Isaac Babel: biography, family, creative activity, famous works, reviews of critics. Isaac Babel

Babel Isaac Emmanuilovich (1894-1940), writer.

Graduated from the Odessa Commercial School, where he mastered several European languages(Babel wrote his first stories in French).

In 1911-1916. studied at the economic department of a commercial institute in Kyiv and at the same time entered the fourth year of the law faculty of the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute. In Petrograd future writer met M. Gorky. “I owe everything to this meeting,” he later wrote. In the journal Chronicle (1916), Gorky published two Babel stories, which were favorably received by critics.

Babel's publicistic articles and reporter's notes, which appeared in the press in 1918, testify to his rejection of the cruelty and violence generated by the revolution. In the spring of 1920, with a journalistic certificate in the name of Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov, he went to the First Cavalry Army of S. M. Budyonny, and with it passed through Ukraine and Galicia.

After suffering from typhus in November 1920, Babel returned to Odessa and then lived in Moscow. His short stories were regularly published in magazines and newspapers, which subsequently amounted to two famous cycle- Cavalry (1926) and Odessa Stories (1931).

Cavalry, which paradoxically combines romantic pathos and rough naturalism, "low" themes and sophistication of style, is one of the most fearless and truthful works about the revolution and the Civil War. Characteristic for the prose of this time, the author's "fascination" with the epoch-making events taking place before his eyes is combined with a sober and harsh assessment of them. Cavalry, which was soon translated into many languages, brought the author wide fame - in the mid-20s. 20th century Babel became one of the most widely read Soviet writers both in the USSR and abroad.

Critic V. B. Shklovsky noted in 1924: “It is unlikely that anyone now writes better in our country.” A notable phenomenon in the literature of the 20s. “Odessa Tales” also appeared - sketches of Odessa life marked by lyricism and subtle irony.

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of constant traveling in Babel's life. He traveled a lot around the country, often went to Europe, where his family emigrated. Incapable of conformism in his work, the writer increasingly "fit" into Soviet reality.

On May 15, 1939, Babel was arrested. Subjected to a series of interrogations, he "confessed" that he was preparing terrorist acts, was a spy for French and Austrian intelligence.
Shot on January 27, 1940 in Moscow.

BABEL Isaak Emmanuilovich (real name Bobel) (pseudonyms - Bab-El, K. Lyutov) [July 1 (13), 1894, Odessa - March 17, 1940, Moscow], Russian writer.

Odessa roots

Born into a wealthy Jewish family (his father was a middle-class merchant) in Moldavanka (Odessa region, famous for its raiders). Odessa as a seaport was a city different languages and nationalities. It had 30 printing houses that produced more than 600 original publications per year: 79% were Russian books, 21% were books in other languages, 5% were in Hebrew. In 1903 he was sent to the Commercial School. Count S. Yu. Witte in Nikolaev (where the family lived for a short time). Then - to the Odessa Commercial School. Emperor Nicholas I. from which he graduated in 1911. He studied Hebrew, the Bible, the Talmud; at famous musician PS Stolyarsky learned to play the violin. By the age of 13-14, Babel had read 11 volumes of N. M. Karamzin's History of the Russian State, works by Racine, Corneille, and Molière. Passion for French (under the influence of the teacher French) led to the writing of the first stories - in French. However, Babel quickly realized that his peasants looked like "peyzan": they were not natural.

In 1911 he entered the economic department of the Kyiv Commercial Institute, from which he graduated in 1916. In 1915, interrupting his studies, he left for Petrograd. Having no residence rights beyond the Pale of Settlement, he unsuccessfully offered his compositions to various editors. In 1915 he was admitted to the fourth year of the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute (did not graduate), for some time in 1915 he lived in Saratov, which was reflected in the story “Childhood. At my grandmother's, then returned to Petrograd. The first serious publications appeared in the Chronicle magazine founded by M. Gorky (“Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna” and “Mama, Rimma and Alla”). In the same 1916, the Petrograd Journal of Journals published a cycle of St. Petersburg sketches, My Leaflets. Gorky, however, criticized the writer for the lack of living impressions. How important it was for Babel to overcome speculation, isolation from life, is evidenced by the cross-cutting motives of his future stories: "Pan Apolek", "The Tale of the Woman", "Jesus' Sin".

Babel considered Russian classic literature too serious. Modeling the literature of the future, he believed that it needed “our national Maupassant”: he would remind you what beauty is in the sun, and in the “road burned by the heat”, and in the “fat and crafty guy”, and in the “healthy peasant clumsy girl” . To the south, to the sea, to the sun, he believed, both Russian people and Russian writers should reach out. "fertile bright sun Gogol's" - then almost no one had this, Babel believed. Even Gorky, he wrote, "in love ... for the sun has something from the head" (essay "Odessa").

creative setting

Having met the revolution with hope, Babel in December 1917 began working in the foreign department of the Petrograd Cheka. In March 1918 he became a correspondent for the St. Petersburg newspaper New life”, where M. Gorky published his “Untimely Thoughts”. Babel's last correspondence in Novaya Zhizn was dated July 2, 1918; on July 6 of the same year, the newspaper was closed along with other opposition publications (these materials were first published abroad in the book Forgotten Babel, Ardis publishing house, 1979). Babel wrote about Petersburg in the first years of the revolution. His routes are indicative: he went to the hospital mortuary ("every morning they sum up the results there"): to the maternity hospital (where emaciated mothers give birth to "non-bearers"); to the slaughterhouse (where animals are slaughtered), he wrote about the commissariat, where a petty thief is brutally beaten to death (“Evening”). Being in the grip of romantic illusions, the writer hoped for the justice of the revolution. He thought: “This is the idea, it must be carried through to the end. We have to make a revolution somehow." But the image of devastation overturned the “idea”, placed doubt in it. In the essay “The Palace of Motherhood”, Babel wrote: “Someday we must make a revolution. Throwing a rifle on your shoulder and shooting at each other is, perhaps, sometimes not stupid. But this is not the whole revolution. Who knows - maybe this is not a revolution at all? You have to have good children. And this is - I know - a real revolution.

It was clear that the writer was guided by traditional universal moral values. He did not yet know how they would be deformed.

A diary

The end of 1919 - the beginning of 1920 Babel spends in Odessa, where he works as the head of the editorial and publishing department of the State Publishing House of Ukraine. In the spring of 1920 he went to the front in the First Cavalry Army as a correspondent for the newspaper "Red Cavalryman" under the pseudonym Kirill Vasilievich Lyutov, Russian. Moving with units, he wrote propaganda articles, kept a diary of military operations, as well as his personal diary. Somewhere along with the convoy moved his manuscripts (many of them disappeared). Only one notebook has survived - a unique document, forgotten by him in Kyiv with the translator M.Ya. Ovrutskaya (first published in the magazine "Friendship of Peoples", 1987, No. 12). A native of Kyiv was his first wife, the artist E. B. Gronfain (daughter of a prominent Kyiv industrialist), whose marriage actually broke up in the first half of the 1920s.

