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Isaac Babel

Early years

Babel was born into a Orthodox Jewish family in Odessa during a period of pogroms and mass exodus of Jews from the Russian Empire. Although he survived Odessa's 1905 pogrom with the help of Russian Orthodox neighbors, his great uncle Shoyl was one of about 300 Jews murdered.

In his teens, Babel hoped to get into the preparatory class of the Nicolas I Odessa Commercial School. However, he first had to overcome the Jewish quota (10% within the Pale of Settlement, 5% outside and 3% for both capitals). Despite the fact that Babel received the passing grades, his place was given to another boy, whose parents had bribed the school officials. As a result he was schooled at home by private tutors.

In addition to regular school subjects, Babel also studied the Talmud and music. According to Cynthia Ozick,

"Though he was at home in Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with the traditional texts and their demanding commentaries, he added to these a lifelong fascination with Maupassant and Flaubert. His first stories were composed in fluent literary French. The breadth and scope of his social compass enabled him to see through the eyes of peasants, soldiers, priests, rabbis, children, artists, actors, women of all classes. He befriended whores, cabdrivers, jockeys; he knew what it was like to be penniless, to live on the edge and off the beaten track."

After an unsuccessful attempt to enroll at Odessa University (again due to the quota), Babel entered Kiev Institute of Finance and Business. There he met Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein, his future wife.

Early career

In 1915, Babel graduated and moved to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), in defiance of laws restricting Jews to residence within the Pale. In the capital he met the Russian writer Maxim Gorky who published some of his stories in his literary magazine Letopis ("Летопись", "Chronicle"). Gorky advised the aspiring writer to gain more life experience and later Babel wrote in his autobiography: "... I owe everything to that meeting and still pronounce Alexey Maksimovich (Gorky's) name with love and admiration." One of his most famous autobiographical short stories, "The Story of My Dovecot" ("История моей голубятни"), is dedicated to Gorky.

The story "The Bathroom Window" was considered obscene by censors and Babel was charged with violating criminal code article 1001.

AFter the October Revolution, Babel sided with Lenin's Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Later, he worked for the Cheka as a translator for the counter-intelligence service, in the Odessa Gubkom (regional Bolshevik party committee), in the food requisitioning unit, in the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education), in a typographic printing office, and served as a newspaper reporter in Petersburg and Tiflis.

Isaac Babel married Yevgenia Gronfein on August 9, 1919 in Odessa. Their marriage produced a daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, who grew up to become the foremost scholar of her father's life and work. In 1925, Yevgenia Babel, disgusted by her husband's infidelities and motivated by her increasing hatred of communism, emigrated to France. Although Babel paid several visits to his estranged wife in Paris, he simultaneously began a common law marriage with Antonina Pirozhkova. Babel's relationship with Pirozhkova also produced a daughter. However, this did not did not interfere with his affairs with other women.
Red Cavalry

In 1920 Babel was assigned to Field Marshal Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army, witnessing a military campaign of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. Poland was not alone in its newfound opportunities and troubles. Virtually all of the newly independent neighbours began fighting over borders: Romania fought with Hungary over Transylvania, Yugoslavia with Italy over Rijeka, Poland with Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn Silesia, with Germany over Poznań and with Ukrainians over Eastern Galicia (Galician War). He documented the horrors on the war he witnessed in the 1920 Diary (Konarmeyskiy Dnevnik 1920 Goda) which he later used to write the Red Cavalry (Конармия), a collection of short stories such as "Crossing the River Zbrucz" and "My First Goose". The legendary violence of the Red Cavalry seemed to harshly contrast the gentle nature of Babel himself.

Babel wrote: "Only by 1923 I have learned how to express my thoughts in a clear and not very lengthy way. Then I returned to writing." Several stories that were later included into Red Cavalry, were published in Vladimir Mayakovsky's LEF ("ЛЕФ") magazine in 1924. Babel's honest description of the brutal realities of war, far from revolutionary propaganda, earned him some powerful enemies. According to recent research, Marshall Budyonny was infuriated by Babel's unvarnished descriptions of marauding Red Cossacks and demanded Babel's execution without success. However, Gorky's influence not only protected Babel, but also helped to guarantee publication, and soon Red Cavalry was translated into many languages.
Odessa Tales

Back in Odessa, Babel started to write the Odessa Tales, a series of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka. At their core, the stories describe the life of Jewish gangsters, both before and after the October Revolution. Many of them directly feature the fictional mob boss Benya Krik, who remains one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature. These stories were later used as the basis for the play Sunset (play).

