
The story of my dovecote. - M., GIZ, 1930
Cavalry. - M.-L., GIZ, 1930
Odessa stories. - M., OGIZ-GIHL, 1931. - 144 pp., 10,000 copies.
Cavalry. - M., OGIZ-GIHL, 1931
Stories. - M., Federation, 1932
Cavalry. - M., GIHL, 1933
Stories. - M., Goslitizdat, 1934
Maria. - M., Goslitizdat, 1935. - 66 pp., 3,000 copies.
Stories. - M., Goslitizdat, 1935
Selected stories. - M., 1936, 2008. - 40 pp., 40,000 copies. (Library "Ogonyok").
Stories. - M., Goslitizdat, 1936
Favorites / Preface I. Ehrenburg. - M., Goslitizdat, 1957.
Favorites / Join Art. L. Pole. - M., Fiction, 1966.
Favorites / Preface I. Ehrenburg. - Kemerovo, 1966
Cavalry. Selected works/ Afterword V. Zvinyatskovsky; Ill. G. Garmidera. - K.: Dnipro, 1989. - 350 p.
Awakening: Essays. Stories. Film story. Play / Comp., prepared. texts, intro. article, note, chronological index by W. M. Spector. - Tbilisi: Merani, 1989. - 432 p.
Favorites / Comp., preface. and comment. V. Ya. Vakulenko. - Frunze: Adabiyat, 1990. - 672 p.
Cavalry / Comp. A.N. Pirozhkova-Babel/. Entered: Cavalry. Cavalry diary of 1920. Odessa stories. Journalism. Stories from different years. Memoirs, portraits, articles. - M., Pravda (Znamya magazine library), 1990. 480 pp. Circulation 400 thousand copies.
Works: In 2 vols. - M.: IHL, 1990 / comp. A. Pirozhkova, entry. Art. G. Beloy, approx. S. Povartsova, reprint vol. 1 - 1991, vol. 2 - 1992
Odessa stories. - Odessa: Voluntary Society of Book Lovers. 1991, p.221, format 93×67 mm, circulation 20,000 copies, hardcover.
Works in two volumes. M., Terra, 1996., 15,000 copies.
Diary 1920 (cavalry). - M.: MIC, 2000.
Cavalry I.E. Babel. - Moscow: Children's literature, 2001.
Collected works: In 2 volumes - M., 2002.
Collected works: In 4 volumes / Comp., notes, intro. Art. I. N. Sukhikh. M.: Time, 2006.
Collected works: In 3 volumes / Comp., approx. entry Art. I. N. Sukhikh. St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012. - 2,000 copies.
Stories / Comp., prepared. texts, afterword, commentary. E. I. Pogorelskaya. St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2014. - 1000 copies.
Letters to a friend: From the archives of I. L. Livshits / Comp., comp. texts and comments. E. Pogorelskaya. M.: Three squares, 2007. - 3000 copies.

Performances

The play “Sunset,” which was shown on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater 2 during the author’s lifetime (1928), was again staged by many theaters during perestroika and post-Soviet times, including.

Makhno Nestor Ivanovich (1888-1934), Ukrainian military and political figure, one of the leaders of the anarchist movement during the Civil War. Born October 27 (November 8), 1888 in the village. Gulyaypole, Aleksandrovsky district, Ekaterinoslav province, in a poor peasant family; father, I.R. Makhno was a coachman. He graduated from the parochial school (1900). From the age of seven he was forced to go to work as a shepherd for rich farmers; later he worked as a laborer for landowners and German colonists. From 1904 he worked as a laborer at an iron foundry in Gulyai-Polye; played in the factory theater group.

In the fall of 1906 he joined the anarchists and joined the youth branch of the Ukrainian group of anarchist-communists (grain volunteers). Participant in several gang attacks and terrorist attacks; was arrested twice. Accused of the murder of an official of the local military government, he was sentenced in 1910 to death penalty by hanging, replaced by hard labor due to his minority at the time of the crime (1908). While in the Butyrka convict prison, he was engaged in self-education; regularly came into conflict with the prison administration.