At the front, Babel fell into the midst of the Cossacks. Originally an irregular army, the Cossacks in tsarist times passed military service with their equipment, their horses and military weapons. During the cavalry campaign, the Cossacks cut off from the rear were forced to feed themselves and provide themselves with horses at the expense of the local population, which often led to bloody skirmishes. In addition, the Cossacks went to the places where they fought in the First world war. They were irritated by someone else's way of life, a foreign culture, attempts by Jews, Poles, Ukrainians to maintain their stable way of life. The habit of war dulled in them the fear of death, the sense of life. And the Cossacks gave vent to their fatigue, anarchism, arrogance, a cold-blooded attitude towards their own and even more so someone else's death, disregard for the personal dignity of another person. Violence was commonplace for them.

Babel saw that in the depths of human psychology lived a vague instinctive impulse towards freedom and will. At the same time, he keenly felt the immaturity, lack of culture, and rudeness of the Cossack masses, and it was difficult for him to imagine how the ideas of the revolution would germinate in this consciousness.

Staying in the First Cavalry put Babel in a special position. A Jew among the Cossacks, he was doomed to loneliness. An intellectual whose heart trembled at the sight of cruelty and the destruction of culture, he could be doubly doomed to loneliness. Nevertheless, Babel still had many friends among the cavalry. His nostalgia grew out of an aversion to violence and destruction.

“Pity villages. Unfinished huts. half naked people. We are ruining radically...” (September 2, 1920). “Klevan, its roads, street, peasants and communism are far apart” (July 11, 1920); "... This is how freedom looks at first" (July 12, 1920). Babel reacted to all this sharply: "There is no outcome ahead" (July 12, 1920).

Judging by the diary, a tangle of complex thoughts and feelings was born in Babel's soul. In his relations with the revolution, in the words of A. Blok, a tragic "inseparability and inseparability" arose.

Cavalry

At the end of the struggle between the Red Army and Poland in 1920, Babel, who had recovered from typhus, returned to Odessa. Soon he began to write about the revolution. The material was the experience gained during the cavalry campaign. In 1922-1923, his stories were published on the pages of city newspapers and magazines (“Evening issue of Izvestia”, “Silhouettes”, “Sailor”, “Lava”, etc.), stylized as a description of “The First Cavalry” (“Grischuk”), as well as a part of "Odessa stories" ("King"). After meeting Mayakovsky in Odessa in 1923, Babel was published in Moscow in the magazines Lef, Krasnaya Nov, Searchlight, and others.

Prone to metaphorical thinking, confident that the style is held together by "the adhesion of individual particles", Babel wrote in one of the stories: "And we heard the great silence of the felling." He deliberately neglected habitual notions where the felling could not be great, he disregarded reality, where the felling could only seem silent. Born artistic image was a metaphor for the revolution in Cavalry.

The fascination with the power of the masses, which later, in the 1930s, turned out to be detrimental to his consciousness and fate, during the years when work was underway on Cavalry, acted as an all-encompassing interest in the liberated, free, primordial forces of life. The cavalrymen looked like Blok’s “blank”, that “without the name of a saint”, “ready for anything” (“nothing to be sorry about”) - went “into the distance”, but they were clearly heroized. The reader's imagination was struck by their naive-innocent and naively-cruel view of the world; it was not clear whether they pleased or frightened the author.

Enriched with experience real life, indeed seeing in the revolution not only strength, but also “tears and blood”, Babel in his stories answered the question that he wrote in his diary during the days of the Polish campaign: “What is our Cossack?” Finding in the Cossack both “junk”, and “revolutionary”, and “bestial cruelty”, Babel in “Konarmiya” melted everything in one crucible, and the Cossacks appeared as artistic characters with the indissolubility of their internally woven contradictory properties. The dominant feature was the image of the characters of the cavalrymen from the inside, with the help of their own votes. The writer was interested in their self-consciousness. In such a fantastic style, the short stories “Salt”, “Treason”, “Biography of Pavlichenko, Matvey Rodionovich”, “Letter”, etc. were written.

Many short stories were written on behalf of the intelligent storyteller Lyutov. His loneliness, his alienation, his heart trembling at the sight of cruelty, his desire to merge with the mass, which is coarser than him, but also more victorious, his curiosity, his appearance- all this biographically resembled Babel in 1920. The duet of voices - the author and Lyutov - is organized in such a way that the reader always feels the overtone of the direct voice of the real author. Confessional intonation in the utterance in the first person enhances the illusion of intimacy, contributes to the identification of the narrator with the author. And it is no longer clear who - Lyutov or Babel - says about himself: "I was exhausted and raked under the grave crown went forward, begging fate for the simplest of skills - the ability to kill a person."

Babel sympathizes with Lyutov, as a person can sympathize with his former self. However, Babel is already aloof and ironic about his romanticism. This creates a distance between Lyutov and the author. Distance also exists between Lyutov and the cavalry. Thanks to the illumination in different mirrors - the mirror of self-expression, self-knowledge, in the mirror of another consciousness - the characters of the cavalrymen and Lyutov acquire a greater volume than if each of them was only alone with his "I". It becomes clear that the origins of the behavior of the Cavalry lie in the sphere of everyday life, physiological, socio-historical, in the experience of centuries of history and in the situation of war and revolution.

Babel wanted to find a form for the embodiment of the temporal and the eternal in the revolution, to understand the connection between the individual, the social and the existential. He found it in the complexity of the parable with its allegorical meaning hidden in the depths of the narrative, with its philosophizing, which, at first glance, seems unpretentious and naive (“Gedali”, “Pan Apolek”, “The Way to Brody”, etc.). Like many others, Babel perceived the revolution as "the intersection of a million-strong primitiveness" and "a mighty, powerful stream of life." But the impossibility to merge, to identify with new force. That is why the bitter phrase of the narrator “The chronicle of everyday atrocities oppresses me tirelessly, like a heart defect” was perceived by readers as a groan that escaped from the soul of the writer himself.

