Complete Works Of Isaac Babel

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W. W. Norton & Company, 2002 - 1072 pāgines
A literary event of extraordinary dimensions—the first single-volume edition of all of Isaac Babel's work.

Considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—and the most revered short-story writer since Chekhov—Isaac Babel (1894-1940) left an extraordinary literary legacy that continues to grow, remarkably, more than sixty years after his death in Lubyanka Prison at the hands of Stalin's secret police. Despite Babel's celebrated stature—which had already been achieved during his lifetime—the whole of his work, owing to his arrest and the state of affairs in the Soviet Union, was never assembled in one place.

This magnificent edition of Babel's collected work fulfills a lifelong ambition of Babel's daughter, Nathalie, who has authorized and edited the entire collection, and has collaborated with award-winning translator Peter Constantine in readying the work for publication. Every story or selection included in this volume (147 in total) has been newly edited and translated, beginning with Babel's first published story, "Old Shloyme," originally published in 1913, and concluding with two scenes from a screenplay that Babel did not live to see made into a film. Included in The Complete Works are stories that will be familiar to Babel enthusiasts, like the "Red Cavalry" cycle and his diaries, as well as untranslated stories and other works that appear in English for the first time.

To read Babel is to relive the wild and often terrifying swings of twentieth-century Russian history. No writer has conveyed with such emotion and convulsive energy the tragic story of a modern nation that remained a prisoner of its brutal and repressive past. Combining the compassion of Dostoevsky with the mordant wit of Chekhov, Babel injected a daring social criticism and a palpable sexual tension into the literary climate of post-tsarist Russia. In the process, he created a style so vivid, so lacerating, and so utterly hypnotic that his stories have come to define the sanguinary landscape of the Soviet Union in the years between the two world wars.

As these stories illustrate, and as Cynthia Ozick insightfully observes in her passionate introduction, Babel was a man of acute contradictions. Born in the cosmopolitan port city of Odessa during the long reign of Alexander II, Babel was quite competent in both Hebrew and Yiddish but, influenced by both Flaubert and Maupassant, wrote his first stories in fluent French. His often comic portrayal of characters—such as the ruthless Jewish mobsters depicted in his Benya Krik stories—resulted from observing them firsthand as a boy in the Moldavanka neighborhood of Odessa. As Ozick notes, the "breadth and scope of his social compass enabled him to see through the eyes of peasants, soldiers, priests, rabbis, children, artists, actors, women of all classes. . . . He was at once a poet of the city ('the glass sun of Petersburg') and a lyricist of the countryside ('the walls of sunset collapsing into the sky')."

Arranged sequentially in fourteen sections, The Complete Works traces the entire arc of Babel's literary career, beginning with early stories, which are followed by The Odessa Stories and The Red Cavalry Stories. Also included are his Reports from St. Petersburg (1918), the remarkable 1920 Diary, and reports from Soviet Georgia and France, where his wife, Evgenia, and his daughter, Nathalie, lived. Many of his later stories (1925-38) reflect a compelling literary quality and abrupt change in style that have challenged translators for years. An accomplished playwright and screenwriter, Babel, at the height of his popularity, began writing for the Soviet cinema as early as the 1920s, and many of these works have never been translated before. This edition also includes a foreword and a biographical afterword by Nathalie Babel, a translator's preface and annotations throughout by Peter Constantine, and a chronology by Gregory Freidin, regarded as one of the foremost Babel scholars in the world.

Unprecedented for both its literary and its scholarly achievement, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel will stand as Babel's final, most enduring legacy.

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Continguts

Introduction by Cynthia Ozick
13
Editors Preface
19
Translators Foreword
29
Acknowledgments
35
OLD SHLOYME
43
ELYA ISAAKOVICH AND MARGARITA PROKOFIEVNA
53
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY
67
ODESSA
75
DISPATCH OFFICE SHAPE UP
369
FIRST AID
487
PREMATURE BABIES
493
EVACUEES
501
THE GEORGIAN THE KERENSKY RUBLES AND
509
THE EVENING
518
A BEAST CANT TALK
524
A NEW LIFE
530

INSPIRATION
83
ON THE FIELD OF HONOR
95
THE SIN OF JESUS
104
CHINK
112
BAGRATOGLY AND THE EYES OF HIS BULL
119
THE END OF ST HYPATIUS
126
THE KING
133
JUSTICE IN PARENTHESES
140
HOW THINGS WERE DONE IN ODESSA
146
LYUBKA THE COSSACK
155
THE FATHER
161
FROIM GRACH
170
THE END OF THE ALMSHOUSE
176
SUNSET
185
The Red Cavalry Stories
197
CROSSING THE RIVER ZBRUCZ
203
THE RESERVE CAVALRY COMMANDER
213
ITALIAN SUN
223
MY FIRST GOOSE
230
THE ROAD TO BRODY
237
THE COMMANDER OF THE SECOND BRIGADE
246
THE LIFE OF MATVEY RODIONOVICH PAVLICHENKO
253
THE CEMETERY IN KOZIN
259
PRISHCHEPA
260
KONKIN
266
SALT
273
AFONKA BIDA
280
AT SAINT VALENTINES
286
IVAN AND IVAN
297
THE CONTINUATION OF THE STORY OF A HORSE
304
ZAMOSC
311
CZESNIKI
320
THE SONG
328
Additional Stories
335
GRISHCHUK
342
THE KISS
350
AND THEN THERE WERE NINE
356
A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
362
THE MOST HOLY PATRIARCH
536
THE CONCERT IN KATERINENSTADT
543
AT THE WORKERS RETREAT
549
WITHOUT A HOMELAND
556
TOBACCO
563
IN CHAKVA
569
RENOVATIONS AND REFURBISHMENT
573
Reports from France 1935
579
TOWN AND COUNTRY
586
THE POWER OF MONEY
592
Stories 19251938
599
FIRST LOVE
612
KARLYANKEL
619
THE AWAKENING
628
IN THE BASEMENT
635
GAPA GUZHVA
644
KOLYVUSHKA
652
THE ROAD
659
THE IVAN AND MARIA
667
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
679
PETROLEUM
687
DANTE STREET
693
GRASSO
699
THE TRIAL
706
Variations and Manuscripts
719
A STORY
729
THREE IN THE AFTERNOON
736
SUNSET
755
MARIA
800
Screenplays
843
BENYA KRIK
896
THE CHINESE MILL AN ATTEMPTED MOBILIZATION
941
STARAYA SQUARE
969
TWO SCENES FROM THE FORGING OF STEEL
1016
A Personal Memoir by Nathalie Babel
1025
A Chronology by Gregory Freidin
1052
Notes
1059
Copyright

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Sobre l'autor (2002)

Isaac Babel was a journalist, playwright, and short story writer, whose works include the Russian masterpieces Red Cavalry and The Odessa Tales. He was arrested and executed in a Soviet prison in 1940. Nathalie Babel, his daughter, edited two other books of Babel's writing and is the author of Hugo and Dostoevsky.

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