These “Ukrainians” did not understand one simple truth: that the freedom and independence of Ukraine are compatible only with the freedom and independence of the working people inhabiting it, without whom Ukraine is nothing...
(May 1918)

Makhno Nestor Ivanovich

(15) March 1917, after the February Revolution, he was released and left for Gulyai-Polye. Participated in the re-establishment of the Peasant Union; in April 1917 he was unanimously elected chairman of his local committee. He advocated ending the war and transferring land for use to peasants without ransom. In order to acquire funds for the purchase of weapons, he resorted to the favorite method of anarchists - expropriations. In July, he proclaimed himself commissar of the Gulyai-Polye region. Delegate to the Ekaterinoslav Congress of Soviets of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies (August 1917); supported his decision to reorganize all branches of the Peasant Union into peasant councils.

He strongly condemned the anti-government rebellion of General L.G. Kornilov and headed the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. He opposed the Provisional Government and rejected the idea of convening Constituent Assembly. In August-October, he carried out the confiscation of landowners' lands in the Aleksandrovsky district, which were transferred to the jurisdiction of land committees; transferred control over enterprises into the hands of workers.

He accepted the October Revolution ambiguously: on the one hand, he welcomed the destruction of the old state system, on the other, he considered the power of the Bolsheviks to be anti-people (anti-peasant). At the same time, he called for a fight against Ukrainian nationalists and the Ukrainian People's Republic created by them. Supported the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. After German occupation Ukraine created in April 1918 in the Gulyai-Polye region a rebel detachment (free Gulyai-Polye battalion), which waged a guerrilla war with German and Ukrainian government units; In retaliation, the authorities killed his older brother and burned his mother's house. At the end of April 1918 he was forced to retreat to Taganrog and disband the detachment. In May 1918 he arrived in Moscow; held negotiations with anarchist leaders and Bolshevik leaders (V.I. Lenin and Ya.M. Sverdlov).

In August he returned to Ukraine, where he again organized several partisan formations to fight the Germans and the regime of Hetman P.P. Skoropadsky. By the end of November, the number of these formations had increased to six thousand people. He made daring raids on rich German economies and landowners' estates, dealt with the occupiers and hetman officers, and at the same time forbade robbing peasants and organizing Jewish pogroms.

After the Germans left Ukraine (November 1918) and the fall of Skoropadsky (December 1919), he refused to recognize the power of the Ukrainian Directory. When its armed forces under the command of S.V. Petliura occupied Yekaterinoslav and dispersed the provincial council, it entered into an agreement with the Red Army on joint actions against the Directory. At the end of December 1918, he defeated the seven-thousand-strong Petliura garrison of Yekaterinoslav. A few days later, the troops of the Directory again captured the city; however, the Makhnovists retreated and fortified themselves in the Gulyai-Polye area.

By that time, this territory had turned into a kind of “enclave of freedom”, where Makhno tried to implement the anarcho-communist idea of society as a “free federation” of self-governing communes, not knowing any class or national differences. Pursuing the exploiters (landowners, factory owners, bankers, speculators) and their accomplices (officials, officers), he at the same time made efforts to establish a normal life for the working people (workers and peasants); On his initiative, children's communes were created, schools, hospitals, workshops were opened, and theatrical performances were organized.

The invasion of Denikin’s troops into the territory of Ukraine in January-February 1919 created an immediate threat to Gulyai-Polye, which forced Makhno to agree to the operational subordination of his units to the Red Army as the 3rd separate brigade of the Trans-Dnieper Division. In the spring of 1919 he fought with the whites in the Mariupol-Volnovakha sector. In April, his relations with the Bolsheviks deteriorated due to their anti-Makhnovist propaganda campaign. On May 19, he was defeated by Denikin’s troops and fled with the remnants of his brigade to Gulyai-Polye. On May 29, in response to the decision of the Workers' and Peasants' Defense Council of Ukraine to liquidate the Makhnovshchina, he broke the alliance with the Bolsheviks. In June, when the Whites, despite heroic defense, captured Gulyai-Polye, he took refuge in the surrounding forests. In July he teamed up with N.A. Grigoriev, a red commander who in May launched a rebellion against Soviet power; On July 27, he and his entire staff were shot; Some of the Grigorievites remained with the Makhnovists.

He returned to Odessa with his parents.

At the insistence of his father, he studied the Hebrew language and Jewish holy books, took violin lessons from the famous musician Pyotr Stolyarsky, and participated in amateur theater performances.

To the same period, researchers of the writer’s work attribute the appearance of Babel’s first unsurvived student stories, which he wrote in French.

In 1911 he graduated from the Odessa Commercial School.

In 1915, in St. Petersburg, he immediately entered the fourth year of the law faculty of the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute, where he did not complete his studies.

In 1916 he graduated with honors from the economics department of the Kyiv Commercial Institute.