"Odessa stories"

The Odessa Tales (1921-1923) became the apotheosis of the liberated forces of life. Babel always romanticized Odessa: in Odessa there was joy, "ardor, lightness and charming - sometimes sad, sometimes touching - a sense of life." Life could be "good...bad", but in any case "extraordinarily...interesting". It was this attitude to life that Babel considered adequate for the revolution. In real Odessa, Moldavanka, K. G. Paustovsky recalled, “was called the part of the city near the freight railway station, where two thousand raiders and thieves lived.” In Babel Odessa, this world is turned upside down. The outskirts of the city turns into a theater stage, where dramas of passion are played out. Everything is taken out into the street: weddings, and family quarrels, and deaths, and funerals. Everyone participates in the action, laughing, fighting, eating, cooking, changing places. If this is a wedding, then the tables are set "the entire length of the yard", and there are so many of them that they stick their tail out of the gate on Hospital Street ("King"). If this is a funeral, then such a funeral, which “Odessa has not yet seen, but the world will not see” (“How It Was Done in Odessa”). In this world, the “sovereign emperor” is placed lower than the street “king” Beni Krik, and official life, its norms, its dry, escheat laws are ridiculed, lowered, destroyed by laughter. The language of the characters is free, it is saturated with meanings that lie in the subtext, the characters understand each other from a half-word, from a half-hint, the style is mixed in Russian-Jewish, Odessa jargon, which was introduced into literature even before Babel at the beginning of the 20th century. Soon, Babel's aphorisms dispersed into proverbs and sayings (“Benya knows for a raid”, “But why was it necessary to take away our gramophones?”).

Babel in criticism

With the publication of stories from the Cavalry cycle, Babel's work became the subject of serious controversy. The guardians of the “barracks order” in literature from the very beginning considered the Cavalry to be the “poetry of banditry”, a slander on the Red Army (N. Vezhnev. Babel’s Babism from Krasnaya Novi. October, 1924, No. 3). Benevolent critics, defending Babel, believed that the most important thing for a writer was “to express his artistic worldview” (A. K. Voronsky).

Babel explained that the creation of the heroic history of the First Cavalry was not part of his intentions. But the controversy did not subside. In 1928, Cavalry was again fired upon from the positions, as Babel said, of “non-commissioned Marxism”: indignation at the rebuke of Gorky, who took Babel under his protection, Pravda printed open letter S. M. Budyonny Gorky, where Babel was again accused of slandering the First Cavalry. Gorky did not renounce Babel (their friendship continued well into the 1930s). The tension around the name of Babel persisted, although Cavalry was continuously reprinted (in 1930 the next edition sold out within seven days, and Gosizdat began preparing the next issue).

A crisis

The crisis overtook the writer at the zenith of creative maturity. Even before the release of Cavalry, Babel began work on scripts as a separate book: Benya Krik and Wandering Stars (both 1925). The ability to see the world as a spectacle seemed to Babel the way to new works. But the writer considered the scripts unsuccessful. At the same time, he wrote the play "Sunset", which critics assessed negatively, seeing in it only the theme of the destruction of old patriarchal family relations; she was embarrassed by the "tragic anguish", the insufficient comedy of the play. The writer Babel was looking for new forms of life, he needed new experience: since 1925, he traveled a lot around the country (Leningrad, Kyiv, Voronezh province, southern Russia), worked as a secretary of the village council in the village of Molodenovo on the Moscow River. In 1925 Babel experienced a short but stormy romance with actress T. V. Kashirina. In 1926, her son Mikhail was born from Babel, who was later adopted by her husband, writer Vsevolod Ivanov.

Babel intended to write in hot topics(collected materials for a book about the Civil War). Since 1927, when the writer went abroad to visit his first family (Babel, as if foreseeing the prospects for life in the USSR, managed to send his mother and sister first to Switzerland, then helped his first wife emigrate to France), he almost every year went abroad (1927, 1928, 1932, 1933, 1935, 1936). In 1934 he spoke (very brightly) at the First Congress of Writers and joined the Union. In 1935 in Paris at the congress of writers in defense of culture, he made a presentation. His speech, flavored with humor, in impeccable French, was met with a standing ovation. It must be said that initially Babel was not included in the Soviet delegation, and only thanks to an urgent request French writers Babel appeared at the congress when it had already begun.

The surviving correspondence with the publishers (Vyach. Polonsky) betrays his despair. He rushes about: he participates in the creation of the collective novel "Big Fires" (1927), publishes his old stories in the almanac "Pass" (No. 6). He associated the internal causes of the crisis not only with his maximalism, but also with "limited possibilities of fulfillment," as he cautiously wrote in a private letter from Paris in July 1928.

But in literary circles, the legend of the “glorified silent man” was already born, who kept his manuscripts in tightly locked chests. The writer himself spoke from time to time about his muteness, about the desire to overcome the "flowery" style, about attempts to write in a new way and about the torment of these efforts. Fussy criticism spurred the writer on, assuring that as soon as he finally renounced his former self, stopped spending years on “conquering the army of words”, overcome his “childhood mistakes” and cling to the “new reality”, everything would go smoothly. Babel tried, although more than once he complained about the impossibility of "catching a literary fever." In 1929-1930 he saw collectivization up close. Then, in 1930, he wrote the story “Kolyvushka” about her, giving it a subtitle: from the book “The Great Old Woman” (published only in 1956 in the charity issue of the Prostor magazine). Babel again pitted the high and the low with their foreheads, the power of the mighty spiritual health and the aggressiveness of ugliness, the primordial justice of the industrious man and the insatiable craving dark force to self-affirmation. As before, he reached the original sources of life, and portrayed their extermination as a tragedy of collectivization.

A great trauma for the writer was the rejected joint work with S. M. Eisenstein on the film "Bezhin Meadow" (banned and destroyed). Nevertheless, in the 1930s he created the stories "Awakening", "Guy de Maupassant". The last collection of stories came out in 1936. The last appearance in the press is one of new year wishes, published under the heading "Literary Dreams" in the "Literary Gazette" on December 31, 1938.

Babel was well aware that his disagreements with the era were by no means of a stylistic order. In letters to his relatives, he complained about the fear that causes the editor of the excessive topicality of his stories. However, his artistic potential was inexhaustible. Almost in the most tragic days for the country - in 1937 - Babel creates another great parable - "Di Grasso". He again depicted a world displaced by passion. Only now this passion is art.

End

May 15, 1939 Babel was arrested at a dacha in Peredelkino near Moscow. The writer was accused of "anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activities in the preparation of terrorist acts ... against the leaders of the CPSU (b) and the Soviet government. Under torture, Babel gave false testimony, but at the last court session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on January 21, 1940, he refused them.

Fourteen years later, in 1954, in the conclusion of the military prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Dolzhenko, on the rehabilitation of Babel, it was said: “What served as the basis for his arrest is not visible from the case materials, since the arrest warrant was issued on June 23, 1939, that is, 35 days after Babel's arrest.

During the arrest, all his manuscripts were confiscated - 24 folders. According to the widow of the writer A. N. Pirozhkova (who fought for Babel from the first days of her arrest), these were sketches and plans for stories, two novels, translations, diaries, notebooks, personal letters to his wife. Not found.

Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel(real name Bobel) (July 1 (13), 1894 - January 27, 1940) - Russian writer.

Babel Isaak Immanuilovich (1894–1940), Russian writer.

