The Essential Fictions
by Isaac Babel
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Pub Date Nov 15 2017 | Archive Date Oct 05 2017
Description
The Essential Fictions offers contemporary readers seventy-two short stories by one of twentieth-century Russia’s premier storytellers, Isaac Babel. This unique volume, which includes Babel’s famous Red Cavalry series and his Odessa Stories, is 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. Working as a journalist, he witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, and accompanied the Cossack horsemen of the Red Cavalry during the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, distilling these experiences into his fiction. Vinokur highlights Babel’s “horrified hopefulness” and “doleful and bespectacled Jewish comedy” 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 absorb and fascinate contemporary readers interested in eastern European and Jewish literature as well as the history and politics of the twentieth century.
Advance Praise
“Vinokur inspires confidence in his ability to produce an edition of Babel's stories that will be more faithful to the original, both literally and stylistically, than any other available in English.” —Carol J. Avins, editor of Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary and author of Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature, 1917-1934
“Isaac Babel wrote amazingly powerful, stinging sentences of almost brutal, always poetic compactness. It is a gift to have these sentences in this collection of Babel’s stories and short essays, translated by the talented Val Vinokur. Babel, one of the greatest writers in Russian in the 20th century, was murdered by Stalin's secret police in 1940. He was 45. This wonderful book is a reminder of what Soviet brutality destroyed." —Richard Bernstein, former book critic for the The New York Times and columnist for The International Herald Tribune
"Vinokur's lucid translation brilliantly conveys the vivid precision and the emotional edge of Isaac Babel's prose to the English-language reader." —Anya Ulinich, author of Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel and Petropolis
“Isaac Babel wrote amazingly powerful, stinging sentences of almost brutal, always poetic compactness. It is a gift to have these sentences in this collection of Babel’s stories and short essays, translated by the talented Val Vinokur. Babel, one of the greatest writers in Russian in the 20th century, was murdered by Stalin's secret police in 1940. He was 45. This wonderful book is a reminder of what Soviet brutality destroyed." —Richard Bernstein, former book critic for the The New York Times and columnist for The International Herald Tribune
"Vinokur's lucid translation brilliantly conveys the vivid precision and the emotional edge of Isaac Babel's prose to the English-language reader." —Anya Ulinich, author of Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel and Petropolis
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9780810135956 |
| PRICE | $21.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 424 |