The writer's literary debut took place in February 1913 in the Kiev magazine "Ogni", where the story "Old Shloime" was published.

In 1916, Babel’s stories in Russian “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna” and “Mama, Rimma and Alla” were published in Maxim Gorky’s magazine “Chronicle”. In the Petrograd "Journal of Journals" notes "My sheets" appeared.

In 1954, Isaac Babel was posthumously rehabilitated.

With the active assistance of Konstantin Paustovsky, he was returned to Soviet literature. In 1957, a collection of the writer’s works, carefully censored, was published. From 1967 until the mid-1980s, Babel's works were not republished.

The work of Isaac Babel had a huge influence on the writers of the so-called “South Russian school” (Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov, Yuri Olesha, Eduard Bagritsky, Valentin Kataev, Konstantin Paustovsky, Mikhail Svetlov), his books have been translated into many foreign languages.

On September 4, 2011, a monument to the writer was unveiled in Odessa on the corner of Rishelievskaya and Zhukovsky streets.

The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources

Isaac Babel

original surname Bobel; birth name - Isaac Manyevich Bobel

Russian Soviet writer, translator, screenwriter and playwright, journalist, war correspondent

short biography

Babel’s biography has a number of gaps and inaccuracies due to the fact that the corresponding notes left by the writer himself are largely embellished, altered, or even “pure fiction” in accordance with the artistic design or political dictates of the time.

Date of Birth

There is a discrepancy in various sources regarding the exact date of birth of the future writer. The Brief Literary Encyclopedia gives Babel's date of birth as July 1 according to the old style, and July 13 according to the new style. However, the metric book of the office of the Odessa city rabbi indicates the date of birth according to the old style - June 30. Babel indicated the same birthday, June 30, in his handwritten autobiography of 1915, preserved in the documents of the Kyiv Commercial Institute. “A short chronicle of the life and work of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel”, compiled by Usher Moiseevich Spector (see: Babel I. Awakening. Tbilisi, 1989. P.491), contains an error in translating the old style into the new: here June 30th Art. Art. corresponds to July 13 A.D. Art., and it should be July 12th. It must be assumed that a similar error has become widespread in reference literature.

Childhood

No later than the fall of 1895, the family moved to Nikolaev, Kherson province, where I. E. Babel lived until he was 11 years old. In November 1903, he entered the first intake of the preparatory class of the Nikolaev Commercial School named after S. Yu. Witte, which opened on December 9 of the same year, but having passed three oral exams (on the Law of God, the Russian language and arithmetic) with straight marks, he was not accepted “for lack of vacancy." After his father submitted a request for a re-test on April 20, 1904, Isaac Babel took the exams again in August and, based on the test results, was enrolled in the first class, and on May 3, 1905, transferred to the second. According to the autobiography of I. E. Babel, in addition to traditional disciplines, he privately studied the Hebrew language, the Bible and the Talmud.

Youth and early creativity

Fluent in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian and French, Babel wrote his first works in French, but they have not survived.

In 1916, he went to Petrograd, without, according to his own recollections, the right to do so, since Jews were prohibited from settling in the capitals (researchers discovered a document issued by the Petrograd police, which allowed Babel to live in the city only while studying at higher education establishment). He managed to immediately enroll in the fourth year of the law faculty of the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute.

In the fall of 1917, Babel, having served for several months as a private on the Romanian front, deserted and made his way to Petrograd, where at the beginning of 1918 he went to work as a translator in the foreign department of the Cheka, and then in the People's Commissariat for Education and food expeditions. Published in the newspaper “New Life”. In the spring of 1920, on the recommendation of Mikhail Koltsov, under the name Kirill Vasilievich Lyutov was sent to the 1st Cavalry Army under the command of Budyonny as a war correspondent for Yug-ROST, and was a fighter and political worker there. In the ranks of the 1st Cavalry he became a participant in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920. The writer kept notes (“Cavalry Diary,” 1920), which served as the basis for the future collection of stories “Cavalry.” Published in the newspaper of the Political Department of the 1st Cavalry “Red Cavalryman”.

Period of literary activity

“To the thunder of guns, to the ringing of sabers, Babel was born from Zoshchenko”
(epigram, quoted from V. Kataev)

In the spring of 1924, Babel was in Odessa, where his father died on March 2 of the same year, after which he finally settled in Moscow with his mother and sister.

In 1927, he took part in the collective novel “Big Fires,” published in the magazine “Ogonyok.”