Born on July 1 (13), 1894 in Odessa on Moldavanka, in the family of a Jewish merchant. In his Autobiography (1924), Babel wrote: “At the insistence of his father, he studied the Hebrew language, the Bible, and the Talmud until the age of sixteen. It was difficult to live at home, because from morning to night they were forced to study many sciences. I rested at school. The program of the Odessa Commercial School, where the future writer studied, was very intense. Chemistry, political economy, jurisprudence, accounting, commodity science, three foreign languages and other items. Speaking of "rest", Babel had in mind the feeling of freedom: according to his recollections, during breaks or after classes, students went to the port, to Greek coffee houses or to Moldavanka "to drink cheap Bessarabian wine in the cellars." All these impressions formed the basis early prose Babel and his Odessa stories.

Babel began writing at the age of fifteen. For two years he wrote in French - under the influence of G. Flaubert, G. Maupassant and his French teacher Vadon. The element of French speech sharpened the sensation literary language and style. Already in his first stories, Babel strove for stylistic elegance and the highest degree of artistic expression. “I take a trifle - an anecdote, a bazaar story, and make of it a thing that I myself can’t tear myself away from ... They will laugh at him not at all because he is cheerful, but because you always want to laugh with human luck,” - he later explained his creative aspirations. The main property of his prose was revealed early: the combination of heterogeneous layers - both the language and the way of life depicted. For his early creativity characteristic is the story Into the Hole (1915), in which the hero buys from the owner of the apartment for five rubles the right to spy on the life of prostitutes renting the next room.

After graduating from the Kyiv Commercial Institute, in 1915 Babel came to St. Petersburg, although he did not have the right to reside outside the Pale of Settlement. After his first stories (Stariy Shloyme, 1913, etc.), published in Odessa and Kyiv, went unnoticed, the young writer became convinced that only the capital could bring him fame. However, the editors of St. Petersburg literary magazines advised Babel to quit writing and engage in trade. This went on for more than a year - until he came to Gorky in the Chronicle magazine, where the stories Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna and Mama, Rimma and Alla were published (1916, No. 11). The stories aroused the interest of the reading public and the judiciary. Babel was going to be prosecuted for pornography. The February Revolution saved him from trial, which had already been scheduled for March 1917.

Babel served in the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), as a correspondent for the newspaper "Red Cavalryman" was in the First Cavalry Army, participated in food expeditions, worked in the People's Commissariat for Education, in the Odessa Provincial Committee, fought on the Romanian, northern, Polish fronts, was a reporter for Tiflis and Petrograd newspapers.

He returned to artistic creativity in 1923: in the journal Lef (1924, No. 4), the stories Salt, Letter, Death of Dolgushov, King, etc. were published. Literary critic A. Voronsky wrote about them: “Babel is not in front of the reader, but somewhere then a large artistic way study and therefore captivates the reader not only with the "gut" and the unusualness of life material, but also ... with culture, intelligence and mature hardness of talent ... ".

Over time, the writer's artistic prose took shape in cycles that gave the names to the collections Cavalry (1926), Jewish stories (1927) and Odessa stories (1931). The basis for the collection of stories Cavalry were diary entries. The first Cavalry, shown by Babel, differed from the beautiful legend that official propaganda composed about the Budyonnovites. Unjustified cruelty, the animal instincts of people overshadowed the weak sprouts of humanity that Babel at first saw in the revolution and in the "cleansing" civil war. The Red commanders did not forgive him for "slandering". The persecution of the writer began, at the origins of which stood S.M. Budyonny. Gorky, defending Babel, wrote that he showed the fighters of the First Cavalry "better, more truthful than Gogol of the Cossacks." Budyonny, on the other hand, called the Cavalry "an overbearing Babel slander." Contrary to Budyonny's opinion, Babel's work has already been regarded as one of the most significant phenomena in modern literature. “Babel was not like any of his contemporaries. But a short time has passed - contemporaries are beginning to gradually resemble Babel. His influence on literature is becoming more and more obvious,” wrote literary critic A. Lezhnev in 1927.

Attempts to discern passion and romance in the revolution turned out to be spiritual anguish for the writer. “Why do I have an unending longing? Because (...) I am at a big, ongoing memorial service,” he wrote in his diary. A kind of salvation for Babel was the fantastic, exaggerated world of the Odessa stories. The action of the stories in this cycle - The King, How It Was Done in Odessa, Father, Lyubka Kazak - takes place in an almost mythological city. Babel's Odessa is populated by characters who, according to the writer, have "ardor, lightness and a charming - sometimes sad, sometimes touching - feeling of life" (Odessa). The real Odessa criminals Mishka Yaponchik, Sonya Zolotaya Ruchka and others, in the writer's imagination, turned into artistically authentic images of Beni Krik, Lyubka Kazak, Froim Grach. Babel portrayed the "King" of the Odessa underworld Benya Krik as a protector of the weak, a kind of Robin Hood. The style of the Odessa stories is distinguished by brevity, conciseness of the language and at the same time vivid imagery and metaphor. Babel's demands on himself were extraordinary. The story of Lyubka Kazak alone had about thirty serious revisions, over each of which the writer worked for several months. Paustovsky in his memoirs cites the words of Babel: “We take it with style, with style. I am ready to write a story about washing clothes, and maybe it will sound like the prose of Julius Caesar.

AT literary heritage Babel, there are about eighty stories, two plays - Sunset (1927, first staged in 1927 by director V. Fedorov on the stage of the Baku Workers' Theater) and Maria (1935, first staged in 1994 by director M. Levitin on the stage of the Moscow Hermitage Theater), five screenplays, including Wandering Stars (1926, based on novel of the same name Sholom Aleichem), journalism.

“It is very difficult to write on topics that interest me, very difficult, if you want to be honest,” he wrote from Paris in 1928. Trying to protect himself, Babel wrote an article Lies, betrayal and smerdyakovism (1937), glorifying the show trials of “enemies of the people ". Shortly thereafter, he confessed in a private letter: “Life is very bad: both mentally and physically - there is nothing to show to good people". The tragedy of the heroes of the Odessa stories was embodied in the short story Froim Grach (1933, published in 1963 in the USA): the title character tries to conclude a "pact of honor" with the Soviet authorities and dies at the hands of the Chekists.

AT last years life, the writer turned to the topic of creativity, which he interpreted as the best that a person is capable of. One of his last stories was written about this - a parable about magic power art by Di Grasso (1937).

On May 15, 1939, Babel was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino on charges of "anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activity" and espionage (case No. 419). During his arrest, several manuscripts were confiscated from him, which turned out to be forever lost (15 folders, 11 notebooks, 7 notebooks with notes). The fate of his written novel about the Cheka remains unknown.

During interrogations, Babel was subjected to severe torture. He was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and shot the next day, January 27, 1940. The execution list was personally signed by Joseph Stalin. In list possible causes Stalin's dislike for Babel is called the fact that he was a close friend of Y. Okhotnikov, I. Yakir, B. Kalmykov, D. Schmidt, E. Yezhova and other "enemies of the people."

