The short-story master who saw too much and wrote too little
“I have become the master of a new genre — the genre of silence.” — First Writers' Congress, 1934
A storyteller from Odessa's Jewish quarter, he rode with Budyonny's cavalry into Poland and wrote Red Cavalry: so honest about the revolution's cruelty that Budyonny raged. Arrested in 1939, entangled even with Yezhov's wife, he was shot in 1940 asking for his manuscripts back. The confiscated pages have never been found.
Career Timeline
- 1916–1926Odessa Tales and Red Cavalry make him a Soviet literary star
- 1934The 'genre of silence' speech at the Writers' Congress
- 1939Arrested; all manuscripts confiscated
- 1940Shot; rehabilitated in 1954
Related historical events
Summer 1920, War Correspondent with the First Cavalry
When the Soviet-Polish war broke out in 1920, the young Odessa writer Isaac Babel was attached to Budyonny's First Cavalry Army as a war correspondent under the alias "Kirill Lyutov". He wrote for the army newspaper Red Cavalryman while secretly keeping a diary. That summer, spent as a bespectacled Jewish intellectual riding among Cossack horsemen, became the lode of his entire literary life.
Out of the diary grew the story cycle Red Cavalry (1926), a new grammar for the twentieth-century short story that pressed the cruelty and the heroism of revolutionary war into single sentences. Budyonny raged in print that his army had been slandered, but in 1928 Gorky defended Babel publicly and closed the argument. The writer who declared that "no iron can pierce the heart with such force as a full stop put just at the right place" rewrote his drafts dozens of times, and his working method became legend.
The King of Moldavanka: The Odessa Stories
Babel's other masterpiece, The Odessa Stories (published 1921–1924, collected 1931), is a cycle of short stories set in Moldavanka, the Jewish quarter of pre-revolutionary Odessa. Its central figure is the gang leader Benya Krik, 'the King', a legendary character modeled on the real-life Mishka Yaponchik. In four core stories, 'The King' (1921), 'How It Was Done in Odessa' (1923), 'The Father' (1924), and 'Lyubka the Cossack' (1924), Babel rendered the lives of thieves, raiders, craftsmen, and small traders in romantic and exotic hues.
What Babel dreamed of was 'a Jew who could stand up for himself,' and Benya Krik was the incarnation of that dream. The stories, which transform the world of Jewish gangsters into a poetic, audacious literary style, established Babel, alongside Red Cavalry, as a master of the twentieth-century short story. In 1926 Babel wrote the screenplay for the film Benya Krik, and the play Sunset (1928) also grew out of the cycle. Soviet critics of the day acknowledged his genius while reproaching him for 'romanticizing banditry' and an 'antipathy to the working class,' but the work endured and entered world literature.
The Genre of Silence, 15 May 1939
From the platform of the First Writers' Congress in 1934 Babel joked that he had become "a great master of a new genre, the genre of silence". In the age of socialist realism his small output was also a chosen defense. He kept writing without publishing, preparing work on collectivization and on the Cheka.
When he was arrested at his Peredelkino dacha before dawn on 15 May 1939, his one plea was to be allowed to finish his work. The confiscated folders of manuscripts, unpublished stories and plays, were never found. He retracted in court the confession extracted under torture, and was shot on 27 January 1940. After his rehabilitation in 1954 his books returned to print, and readers in the Soviet Union and beyond recovered the greatest short-story writer the revolution had produced. The investigation file, published by Vitaly Shentalinsky, restored the whole case to the documentary record.