According to Nathalie Babel Brown,
"Sunset premiered at the Baku Worker's Theatre on October 23, 1927 and played in Odessa, Kiev, and the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre. The reviews, however, were mixed. Some critics praised the play's 'powerful anti-bourgeois stance and its interesting 'fathers and sons' theme. But in Moscow, particularly, critics felt that the play's attitude toward the bourgeoisie was contradictory and weak. Sunset closed, and was dropped from the repertoire of the Moscow Art Theatre.
Glory days
According to Nathalie Babel Brown,
"The young writer burst upon the literary scene and instantly became the rage in Moscow. The tradition in Russia being to worship poets and writers, Babel soon became one of the happy few, a group that included Soviet writers who enjoyed exceptional status and privileges in an otherwise impoverished and despotic country. In the late 1930s, he was given a villa in the writer's colony of Peredelkino, outside Moscow. No secret was ever made of his having a wife and daughter in Paris. At the same time, hardly anyone outside of Moscow knew of two other children he had fathered. As a matter of fact, Babel had many secrets, lived with many ambiguities and contradicitions, and left many unanswered questions behind him."
Clashes with the authorities
In 1930, Babel travelled in Ukraine and witnessed the brutality of the forced collectivisation and the resulting Terror Famine. As Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet intelligentsia and ordered all writers and artists must conform to socialist realism, Babel increasingly withdrew from public life. During the campaign against, "Formalism," Babel was publicly denounced for low productivity. Although many other Soviet intellectuals were intimidated, Babel confided in his protege, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, "In six months time, they'll leave the formalists in peace and start some other campaign."

At the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934), Babel noted ironically, that he was becoming "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence."

Babel's 1935 play Maria, a portrait of the sordid underbelly of Soviet society, caused Babel to be chided by Maxim Gorky for having a "Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat." Gorky further warned his friend that "political inferences" would be made "that will be personally harmful to you." Although intended to be performed by Moscow's Vakhtangov Theatre, the play's performance was cancelled by the NKVD during rehearsals in 1935.

In 1932, after numerous requests he was permitted to visit his estranged wife Yevgenia in Paris in 1932. While visiting his wife and their daughter Nathalie, Babel agonized over whether or not to return to Soviet Russia. In conversations and letters to friends, expressed longing at the thought of being "a free man," while also expressing fear at no longer being able to make a living solely through writing. On July 27, 1933, Babel wrote a letter to Yuri Annenkov, stating that he had been summoned to Moscow and was leaving immediately.

Upon his return, Babel began a common law marriage with Antonina Pirozhkova, which would ultimately produce a daughter, Lidya Babel. He also collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein on the film Bezhin Meadow, about the informer Pavlik Morozov, and worked on the screenplays for several other Soviet propaganda movies.
Escape clause
According to Nathalie Babel Brown,
"Babel came to Paris in the summer of 1935, as part of the delegation of Soviet writers to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace. He probably knew this would have been his last chance to remain in Europe. As he had done numerous times during the last ten years, he asked my mother to return with him to Moscow. Although he knew the general situation was bad, he nevertheless described to her the comfortable life that the family could have there together. It was the last opportunity my mother had to give a negative answer, and she never forgot it. Perhaps it helped her later on to be proven completely right in her fears and her total lack of confidence in the Soviet Union. My mother described to me these last conversations with my father many times."
Relationship with the Yezhovs
During a visit to Berlin, the married Babel began an affair with Yevgenia Feigenberg, who was then a translator at the Soviet embassy. Yevgenia, whom Simon Sebag Montefiore has dubbed, "a seasoned literary groupie," reportedly began her seduction of Babel with the words, "You don't know me, but I know you well." Even after Yevgenia married NKVD boss Nikolai Yezhov the affair continued and Babel frequently presided over Mrs. Yezhov's literary gatherings, which often included such luminaries as Solomon Mikhoels, Leonid Utesov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Mikhail Koltsov. On one such occasion, Babel was heard to say, "Just think, our girl from Odessa has become the first lady of the kingdom!"

In retaliation for Babel's affair with his wife, Yezhov ordered the writer placed under constant NKVD surveillance. As the Great Purge began during the late 1930s, Yezhov was informed that Babel was spreading rumors about the suspicious death of Maxim Gorky and alleging that his former mentor had been murdered on orders from Stalin. Babel had also been heard to say of Leon Trotsky, "It's impossible to imagine the charm and strength of his influence on anyone who encounters him." Babel further commented that Lev Kamenev was, "...the most brilliant connoisseur of language and literature."

As the number of Purge victims skyrocketed, however, Nikolai Yezhov's over enthusiastic pursuit of suspected "enemies" began to be thought a liability by Stalin and his inner circle. In response, Lavrenti Beria was assigned as Yezhov's assistant and swiftly usurped the leadership of the NKVD.

According to Montefiore,
"The darkness began to descend upon Yezhov's family where his silly, sensual wife was unwittingly to play the terrible role of black widow spider: most of her lover's were to die... A pall fell on Yevgenia's literary salon. When a friend walked her home to the Kremlin after a party, she herself reflected that Babel was in danger because he had been friends with arrested Trotskyite generals: 'Only his European fame could save him..."
Arrest and Death
The NKVD photo of Babel made after his arrest
In May 1939, Isaac Babel was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino. He immediately told Antonina, "Please see our girl grows up happy." According to Peter Constantine,
"From that day on, Babel, one of the foremost writers of his time, became a nonperson in the Soviet Union. His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi. He became unmentionable in any public venue. When the film director Mark Donskoi's famous Gorky trilogy premiered the following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplay, had been removed from the credits."
Interrogated under torture in Moscow's Lubyanka prison, Babel confessed that his "creative impotence, which has prevented me from publishing any significant work for last few years," was, "deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write." This, however, was not enough for Stalin and his minions. In his confession paper, which still contains blood stains, Babel "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux to spy for France.