In 1954 he was posthumously rehabilitated. With the active assistance of Konstantin Paustovsky, who loved Babel very much and left warm memories of him, after 1956 Babel was returned to Soviet literature. In 1957, the collection "Selected" was published with a preface by Ilya Ehrenburg, who called Isaac Babel one of prominent writers XX century, a brilliant stylist and master of the short story.

Currently, in Odessa, citizens are raising funds for the monument to Isaac Babel. Already obtained permission from the city council; the monument will stand at the intersection of Zhukovsky and Richelieu streets, opposite the house where he once lived. The grand opening is planned for early July 2011, on the occasion of the writer's birthday.

Bibliography

In total, Babel wrote about 80 stories, combined into collections, two plays and five screenplays.

• A series of articles "Diary" (1918) about work in the Cheka and Narkompros
• A series of essays "On the field of honor" (1920) based on front-line notes of French officers
• Collection "Cavalry" (1926)
• Jewish Stories (1927)
• "Odessa stories" (1931)
• The play "Sunset" (1927)
• The play "Maria" (1935)
• The unfinished novel Velyka Krinitsa, of which only the first chapter, Gapa Guzhva, was published. New world", No. 10, 1931)
• fragment of the story "Jew" (published in 1968)

Babel Isaak Immanuilovich was born in Odessa in the family of a Jewish merchant. The beginning of the century was a time of social unrest and a mass exodus of Jews from Russian Empire. Babel himself survived the 1905 pogrom (he was hidden by a Christian family), and his grandfather Shoyl was one of the 300 murdered Jews.

To get into preparatory class Odessa commercial school of Nicholas I, Babel had to exceed the quota for Jewish students (10% in the Pale of Settlement, 5% outside it and 3% for both capitals), but despite the positive marks that gave the right to study, the place was given to another a young man whose parents gave a bribe to the leadership of the school. For a year of education at home, Babel completed a two-class program. In addition to traditional disciplines, he studied the Talmud and studied music. After another unsuccessful attempt to enter the Odessa University (again due to quotas), he ended up at the Kiev Institute of Finance and Entrepreneurship. There he met his future wife Evgenia Gronfein.

Fluent in Yiddish, Russian and French, Babel wrote his first works in French, but they have not reached us. Babel published the first stories in Russian in the journal Chronicle. Then, on the advice of M. Gorky, he "went into the people" and changed several professions.

In 1920 he was a soldier and political worker of the Cavalry Army. In 1924 he published a number of short stories, which later formed the Cavalry and Odessa Tales cycles. Babel was able to masterfully convey in Russian the style of literature created in Yiddish (this is especially noticeable in Odessa Tales, where in places the direct speech of his characters is an interlinear translation from Yiddish).

Soviet criticism of those years, paying tribute to the talent and significance of Babel's work, pointed to "antipathy to the cause of the working class" and reproached him for "naturalism and apology for the elemental principle and the romanticization of banditry."

In "Odessa Tales" Babel depicts in a romantic way the life of Jewish criminals of the early 20th century, finding exotic features and strong characters in everyday life of thieves, raiders, as well as artisans and petty merchants.

In 1928 Babel published the play "Sunset" (staged at the 2nd Moscow Art Theater), in 1935 - the play "Maria". Babel's Peru also owns several scripts. Master short story, Babel strives for conciseness and accuracy, combining in the images of his characters, plot collisions and descriptions a huge temperament with outward dispassion. The flowery, metaphor-laden language of his early stories is later replaced by a strict and restrained narrative manner.

In May 1939, Babel was arrested on charges of "anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activities" and shot on January 27, 1940. In 1954 he was posthumously rehabilitated.

Babel's work had a huge impact on the writers of the so-called "South Russian school" (Ilf, Petrov, Olesha, Kataev, Paustovsky, Svetlov, Bagritsky) and was widely recognized in the Soviet Union, his books were translated into many foreign languages.

BABEL'S MIGHTY FUN

Fazil Iskander

At the age of thirty, already a member of the Writers' Union, I read Babel for the first time. He was just released after rehabilitation. Of course, I knew that there was such a writer from Odessa, but I did not read a single line.

As I remember now, I sat down with his book on the porch of our Sukhum house, opened it and was blinded by its stylistic brilliance. After that, for several more months, I not only read and reread his stories myself, but also tried to present them to all my acquaintances, most often in my own performance. This frightened some, some of my friends, as soon as I took up a book, tried to sneak away, but I put them in their place, and then they were grateful to me or were forced to pretend that they were grateful, because I tried my best.

I felt that it was beautiful literature, but I did not understand why and how prose becomes high-class poetry. At that time I wrote only poetry and I took the advice of some of my literary friends to try their hand at prose as a secret insult. Of course, I understood intellectually that any good literature poetic. In any case, it should be. But Babel's poetry was evident in more literally this word. In which? Constriction - immediately a bull by the horns. The self-sufficiency of the phrase, the unprecedented diversity of the human condition per unit of literary space. Babel's phrases can be quoted endlessly, like the lines of a poet. Now I think that the spring of his inspirational rhythms is tightened too tight, he immediately takes on too high a tone, which makes it difficult for the effect of increasing tension, but then I did not notice this. In a word, I was captivated by its full-blooded Black Sea fun in an almost invariable combination with biblical sadness.

Cavalry shocked me with the original authenticity of revolutionary pathos, combined with the incredible accuracy and paradoxical thinking of every Red Army soldier. But thinking is, as in " Quiet Don”, is transmitted only through a gesture, a word, an action. By the way, these things are close to each other and some general epic melody of a swift narrative.

Reading Cavalry, you understand that the element of revolution is not imposed on anyone. It matured within the people as a dream of retribution and renewal of the entire Russian life. But that furious determination with which the heroes of Cavalry go to their deaths, but also, without hesitation, are ready to chop off everyone who is an enemy or at the moment seems to be such, suddenly reveals through the author's irony and bitterness the possibility of future tragic mistakes.

Is the beautiful, sweeping Don Quixote of the revolution, after its victory, capable of transforming into a wise creator, and will it not seem to him, so trusting and ingenuous, in new conditions, in the struggle with new difficulties, the familiar order: “Chop!”?

And this anxiety, how distant theme music, no, no, yes, and it will stir up in the Cavalry.

One smart critic once, in a conversation with me, expressed doubts about Babel's Odessa stories: is it possible to sing of bandits?

The question is, of course, not an easy one. Nevertheless, the literary victory of these stories is obvious. It's all about the conditions of the game that the artist sets before us. In the beam of light with which Babel illuminated the pre-revolutionary life of Odessa, we have no choice: either Benya Krik - or a policeman, or the rich man Tartakovsky - or Benya Krik. Here, it seems to me, the same principle is used as in folk songs glorifying robbers: the idealization of the instrument of retribution for the injustice of life.

