Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
The Hard Hitter
By John Bayley
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
edited by Nathalie Babel, translated from the Russian by Peter Constantine, with an introduction by Cynthia Ozick
Norton, 1,072 pp., $39.95
Like so many men who made their mark on the twentieth century, Isaac Babel began as a Jewish revolutionary; like so many of them, too, he died disillusioned and by violence. But in the process he had become one of the century's most remarkable writers. He became famous in Russia as a writer before his death in 1940 at the hands of an OGPU firing squad; then he became a nonperson, until he was partially rehabilitated in 1954. By that time too his name as a writer of brilliant short stories had become known in the West. The collection Konarmiya, 'Horse Army' literally, and translated as Red Cavalry, which described in graphic detail the abortive Soviet campaign against Poland in 1920, showed that he had been an eyewitness and a sensational reporter of war experiences, but his true stature and importance, for a long while accepted and widely acclaimed in Russia, only now becomes apparent in the English-speaking world with the translation and publication of his complete works.
Review, 6618 words
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