In 1935 he published the play "Maria". Babel also wrote several scripts and collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein.

Delegate to the First Congress of Writers of the USSR (1934).

Discussion about "Cavalry"

Collectivization in Ukraine

According to S.I. Lipkin, returning to Moscow in April 1930, Babel told his friend E.G. Bagritsky: “Would you believe it, Eduard Georgievich, I have now learned to calmly watch how people are shot.” According to V.V. Kozhinov, collectivization delighted him. At the beginning of 1931, Babel again went to those places, and in December 1933 of the famine year he wrote in a letter from the village of Prishibskaya to his sister in Brussels: “The transition to collective farms occurred with friction, there was a need, but now everything is developing with extraordinary brilliance. In a year or two we will have prosperity that will eclipse everything that these villages saw in the past, and they lived comfortably. The collective farm movement has made decisive progress this year, and now truly boundless prospects are opening up, the land is being transformed. I don’t know how long I’ll stay here. Witnessing new relationships and economic forms is interesting and necessary.”.

In an attempt to break the creative silence, in the early 1930s I. E. Babel also traveled to Kabardino-Balkaria, Molodenovo near Moscow, Donbass and Dneprostroy.

Arrest and execution

In the summer of 1938, the Presidium of the USSR Writers' Union approved Babel as a member of the editorial board of the State Publishing House of Fiction (GIHL).

Babel testified that in 1933, through Ilya Ehrenburg, he established espionage connections with the French writer Andre Malraux, to whom he transmitted information about the state of the Air Fleet.

He was sentenced to capital punishment by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and was shot the next day, January 27, 1940. The execution list was signed by the Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, I.V. Stalin. The writer’s ashes are buried in Common Grave No. 1 of the Donskoye Cemetery.

Family

The writer's father died in 1924, after which Babel's mother and his sister Maria and her husband emigrated and lived in Belgium.

His wife, artist Evgenia Borisovna Gronfain, went to France in 1925.
- Daughter Natalya (1929-2005, married to American literary critic Natalie Brown, under whose editorship the complete works of Isaac Babel were published in English).
Babel’s second (common-law) wife, with whom he became close after breaking up with Evgenia, is actress Tamara Vladimirovna Kashirina (later Ivanova, wife of the writer Vsevolod Ivanov);
- Their son, named Emmanuel (1926-2000, was known in the Khrushchev era as the artist Mikhail Ivanov, a member of the “Group of Nine”), was brought up in the family of his stepfather V.V. Ivanov, considering himself his son. After breaking up with Kashirina, Babel, who traveled abroad, was reunited for some time with his legal wife, who gave birth to a daughter, Natalya.

Babel’s last wife, Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova, gave birth to his daughter Lydia:
- Daughter Lydia (1937), has lived in the USA since 1996. She died in September 2010.
  - The son of Lydia Isaakovna and the grandson of Babel is Andrei Malaev-Babel, director and theater teacher, professor at Florida State University (Sarasota, USA).

Literary influence

Babel's works aroused interest all over the world. Thus, Jorge Luis Borges wrote about “Cavalry” in his youth:

His style of music contrasts with the almost unspeakable brutality of some scenes.

Study of life and creativity

One of the first researchers of I. E. Babel’s work was I. A. Smirin and Kharkov literary critic and theater critic L. Ya. Livshits.
After the posthumous rehabilitation of the writer, an essay on his work was prepared by the Moscow literary scholar and critic F. M. Levin.
In the late Soviet and early post-Soviet times, the life path and literary heritage of the writer was most actively studied by the Moscow engineer, collector of miniature books Usher Moiseevich Spektor (died 1993).
Literary critic Elena Iosifovna Pogorelskaya, an employee of the State Literary Museum (Moscow), is the author of many articles and publications dedicated to the life, work and epistolary heritage of Babel.
The creative biography of Babel and the circumstances of his tragic death have been studied for a long time by literary critic S. N. Povartsov (Omsk).
Local historian A. Yu. Rosenboim (Rostislav Aleksandrov) dedicated a number of publications to the Odessa pages of Babel’s life, and the historian M. B. Kalnitsky dedicated them to the Kyiv pages.
In April 1989, the “First Babel Readings” took place in Odessa.

Memory

Back in 1968, a group of climbers from Odessa, having conquered an unnamed peak 6007 m high in the Pamirs, named it Babel Peak (the name was approved two years later).
In 1989, one of the streets of Moldavanka was named in honor of Babel.