There is so much humor in these stories, so many subtle and accurate observations that the profession of the protagonist recedes into the background, we are picked up by a powerful stream of liberation of a person from ugly complexes of fear, musty habits, wretched and deceitful integrity.

I think that Babel understood art as a celebration of life, and the wise sadness that occasionally opens up at this celebration not only does not spoil it, but also gives it spiritual authenticity. Sadness is a constant companion of the knowledge of life. He who honestly knows sorrow is worthy of honest joy. And this joy is brought to people by the creative gift of our wonderful writer Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel.

And thank God that fans of this wonderful gift can now get acquainted with the living testimonies of contemporaries who knew the writer closely during his lifetime.

Despite the fact that the books of Isaac Babel were popular all over the world, he fell victim to the "great purge" of Joseph Stalin, allegedly because of his long-term relationship with the wife of the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov. Babel was arrested by the NKVD in Peredelkino on the night of May 15, 1939. After being recognized during interrogation as a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, he was shot on January 27, 1940.

early years

The biography of Isaac Babel begins in Ukraine. The future writer was born in Odessa on Moldavanka in a typical Jewish family. Shortly after his birth, the Babel family moved to the port city of Nikolaev. Later, in 1906, they moved to a more respectable area of ​​Odessa. Babel used Moldavanka as the setting for Odessa Tales and Sunset.

Although Babel's stories present his family as "dispossessed and confused people", they were relatively well off. According to his autobiographical accounts, Isaac Babel's father, Manus, was an impoverished shopkeeper. However, Babel's daughter, Natalie Babel-Brown, stated that her father fabricated this and other biographical details in order to "create a background that would be perfect for a young Soviet writer who was not a member of the Communist Party." In fact, Babel's father was an agricultural implements dealer and owned a large warehouse.

As a teenager, Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel hoped to get into the preparatory class of the Odessa Commercial School. Nicholas I. However, first he had to overcome the Jewish quota. Despite Babel getting enough grades to pass, his place was given to another boy whose parents bribed school officials. As a result, he was taught by private tutors.

After the Jewish quota also thwarted an attempt to enter Odessa University, Babel entered the Kyiv Institute of Finance and Business. There he met Evgenia Borisovna Gronfein, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. In the end, she fled with him to Odessa.

Path to Glory

In 1915, Babel graduated from high school and moved to Petrograd, in violation of laws restricting Jews from living within the Pale of Settlement. He was fluent in French, Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish, and Isaac Babel's early stories were written in French. However, none of his histories have survived in that language. The most famous work of Isaac Babel is Odessa Stories.

In St. Petersburg, Babel met Maxim Gorky, who published some of his stories in his literary magazine Letopis (Chronicle). Gorky advised the aspiring writer to get more life experience. The author of "Odessa Tales" Isaac Babel wrote in his autobiography: "... I owe everything to this meeting and still pronounce the name of Alexei Maksimovich Gorky with love and admiration." One of his most famous semi-autobiographical stories, The Story of My Dovecote (The Story of My Dovecote), was dedicated specifically to Gorky.

The "Bathroom Window" story was deemed too obscene by the censors, and Babel was charged with violating Article 1001 of the Criminal Code.

There is very little information about Babel's whereabouts during and after the October Revolution. According to one of his stories, called "The Road", he served on the Romanian front until early December 1917. In March 1918 he returned to Petrograd as a reporter for Gorky's Menshevik newspaper Novaya Zhizn. Isaac Babel's stories and reports continued to be published there until Novaya Zhizn was forcibly closed by Lenin's order in July 1918.

October coming

During the Russian Civil War, which led to the party's monopoly on the printed word, Babel worked in the publishing house of the Odessa Provincial Committee (the Regional Committee of the CPSU), in the food procurement division (see his story "Ivan-Maria"), in the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education ), as well as printing houses.

After the end of the Civil War, the author of "Odessa Tales" Isaac Babel worked as a reporter for the newspaper "Dawn of the East" ("Dawn of the East"), published in Tbilisi. In one of his articles, he expressed regret that Lenin's New Economic Policy was not more widely implemented.

Personal life

Babel married Evgenia Gronfein on August 9, 1919 in Odessa. In 1929, their marriage produced a daughter, Natalie Babel-Brown, who was brought up specifically to become a scholar and editor of her father's works. By 1925, Yevgenia Babel, feeling betrayed by her husband's infidelity and filled with a growing hatred of Communism, emigrated to France. Babel saw her several times during his visits to Paris. During this period, he also entered into a long-term romantic relationship with Tamara Kashirina. They had a son, Emmanuil Babel, who was later adopted by his stepfather Vsevolod Ivanov. Emmanuil Babel's name was changed to Mikhail Ivanov and he later became famous artist.

After the final break with Tamara, Babel tried to reconcile with Evgenia. In 1932, Babel met a sultry Siberian named Antonina Pirozhkova, and after failing to convince his wife to return to Moscow, he and Antonina began living together. In 1939, their daughter Lydia Babel was born in their civil marriage.

In the ranks of the red cavalry

In 1920, Babel served under Semyon Budyonny and witnessed the military campaign of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. Poland was not alone in its newfound opportunities and challenges. Almost all of the new independent neighbors began to fight for borders: Romania fought with Hungary for Transylvania, Yugoslavia with Italy - for Rijeka. Poland argued with Czechoslovakia for Cieszyn and Silesia, with Germany for Poznan, and with the Ukrainians (and, as a result, with the Ukrainian SSR - part of the USSR) - for Eastern Galicia.

Babel documented the horrors of the war he saw in a diary from 1920 (Konarmeisky Diary, 1920). "Cavalry" by Isaac Babel is just the result literary processing aforementioned diary. This book is a collection of short stories such as “Crossing the Zbruch River” and “My First Goose.” The terrible violence of the Red Cavalry seemed to contrast sharply with the gentle nature of Babel himself.

Babel wrote: "It was not until 1923 that I learned to express my thoughts in a clear and not very long way, and then returned to writing." Several stories that were later included in Cavalry were published in Vladimir Mayakovsky's LEF magazine in 1924. Babel's honest description of the cruel realities of the war, far from revolutionary propaganda, brought him numerous enemies. According to recent research, Marshal Budyonny was furious at Babel's description of Red Cossack looting. However, Gorky's influence not only protected Babel from the wrath of the illustrious commander, but also helped in the publication of the book. In 1929, Cavalry was transferred to English language J. Harland, and then into a number of other languages.

"Odessa Tales" by Babel

Returning to Odessa, the talented writer began writing "Odessa Stories" - a series of stories about the Odessa ghetto of Moldavanka. They are based on the life of Jewish criminals before and after the October Revolution. It is the outstanding and realistic characters that make Isaac Babel's prose remarkable - Benya Krik and other characters in his "Stories" forever entered the golden fund of anti-heroes of Russian literature.

