Volume 13, Number 2 · July 31, 1969
Five Minutes of Life
By V.S. Pritchett
The Lonely Years 1925-1939
by Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel, translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 402 pp., $6.75
You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915-1937
by Isaac Babel, edited and with Notes by Nathalie Babel, translated by Max Hayward
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 304 pp., $5.95
Isaac Babel was the most telling writer of abrupt stories to come out of the Russian revolution. This gentle Jew was a man who hit one in the belly. More important he had—what is indispensable to short stories—a distinct voice. Made famous by Red Cavalry and the Odessa stories—he was rewarded with a very pretty dacha—he worked under Gorki's influence and protection as a writer precariously accepted by the regime but increasingly restless and finally silent under it as a person and an artist; he was allowed to go to Paris and Italy, but his foreign contacts must have brought him under suspicion; he was arrested, secretly tried, and presumably executed, in the general Stalinist attack on the arts in 1939. A blunt story—rather like one of his own. His works vanished; references to them were cut out of histories and criticism; his manuscripts and papers were either destroyed or, haphazard, lost. Not until 1964 was he rehabilitated and there was a public celebration of his genius.
Review, 1353 words
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