- The grand opening of the monument to the writer in Odessa took place on September 4, 2011. The author of the monument is People's Artist of the Russian Federation Georgy Frangulyan. The monument was erected at the intersection of Zhukovsky and Rishelievskaya streets, opposite the house where he once lived. The sculptural composition represents the figure of a writer sitting on the steps and a rolling wheel on which “Isaac Babel” is inscribed. The area near the monument is paved with traditional Odessa paving stones. The monument was built on the initiative of the World Club of Odessa residents with funds from sponsors from all over the world.
- In the city of Odessa, on a house located at st. Rishelevskaya 17, where the writer lived, a memorial plaque was installed. The house itself is an architectural monument, built at the beginning of the 20th century according to the design of Samuel Galperson. Initially, the building belonged to engineer S. Reich and was an apartment building. Babel's family settled here after returning from Nikolaev in 1905. Their apartment No. 10 was on the fourth floor, the balcony overlooked Richelieu Street. The apartment was owned by the writer’s father, Emmanuel Babel, an entrepreneur who had an office selling agricultural machines. The writer’s grandmother Mindlya Aronovna lived there until her death in 1913, who became the heroine of one of the writer’s early works, “Childhood. By Grandma". In 2015, work on a major reconstruction of this building was completed. The courtyard is decorated with images of Odessa sights and scenes from its history.
- The asteroid (5808) Babel, discovered by astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory on August 27, 1987, is named in honor of I. E. Babel.

Literary heritage

In total, Babel wrote about 80 stories, collected in collections, two plays and five film scripts.

A series of articles “Diary” (1918) about work in the Cheka and Narkompros.
A series of essays “On the Field of Honor” (1920) based on the front-line notes of French officers.
"Cavalry Diary of 1920"
Collection "Cavalry" (1926), reprint. 1933.
Jewish Stories (1927).
"Odessa Stories" (1931).
The play "Sunset" (1928).
The play "Maria" (1935).
The unfinished novel “Great Krinitsa”, from which only the first chapter “Gapa Guzhva” (“New World”, No. 10, 1931) was published.
fragment of the story “The Jewish Woman” (published in 1968).
Cavalry diary of 1920.

Editions of essays

Lyubka Kozak. - M., Ogonyok, 1925
Stories. - M., Ogonyok, 1925. - 32 p.
Stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1925. - 112 p.
Benya Krik. - M., Circle, 1926
Libretto of the film "Benya Krik". Virob of the Odessa factory VUFKU 1926 rock. Kyiv, 1926. - 8 p. - 5000 copies.
Wandering stars. - M., Kinoprint, 1926
The story of my dovecote. - M.-L., ZIF, 1926. - 80 p.
Cavalry. - M.-L., GIZ, 1926
Stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1926
The story of my dovecote. - Paris, 1927
The story of my dovecote. - M.-L., ZIF, 1927
Cavalry. - M.-L., GIZ, 1927
Cavalry. - M., FOSP, 1927
The end of St. Hypatia. - M.-L., ZIF, 1927
Stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1927 - 64 p.
Stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1927. - 128 p.
Sunset. - M., “Circle”, 1928. - 96 pp., 5,000 copies.
Cavalry.- M.-L., GIZ, 1928
The story of my dovecote. - M., GIZ, 1930
Cavalry. - M.-L., GIZ, 1930
Odessa stories. - M., OGIZ-GIHL, 1931. - 144 pp., 10,000 copies.
Cavalry. - M., OGIZ-GIHL, 1931
Stories. - M., Federation, 1932
Cavalry. - M., GIHL, 1933
Stories. - M., Goslitizdat, 1934
Maria. - M., Goslitizdat, 1935. - 66 pp., 3,000 copies.
Stories. - M., Goslitizdat, 1935
Selected stories. - M., 1936, 2008. - 40 pp., 40,000 copies. (Library "Ogonyok").
Stories. - M., Goslitizdat, 1936
Favorites / Preface I. Ehrenburg. - M., Goslitizdat, 1957.
Favorites / Join Art. L. Pole. - M., Fiction, 1966.
Favorites / Preface I. Ehrenburg. - Kemerovo, 1966
Cavalry. Selected works / Afterword. V. Zvinyatskovsky; Ill. G. Garmidera. - K.: Dnipro, 1989. - 350 p.
Awakening: Essays. Stories. Film story. Play / Comp., prepared. texts, intro. article, note, chronological index by W. M. Spector. - Tbilisi: Merani, 1989. - 432 p.
Favorites / Comp., preface. and comment. V. Ya. Vakulenko. - Frunze: Adabiyat, 1990. - 672 p.
Cavalry / Comp. A.N. Pirozhkova-Babel/. Entered: Cavalry. Cavalry diary of 1920. Odessa stories. Journalism. Stories from different years. Memoirs, portraits, articles. - M., Pravda (Znamya magazine library), 1990. 480 pp. Circulation 400 thousand copies.
Works: In 2 vols. - M.: IHL, 1990 / comp. A. Pirozhkova, entry. Art. G. Beloy, approx. S. Povartsova, reprint vol. 1 - 1991, vol. 2 - 1992
Odessa stories. - Odessa: Voluntary Society of Book Lovers. 1991, p.221, format 93×67 mm, circulation 20,000 copies, hardcover.
Works in two volumes. M., Terra, 1996., 15,000 copies.
Diary 1920 (cavalry). - M.: MIC, 2000.
Cavalry I.E. Babel. - Moscow: Children's literature, 2001.
Collected works: In 2 volumes - M., 2002.
Collected works: In 4 volumes / Comp., notes, intro. Art. I. N. Sukhikh. M.: Time, 2006.
Collected works: In 3 volumes / Comp., approx. entry Art. I. N. Sukhikh. St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012. - 2,000 copies.
Stories / Comp., prepared. texts, afterword, commentary. E. I. Pogorelskaya. St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2014. - 1000 copies.
Letters to a friend: From the archives of I. L. Livshits / Comp., comp. texts and comments. E. Pogorelskaya. M.: Three squares, 2007. - 3000 copies.