Conflict with power

In 1930, Babel traveled around Ukraine and witnessed the brutality of forced collectivization and the fight against the kulaks. As Stalin consolidated his grip on the Soviet intelligentsia and decreed that all writers and artists must conform to socialist realism, Babel increasingly moved away from public life. During the campaign against "formalism", Babel was publicly denounced for poor performance. At this time, many other Soviet writers were frightened and feverishly rewrote their past works to suit Stalin's wishes.

At the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934), Babel ironically remarked that he was becoming "a master of the new literary genre, genre of silence. The American Max Eastman describes Babel's growing reticence as an artist in a chapter titled "The Silence of Isaac Babel" in his 1934 book Artists in Uniform.

Paris voyage

In 1932, after numerous requests, he was allowed to visit his wife Eugenie in Paris. While visiting his wife and their daughter Natalie, the writer was tormented by the question of whether to return to Soviet Russia or not. In conversations and letters to friends, he expressed his desire to be " a free man”, and also expressed the fear that he would no longer be able to earn a living exclusively by writing. On July 27, 1933, Babel wrote a letter to Yuri Annenkov, saying that for some reason he had been summoned to Moscow.

After returning to Russia, Babel decided to move in with Pirozhkova, entering into a civil marriage with her, which led to the appearance of a daughter, Lydia. He also collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein on a film about Pavlik Morozov, a child informer for the Soviet secret police. Babel also worked on the scripts for several other Stalinist propaganda films.

Connection with the Yezhov family

While visiting Berlin, the married Babel began an affair with Evgenia Feigenberg, who was a translator at the Soviet embassy. According to the protocols of the writer's interrogation, Evgeniya intrigued the writer with the words: "You don't know me, but I know you well." Even after Yevgenia married the head of the NKVD N. I. Yezhov, their romance continued, and Babel often presided over literary meetings"citizens Yezhova", which were often attended by such luminaries of Soviet culture as Solomon Mikhoels, Leonid Utyosov, Sergei Eisenstein and Mikhail Koltsov. At one of these meetings, Babel said: “Just think, a simple girl from Odessa became the first lady of the kingdom!”

In her memoirs, Antonina declares complete ignorance about her husband's affair with Yezhov's wife. Babel told her that his interest in Yevgenia Yezhova was "purely professional" and was due to his desire to "better understand the party elite."

In retaliation for an affair with his wife, Yezhov ordered that the writer be under constant surveillance by the NKVD. When the Great Purge began in the late 1930s, Yezhov was informed that Babel was spreading rumors about the suspicious death of Maxim Gorky and claimed that his former mentor was killed on the orders of Stalin. It is also alleged that Babel said of Trotsky the following words: "It is impossible to describe his charm and power of influence on all who meet him." Babel also said that Lev Kamenev was "... the brightest connoisseur of language and literature."

However, as the number of victims of the purge grew, Nikolai Yezhov's excessive desire to eliminate all "enemies of the people" placed a heavy burden on the reputation of Stalin and his inner circle. In response, Lavrenty Beria was appointed Yezhov's assistant and quickly usurped the leadership of the NKVD.

Arrest

On May 15, 1939, Antonina Pirozhkova was awakened by four NKVD agents knocking on the door of her Moscow apartment. Despite a strong shock, she agreed to take them to Babel's dacha in Peredelkino. Babel was then arrested. According to Pirozhkova: “In the car, one of the men was sitting in the back with Babel and me, and the other was sitting in front with the driver. Babel said: “The worst thing is that my mother will not receive my letters,” and after that he was silent for a long time. I couldn't say a word. When we arrived at Moscow, I said to Isaac: “I will wait for you, imagining that you just went to Odessa ... only this time there will be no letters ....” He replied: “But I don’t know, what will be my fate. At that moment, the man sitting next to Babel said to me: "We have no claims against you personally." We drove up to the Lubyanka and stopped in front of a massive closed door, where two sentries were standing. Babel kissed me and said: "Someday we will see each other ..." And, without looking back, he got out of the car and went through this door.

According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Babel's arrest became the subject of an urban legend in the NKVD. Babel, according to the NKVD agents, seriously wounded one of their men and also resisted arrest. Nadezhda Mandelstam once declared, without hiding her contempt for the Cheka: “Whenever I hear such tales, I think of the tiny hole in the skull of Isaac Babel, the cautious, smart person With high forehead who has probably never held a gun in his life."

execution

From the day of his arrest, Isaac Babel became unclaimed in the Soviet Union, his name was destroyed, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, deleted from school and university textbooks. He became unacceptable in any public. When the famous director Mark Donskoy premiered the following year, the name of Babel, who worked on the script, was removed from the end credits.

According to Babel's dossier, the writer spent a total of eight months in Lubyanka and Butyrka prison, when a criminal case was fabricated against him for Trotskyism, terrorism and espionage in favor of Austria and France. At the beginning of the interrogations, Babel categorically denied any wrongdoing, but then, three days later, he suddenly "confessed" to everything that the investigator had accused him of, and named many people as co-conspirators. Apparently, he was tortured, almost certainly beaten. Among the investigators who worked on his case were Boris Rhodes, who had a reputation for being a particularly cruel torturer, even by the standards of that time, and Lev Schwartzmann, who at one time tortured a well-known theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Among those whom Babel "accused" of plotting with him were his close friends Sergei Eisenstein, Solomon Mikhoels and Ilya Ehrenburg.

Despite months of prayer and writing letters addressed personally to Beria, Babel was denied access to his unpublished manuscripts. In October 1939, Babel was again called in for questioning and denied all his previous testimony. A statement was recorded: "I ask the investigation to take into account that in prison I nevertheless committed a crime - I slandered several people." This led to further arrests, as the NKVD leadership was very interested in keeping the cases against Mikhoels, Ehrenburg and Eisenstein.

On January 16, 1940, Beria presented Stalin with a list of 457 "enemies of the party and Soviet power" who were in custody, with a recommendation to shoot 346, including Isaac Babel. According to the later testimony of Babel's daughter, Natalie Babel-Brown, his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenty Beria's private halls. It lasted about twenty minutes. The verdict was prepared in advance without any ambiguity: execution by firing squad, which must be carried out immediately. He was shot at 1.30 am on January 27, 1940.

Babel's last recorded words in the trial were: "I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I falsely accused myself. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others... I ask only one thing - let me finish the job. He was shot the next day, and his body was thrown into common grave. All this information was disclosed only in the early 1990s.

