Word: babel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Babel was not merely compelled to rewrite a story dozens of times, as the Russian authors suggest. He seems to have been incapable of writing anything that did not follow the unique lines of his own ironical and conflicting character. For all their straightforward drama and excitement, the Red Cavalry stories rest on the contradiction between professional bloodletting and revolutionary ideals...
Earliest Voice. Babel himself put the matter of his individuality best. In a 1937 interview, the text of which Miss Babel has included in her book, he told the hounding members of the Union of Soviet Writers: "You talk about my silence. Let me tell you a secret. I have wasted several years trying, with due regard to my own tastes, to write lengthily, with a lot of detail and philosophy -striving for the sort of truth I have been talking about. It didn't work out with me. And so, although I'm a devotee of Tolstoy...
This individuality, which was both Babel's genius and his death warrant, comes through best in his tales of old Odessa. In them, Chekhov's melancholy, Maupassant's detachment and Gogol's grotesque wit seem to fuse into the unmistakable Babel voice. It is a voice that can be heard most simply and clearly in You Must Know Everything, the title story of the collection. Considered to be his earliest known fiction, the story was discovered in manuscript and published in the Soviet Union...
...typical autobiographical Babel childhood story, the reader slips into the author's atmosphere of old Odessa as if it were a familiar coat. Within a framework of shop-lined streets, savory meals and sturdy furnishings, the young narrator casually spins the tale of his grandmother, an embittered illiterate who urges her grandson to study hard and learn everything. To her, knowledge is not an instrument of discovery but a weapon of revenge that will bring the world to its knees...
Many of the 25 stories translated by Max Hayward for this edition were published in Russia during Babel's lifetime, but only a few even begin to approach the lyrical force of such concentrated conceptions as the widely known The Story of My Dovecot, Lyubka the Cossack and Salt. The Jewess, longest story in the book and presumed to be a fragment of a proposed novel, touches on one of Babel's most forceful and most personal themes-the conflicting needs of a Soviet Jew to retain his traditions and be a correct citizen. The Jewess...