Performances

in 1987 by director Andrei Goncharov at the Moscow Theater named after V. Mayakovsky;
in 1998 by director Semyon Spivak in Youth Theater on the Fontanka (play “Screams from Odessa”);
in 2001 by director Marina Glukhovskaya in Omsk academic theater dramas.

A number of theaters - Theater named after. E. Vakhtangov in Moscow, the Riga Theater of Russian Drama, etc. - staged the musical “Bindyuzhnik and the King” (music by Alexander Zhurbin, libretto by Asar Eppel), created based on the same play; in several productions it was called “Sunset”.

Since the 1960s, professional and amateur theaters in different cities of the USSR have staged dramatizations of “Cavalry” and “Odessa Tales.” In 1968 in Leningrad, director Efim Davidovich Tabachnikov staged a play based on I. Babel’s play “Maria” in the people’s theater at the Lensovet Palace of Culture. The most famous play is “Five Stories of Babel”, staged by Efim Kucher at the Taganka Theater (1980).

Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was born July 1(13), 1894 in Odessa on Moldavanka. Son of a Jewish merchant. Soon after the birth of Isaac Babel, his family moved to Nikolaev, a port city located 111 kilometers from Odessa. There, his father worked for an overseas agricultural equipment manufacturer.

Babel, when he grew up, entered the commercial school named after S.Yu. Witte. His family returned to Odessa in 1905, and Babel continued his studies with private teachers until he entered the Odessa Commercial School named after Nicholas I, from which he graduated in 1911. In 1916 graduated from the Kyiv Commercial Institute.

He wrote his first stories (not preserved) in French. In 1916. with the assistance of M. Gorky, he published two stories in the journal “Chronicle”. In 1917 interrupted his studies in literature, changed many professions: he was a reporter, head of the editorial and publishing department of the State Publishing House of Ukraine, an employee of the People's Commissariat for Education, a translator at the Petrograd Cheka; served as a fighter in the 1st Cavalry Army.

In 1919 Isaac Babel married Evgenia Gronfein, the daughter of a wealthy supplier of agricultural equipment, whom he had previously met in Kyiv. After his military service, he wrote for newspapers and also devoted more time to writing short stories. In 1925 he published the book “The Story of My Dovecote,” which included works based on stories from his childhood.

Babel became famous due to the publication of several stories in the magazine "LEF" ( 1924 ). Babel is a recognized master of the short story and an outstanding stylist. Striving for laconicism and density of writing, he considered the prose of G. de Maupassant and G. Flaubert as a model for himself. In Babel's stories, colorfulness is combined with the external dispassion of the narrative; their speech structure is based on the interpenetration of stylistic and linguistic layers: literary speech coexists with colloquial speech, Russian folk tale - with Jewish small-town dialect, Ukrainian and Polish languages.

