Word: babeling
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...ISAAC BABEL: YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING. Edited by Nathalie Babel. Translated by Max Hayward. 283 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
More words have been published about Isaac Babel than by him. It is a situation that would have greatly amused the Russian-Jewish short-short-story writer whose work exemplifies Pushkin's golden rule that "precision and brevity are the prime qualities of prose." As a writer who could be economical without sacrificing impact, Babel compares favorably with Chekhov. Even Hemingway, one of the most ruthless wringers of prose, conceded that Babel could "clot the curds" better than he could...
Though plentiful, facts about Babel are less precise than his fiction. An obsessive craftsman, intensely jealous of his working and thinking time, he was often evasive and devious with friends and editors. There is no doubt, however, that Babel's life was brief. In 1939, after nearly a decade of playing the quiet and lucky mouse to Stalin's cat, the 44-year-old writer was snatched off to Moscow's Lubyanka prison and never heard from again. As the prison gates closed behind him, he was heard to utter, with a sly smile...
...Babel's unpublished manuscripts were seized, and are presumed to have been destroyed during World War II. His books disappeared from the shops, and his name was stricken from The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. He became an Orwellian unperson. Whether Babel was shot immediately after a sham trial or died in a forced-labor camp has never been known with any certainty. After Khrushchev "rehabilitated" Babel's name in 1954, the family received only a certificate giving an official death date of March...
Conflicting Character. Like many other artists whose lives and works were obliterated during Stalin's purges, Babel was guilty not of disloyalty to the Revolution but of not being demonstrably loyal enough. Apparently, Stalin expected much of this stocky, near sighted Jew, who in the 1920s had become an overnight literary hero with Red Cavalry, a collection of vignettes in which Babel fictionalized his experiences as a correspondent riding with the Red Cossacks against the Poles who repulsed the Bolshevik attempt to Communize their homeland. But instead of falling into the assembly line of Social Realism, Babel fell into...