According to Nathalie Babel Brown,
"As we now know, his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria's private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without abiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately. Babel had been convicted of 'active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization,' and of 'being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments.' Babel's last recorded words in the proceedings were, 'I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others... I am asking for only one thing -- let me finish my work.' He was shot the next day and his body was thrown into a communal grave. All of this horrific information was revealed in the early 1990s, a relatively short time ago.
According to the early official Soviet version, Isaac Babel died in the GULAG on March 17, 1941. His archives and manuscripts were confiscated by the NKVD and destroyed. Peter Constantine, who translated Babel's writings into English, has described Babel's execution as, "one of the great tragedies of twentieth century literature."
Rehabilitation
On December 23, 1954, during the Khrushchev thaw, a typed half sheet of paper ended the official silence. It read,
"The sentence of the military collegium dated 26 January, 1940 concerning Babel, I.E., is revoked on the basis of newly discovered circumstances and the case against him is terminated in the absence of elements of a crime."
However, his works were never published in an uncensored form until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Legacy
After her husband's return to Moscow in 1935, Yevgenia Gronfein Babel remained unaware of his other family with Antonina Pirozhkova. Eventually, however, she was cruelly informed by Ilya Ehrenburg during the 1950s. Enraged, Yevgenia spat in Ehrenberg's face and then fainted.

Her daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, believes that Ehrenburg did this under orders from the KGB. With two potential contenders for the role of Babel's widow, the Soviet State clearly preferred Babel's common-law wife Antonina to his legal wife Yevgenia, who had emigrated to the West.

Although Babel's play Maria was very popular at Western European colleges during the 1960s, it was not performed in Babel's homeland until 1994. The first English translation appeared in 2002, translated by Peter Constantine and edited by Nathalie Babel Brown. Marias American premiere, directed by Carl Weber, took place at Stanford University two years later.

Although she was too young to have many memories of her father, Nathalie Babel Brown went on to become one of the world's foremost scholars of his life and work. When a Norton Anthology of his writings was published in 2002, Nathalie edited the volume and provided a foreword. She died in Washington DC in 2008.

Lidya Babel, the daughter of Isaac Babel and Antonina Pirozhkova, also emigrated to the United States and currently reside in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Bibliography

Конармейский дневник 1920 года, English translation: 1920 Diary, ISBN 0-300-09313-6

Конармия, (1926), English translation: Red Cavalry, ISBN 0-393-32423-0

Одесские рассказы, Odessa Tales

Закат, Sunset, play (1926)

Benya Krik, screenplay (1926) (filmed in Ukraine and available on DVD from National Center for Jewish Film)

Мария, Maria, play (1935)

You Must Know Everything, Stories 1915-1937, Translated from Russian by Max Hayward. Edited, and with notes by Nathalie Babel, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 1966.

Quotes

"No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."

"Over the town roamed the homeless moon. I went along with her, warming up in my heart impracticable dreams and discordant songs."

Benya Krik: "This is my idea: A Jew no longer in the prime of life, a Jew who used to go about naked, barefoot, and filthy like a convict on Sakhalin Island! And now, thank God, he's getting up there in years, it is time to put an end to this life sentence of hard labor -- it is time to turn the Sabbath into Sabbath.

*From the 1926 play Sunset (play)

"He can write, but he's got nothing to say."

* Remarking to Ilya Ehrenburg about the promise shown by the White emigre and acclaimed author Vladimir Nabokov.

"If it was up to me, I wouldn't ask my worst enemy to clean floors after the Revolution! During the Revolution the dirt grew to three inches thick on these floors -- you couldn't shave it off with a plane! I should get a medal for cleaning floors after the Revolution, and all you do is bark."

* From the 1935 play Maria (play).

Captain Viskovsky: "Who knows what can happen, Yasha? They might ask you to blow up the street you were born on, and you would blow it up. Or to blast an orphanage to bits, and you'd say, "A two-zero-eight fuse," and blast that orphanage to bits. That's what you would do, Yasha, as long as they let you live your life, strum your guitar, and sleep with thin women. You're fat but you like them thin. You'll do anything, if they tell you to renounce your mother three times, you would renounce her three times. But that's not the point, Yasha! The point is they will want more: they won't let you drink vodka with the people you like, they'll make you read boring books, and the songs they teach you will be boring, too. Then you'll be mad, my dear Red Artillerist. You'll be furious, your eyes will start rolling! Then two citizens will come visiting: "Let's go, Comrade Kravchenko." "Should I take any personal effects with me or not," you'll ask them. "No, you needn't take any personal effects with you. It'll be a quick interrogation, over in a minute." And that will be the end of you, my dear Red Artillerist. It'll cost them four kopecks. It's been calculated that a Colt bullet costs four kopecks and not a centime more."

*A White Army officer turned black marketeer lectures a Red Army associate about the pitfalls of Stalinism. From the 1935 play Maria.

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