Most of Babel's stories were included in the "Cavalry" cycles ( separate edition – 1926 ) and “Odessa Stories” (separate publication – 1931 ). In Cavalry, the lack of a single plot is compensated by a system of leitmotifs, the core of which is the opposing themes of cruelty and mercy. The cycle caused heated controversy: Babel was accused of slander (S.M. Budyonny), of partiality to naturalistic details, of a subjective depiction of the Civil War. “Odessa Stories” recreates the atmosphere of Moldavanka – the center of the thieves’ world of Odessa; The cycle is dominated by the carnival element and original Odessa humor. Based on urban folklore, Babel painted colorful images of thieves and raiders - charming rogues and “ noble robbers" Babel also created 2 plays: “Sunset” ( 1928 ) and "Maria" ( 1935 , allowed for staging in 1988); 5 scenarios (including “Wandering Stars”, 1926 ; based on the novel of the same name by Sholom Aleichem).

During the 1930s The activities and works of I. Babel came under the close attention of critics and censors, who were looking for even the slightest mention of his disloyalty to the Soviet government. Periodically, Babel visited France, where his wife and daughter Natalie lived. He wrote less and less and spent three years in solitude.

In 1939 Isaac Babel was arrested by the NKVD and accused of membership in anti-Soviet political organizations and terrorist groups, as well as being a spy for France and Austria.

January 27, 1940 Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was shot. Rehabilitated – in 1954.

Babel, Isaac Emmanuilovich Isaac Babel.

Babel, Isaac Emmanuilovich(06/30/1894, Odessa, – 01/27/1940, Moscow), Russian writer.

He graduated from the Odessa Commercial School and studied Hebrew, the Bible and the Talmud at home. He continued his education at the Kiev Institute of Finance. According to available information, during his school and student years he took part in Zionist circles.

At the age of 15 he began writing stories in French. In 1915 he came to Petrograd “without the right of residence.” With the assistance of Gorky, he published two stories in the journal “Chronicle”: “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna” and “Mama, Rimma and Alla”, for which he was prosecuted under article 1001 (pornography). In the "Journal of Journals" for 1916–17. published several short essays under the pseudonym Bab-El, in one of which he predicted the revival in Russian literature of the early “Little Russian” Gogol line, “overwritten” by the St. Petersburg Akaki Akakievich, and the appearance of the “Odessa Maupassant.” This literary declaration of the young Babel anticipated some aesthetic principles the so-called “southwestern school” (I. Ilf and E. Petrov, V. Kataev, Y. Olesha, E. Bagritsky, S. Hecht, L. Slavin and others).

In the fall of 1917, Babel, having served in the army for several months as a private, deserted and made his way to Petrograd, where he entered service in the Cheka, and then in the People's Commissariat for Education. The experience of working in these institutions was reflected in Babel’s series of articles “Diary”, published in the spring of 1918 in the newspaper “Novaya Zhizn”. Here Babel ironically describes the first fruits of the Bolshevik revolution: arbitrariness, general savagery and devastation. In the essay “Palace of Motherhood,” Babel, on his own behalf, expresses those doubts that later, in “Cavalry,” he put into the mouth of the Hasidic ragpicker (see Hasidism) Gedali, the character story of the same name: “...shooting at each other is, perhaps, sometimes not stupid. But this is not the whole revolution. Who knows, maybe this isn’t a revolution at all.” This, as well as Babel’s other stories, reflects the spiritual conflict that the revolution caused among many Jews loyal to their national and religious traditions. After the closure of "New Life" Soviet authorities Babel began working on a story from the life of revolutionary Petrograd: “About two Chinese in a brothel.” The story “Walking” (“Silhouettes”, No. 6–7, 1923; “Pass”, No. 6, 1928) is the only surviving excerpt from this story.