According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Babel's ashes were buried with those of Nikolai Yezhov and several other victims of the Great Purge in mass grave at the Donskoy cemetery. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a memorial plaque was placed there, on which it is written: “The remains of innocent, tortured and executed victims of political repression are buried here. May they be remembered forever." The grave of Yevgenia Yezhova, who committed suicide in a psychiatric institution, is less than twenty paces from the grave of her former lover.

According to an earlier official Soviet version, Isaac Babel died in the Gulag on March 17, 1941. Peter Konstantin, who translated all of Babel's letters into English, described the writer's execution as "one of greatest tragedies literature of the 20th century. The works of Isaac Babel are still popular both in the countries of the former USSR and in the West.

BABEL, ISAAK EMMANUILOVICH(1894–1940), Russian Soviet writer. Born on July 1 (13), 1894 in Odessa on Moldavanka, in the family of a Jewish merchant. AT Autobiographies(1924) Babel wrote: “At the insistence of his father, he studied the Hebrew language, the Bible, the Talmud until the age of sixteen. It was difficult to live at home, because from morning to night they were forced to study many sciences. I rested at school. The program of the Odessa Commercial School, where the future writer studied, was very intense. Chemistry, political economy, jurisprudence, accounting, commodity science, three foreign languages ​​and other subjects were studied. Speaking of "rest", Babel had in mind the feeling of freedom: according to his recollections, during breaks or after classes, students went to the port, to Greek coffee houses or to Moldavanka "to drink cheap Bessarabian wine in the cellars." All these impressions later formed the basis of Babel's early prose and his Odessa stories.

Babel began writing at the age of fifteen. For two years he wrote in French - under the influence of G. Flaubert, G. Maupassant and his French teacher Vadon. The element of French speech sharpened the sense of the literary language and style. Already in his first stories, Babel strove for stylistic elegance and the highest degree of artistic expression. “I take a trifle - an anecdote, a bazaar story, and make of it a thing that I myself can’t tear myself away from ... They will laugh at him not at all because he is cheerful, but because you always want to laugh with human luck,” - he later explained his creative aspirations.

The main property of his prose was revealed early: the combination of heterogeneous layers - both the language and the way of life depicted. His early work is characterized by the story In a slit(1915), in which the hero buys for five rubles from the owner of the apartment the right to spy on the life of prostitutes renting the next room.

After graduating from the Kyiv Commercial Institute, in 1915 Babel came to St. Petersburg, although he did not have the right to reside outside the Pale of Settlement. After his first stories ( Old Shloyme, 1913, etc.), published in Odessa and Kyiv, went unnoticed, the young writer became convinced that only the capital could bring him fame. However, the editors of St. Petersburg literary magazines advised Babel to quit writing and engage in trade. This went on for more than a year - until he came to Gorky in the Chronicle magazine, where the stories were published Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna and Mom, Rimma and Alla(1916, No. 11). The stories aroused the interest of the reading public and the judiciary. Babel was going to be prosecuted for pornography. The February Revolution saved him from trial, which had already been scheduled for March 1917.

Babel served in the Extraordinary Commission, as a correspondent for the newspaper "Red Cavalryman" was in the First Cavalry Army, participated in food expeditions, worked in the People's Commissariat of Education, in the Odessa Provincial Committee, fought on the Romanian, northern, Polish fronts, was a reporter for Tiflis and Petrograd newspapers.

He returned to artistic creativity in 1923: stories were published in the journal Lef (1924, No. 4). Salt, Letter, Dolgushov's death, King and others. Literary critic A. Voronsky wrote about them: “Babel, not before the eyes of the reader, but somewhere away from him, has already passed a long artistic path of study and therefore captivates the reader not only with his “gut” and unusual life material, but also. .. culture, intelligence and mature firmness of talent ... ".

Over time, the writer's artistic prose took shape in cycles that gave names to collections Cavalry (1926), Jewish stories(1927) and Odessa stories (1931).

Basis for a collection of stories Cavalry were diary entries. The first Cavalry, shown by Babel, differed from the beautiful legend that official propaganda composed about the Budyonnovites. He was not forgiven for the slander. Gorky, defending Babel, wrote that he showed the fighters of the First Cavalry "better, more truthful than Gogol of the Cossacks." Budyonny called Cavalry"Super-arrogant Babel slander." Nevertheless, Babel's work was already seen as a significant phenomenon in modern literature. “Babel was not like any of his contemporaries. But a short time has passed - contemporaries are beginning to gradually resemble Babel. His influence on literature is becoming more and more obvious,” wrote literary critic A. Lezhnev in 1927.

Attempts to discern passion and romance in the revolution turned out to be spiritual anguish for the writer. “Why do I have an unending longing? Because (...) I am at a big, ongoing memorial service,” he wrote in his diary. A fantastic, exaggerated world became a kind of salvation for Babel Odessa stories. The action of the stories in this cycle is King, How it was done in Odessa, Father, Lyubka Cossack– takes place in an almost mythological city. Babel Odessa is inhabited by characters in whom, according to the writer, there is “arousal, lightness and a charming – sometimes sad, sometimes touching – sense of life” ( Odessa). The real Odessa criminals Mishka Yaponchik, Sonya Zolotaya Ruchka and others, in the writer's imagination, turned into artistically authentic images of Beni Krik, Lyubka Kazak, Froim Grach. Babel portrayed the "King" of the Odessa underworld Benya Krik as a protector of the weak, a kind of Robin Hood. Stylistics Odessa stories is distinguished by conciseness, conciseness of the language and at the same time vivid imagery, metaphor. Babel's demands on himself were extraordinary. Only one story Lyubka Cossack had about thirty major editors, each of which the writer worked for several months. Paustovsky in his memoirs cites the words of Babel: “We take it with style, with style. I am ready to write a story about washing clothes, and maybe it will sound like the prose of Julius Caesar.

In the literary heritage of Babel there are about eighty stories, two plays - Sunset(1927, first staged in 1927 by director V. Fedorov on the stage of the Baku Workers' Theatre) and Maria(1935, first staged in 1994 by director M. Levitin on the stage of the Moscow Hermitage Theater), five screenplays, including wandering stars(1926, based on the novel of the same name by Sholom Aleichem), journalism.

“It is very difficult to write on topics that interest me, very difficult, if you want to be honest,” he wrote from Paris in 1928. In 1937, Babel wrote an article Lies, betrayal and smerdyakovism, glorifying the show trials of "enemies of the people". Shortly thereafter, he admitted in a private letter: "Life is very bad: both mentally and physically - there is nothing to show to good people." The Tragedy of Heroes Odessa stories embodied in a novel Froim Grach(1933, published in 1963 in the USA): the title character tries to conclude a "pact of honor" with the authorities, but dies.

In the last years of his life, the writer turned to the topic of creativity, which he interpreted as the best that a person is capable of. One of his last stories was written about this - a parable about the magical power of art. Di Grasso (1937).

Babel was arrested on May 15, 1939 and, accused of "anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activity", was shot on January 27, 1940.