The Essential Fictions

The Essential Fictions offers contemporary readers seventy-three short stories by one of twentieth-century Russia’s premier storytellers, Isaac Babel. This unique volume, which includes Babel’s famous Red Calvary series and his Odessa Stories, was translated, edited, introduced, and annotated by Val Vinokur, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Translation, and features illustrations by Yefim Ladyzhensky, a painter known for his depictions of everyday life under Soviet rule in Babel’s native Odessa.

Babel was born in 1894 into multicultural Odessa’s thriving Jewish community. His work is tinctured with the sentiments of his childhood, but exhibits an acerbity that could have only been acquired during Babel’s time as a journalist, when he witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, and accompanied a mounted division of the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War. Translator Vinokur deftly highlights both Babel’s “doleful and bespectacled Jewish comedy” and “horrified hopefulness” in the face of the bloody conflicts that plagued his generation.

On the centenary of the revolution that toppled the Romanov tsars, Babel’s fictions continue to engross and enthrall contemporary readers interested in Eastern European and Jewish literature, as well as the history and politics of the twentieth century.

ISAAC BABEL (1894–1940) is best known for his short fiction, especially his tales about the Jewish gangsters of Odessa and the Cossacks of the Red Cavalry. A contemporary, Viktor Shklovsky, once described Babel as writing “in the same tone about the stars and gonorrhea.” Babel was executed on Stalin’s orders in 1940 in the wake of the Great Purge.
VAL VINOKUR is an associate professor of literary studies, chair of liberal arts, and director of Jewish culture at The New School, where he also leads workshops in literary translation. He is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern University Press, 2008), and has translated several novels from the French with Rose-Myriam Réjouis.
YEFIM LADYZHENSKY (1911–1982) began his career as a set designer, but devoted his life to painting after encountering Babel’s fiction, which he described as having played for him “the same role that the Bible and myths did for a multitude of artists—a reason and a stimulus for expressing my feelings and experiences.” When he emigrated from Odessa to Jerusalem in 1979, the Soviet government impounded his Babel-inspired paintings. To make up for their loss, he quickly completed the eighteen richly detailed drawings for Red Cavalry that are included in this volume.