Returning to Odessa, Babel published in the local magazine “Lava” (June 1920) a series of essays “On the Field of Honor”, the content of which was borrowed from the front-line records of French officers. In the spring of 1920, on the recommendation of M. Koltsov, Babel, under the name of Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov, was sent to the 1st Cavalry Army as a war correspondent for Yug-ROST. The diary that Babel kept during the Polish campaign records his true impressions: this is the “chronicle of everyday atrocities” that is silently mentioned in the allegorical short story “The Path to Brody.” With documentary accuracy, Babel describes here the wild bullying of Budyonny’s cavalrymen against the defenseless Jewish population of the town of Demidovka on the day of the Ninth of Av: “... everything, just like when they destroyed the temple.” In the book “Cavalry” (separate edition, with significant changes, 1926; 8th additional edition, 1933), the real material of the diary undergoes a strong artistic transformation: the “chronicle of everyday atrocities” turns into a kind of heroic epic. Babel’s main narrative technique is the so-called skaz, which refracts the author’s thought into someone else’s word. Thus, in the short stories “Konkin”, “Salt”, “Letter”, “Biography of Pavlichenka”, “Betrayal” the narrator is a man from the common people, whose style, point of view and assessments are clearly alien to the author, but are necessary for him as a means of overcoming generally accepted and worn-out literary norms and ideological assessments. The main narrator of “Cavalry” cannot be identified with the author, since the complex speech mask is “Kirill Lyutov” himself - a Jew with a pretentious and militant Russian surname, a sentimental and prone to exaggeration “candidate of rights of St. Petersburg University”, in which “exotic” savages Budennovtsy excite both delight and horror. "Cavalry" is a book about defeat and the futility of sacrifice. It ends with a note of hopeless tragedy (the story “The Rabbi’s Son”): “...monstrous Russia, implausible, like a herd of body lice, stomped its bast shoes on both sides of the carriages. The typhoid peasants rolled in front of them the usual hump of a soldier's death... when I ran out of potatoes, I threw a pile of Trotsky's leaflets at them. But only one of them extended a dirty, dead hand for the leaflet. And I recognized Ilya, the son of the Zhitomir rabbi.” The son of a rabbi, a “Red Army soldier from Bratslav,” in whose chest “the mandates of an agitator and the memos of a Jewish poet” are piled nearby, dies “among poems, phylacteries and footcloths.” Only in the seventh and eighth editions of the book did Babel change its ending, placing after the story “The Rabbi’s Son” a new, more “optimistic” epilogue: the story “Argamak”.

Simultaneously with Cavalry, Babel published Odessa Stories, written back in 1921–23. (separate ed. 1931). The main character of these stories is the Jewish raider Benya Krik (whose prototype was the legendary Mishka Yaponchik), the embodiment of Babel's dream of a Jew who knows how to stand up for himself. Here Babel’s comic talent and his flair for language are demonstrated most forcefully (the colorful Odessa jargon is played out in the stories). Babel’s cycle of autobiographical stories “The History of My Dovecote” (1926) is also largely devoted to Jewish themes. This is the key to the main theme of his work, the opposition of weakness and strength, which more than once gave contemporaries a reason to accuse Babel of the cult of the “strong man.”

In 1928, Babel published the play “Sunset”. This, according to S. Eisenstein, “perhaps the best post-October play in terms of dramatic skill,” was unsuccessfully staged by the 2nd Moscow Art Theater and found its true stage embodiment only in the 1960s. outside the USSR: in the Israeli Habima Theater and the Budapest Thalia Theater. In the 1930s Babel published few works. In the stories “Karl-Yankel”, “Oil”, “The End of the Almshouse”, etc., those compromise solutions appear that the writer avoided in his best works. Of the novel he conceived about collectivization, “Velikaya Krinitsa,” only the first chapter, “Gapa Guzhva” (“New World,” No. 10, 1931), was published. Babel's second play, "Maria" (1935), was not very successful. However, as evidenced by such posthumously published works as a fragment of the story “The Jewish Woman” (New Journal, 1968), the story “Certificate (My First Fee)” and others, Babel also in the 1930s. did not lose his skill, although the atmosphere of repression forced him to appear in print less and less.

Back in 1926, Babel began working for cinema (titles in Yiddish for the film “Jewish Happiness”, the script “Wandering Stars” based on the novel by Shalom Aleichem, the film story “Benya Krik”). In 1936, together with Eisenstein, Babel wrote the film script “Bezhin Meadow”. The film based on this scenario was destroyed by Soviet censorship. In 1937 Babel prints latest stories"Kiss", "Di Grasso" and "Sulak". Arrested after the fall of Yezhov, in the spring of 1939, Babel was shot in Lefortovo prison (Moscow) on January 27, 1940.

In the publications published in the USSR after Babel’s “posthumous rehabilitation” (the best of them: “Selected”, 1966), his works were subject to strong censorship cuts. In the USA, the writer’s daughter, Natalia Babel, did a great job of collecting hard-to-find and previously unpublished works of her father and publishing them with detailed comments.