BABEL ISAAK EMMANUILOVYCH
(b. 1894 - d. 1940)
The tender attachment of the inhabitants of Odessa to their city has already become almost legendary. Our ancestors compared Odessa with nothing less than Paris: the same fashionable vernissages, the Lyon Credit bank on Richelieu, the picturesque Pryvoz - why not the Womb of Odessa - a brilliant opera, many poets and his own Maupassant, known as Isaac Babel…
“I was born ... in Moldavanka,” wrote Isaac Emmanuilovich in his autobiography. And this event determined his entire future life and creative path. In the genetic memory, on hearing, and in the mind of Babel, she remained, as they once said, a place "more than Odessa itself." The Moldavian woman is a phenomenon, the morality of the whole city. This suburb of Odessa brought up a special morality in Isaac Babel, endowed his memory with aching sadness, and became his style of life.
Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel was born on July 1 (13), 1894 in Odessa in a fairly prosperous Jewish family. His maternal great-grandmother Feiga married in 1818 a Jew of the same age, Mozes-Froim Leyzov-Schwekhvel, who had arrived from Galicia, and after some time became an "apprentice of the Jewish male guild." One of their sons, Aron Mozesov Shvehvel, later became the grandfather of the famous writer Isaac Babel. His eldest daughter Feiga (named after her grandmother) married Emmanuil Babel in 1890. The following year, their first-born Aron was born, in 1892 their daughter Anna, and then Isaac, the future famous writer.
Having lived for a short time in Odessa, the Babel family left for Nikolaev, where Emmanuil Isaakovich entered the service of Birnbaum's firm for the sale of agricultural machinery. His business flourished. In addition to technology, the elder Babel traded in fire pumps, blue vitriol and pig iron. Among the friends of a successful merchant was even a French consul.
Unfortunately, misfortune personal nature pursued the family. One by one, the older children Aron and Anna died. Only Isaac survived. The boy was strong and smart. It must be said that Isaac was always surrounded by the love and care of his loved ones. My paternal grandmother, Mindley Aronovna, adored her grandson and surrounded him with harsh, demanding love. She was absolutely sure that her beloved Isaac would glorify their surname. Mindli Aronovna even got angry if someone tried to compete with her in love for her little grandson. He received his early education at home. In his autobiography, Babel wrote: “At the insistence of his father, he studied the Jewish language, the Bible, and the Talmud until the age of 16. It was difficult to live at home, because from morning till night they were forced to study many sciences. I rested at school. The boy studied well. Languages were especially easy for him. Isaac easily mastered English and German, was fluent in Yiddish and Hebrew, and spoke French as fluently as Russian. In Nikolaev, he entered the preparatory class of the commercial school. Count S. Yu. Witte. In the same place, on June 16, 1899, the only sister of Isaac, Mera (Marie), was born in the Babel family.
Having amassed sufficient capital, the family moved in 1905 to hometown Odessa and for some time settled with her mother's sister Gitl (Katya) on Tiraspolskaya, 12, in apartment No. 3. Adult Isaac will describe this apartment, house and yard in the story "Awakening". Four years later, the Babel family settled on Richelevskaya in house number 17, apartment number 10. The father always dreamed that his son would follow in his footsteps and become a businessman. It was to him that Emmanuil Babel wanted to leave a profitable family business. Therefore, under pressure from his father, Isaac entered the Odessa Commercial School. Emperor Nicholas I. The program of the school was very rich. Chemistry, political economy, jurisprudence, accounting, commodity science, three foreign languages and other items. You could "rest" during the breaks in Greek coffee houses or walking along the port. Sometimes students ran to Moldavanka "to drink cheap Bessarabian wine in the cellars." The father doted on his son, literally idolized him. If he really liked someone, the elder Babel said about such a person: "The type of beauty of my Easy." These words from the lips of a loving father were the highest praise.
Isaac Babel actively participated in amateur performances and composed plays. At the insistence of his father, he studied violin with the famous maestro Peter Solomonovich Stolyarsky. During his studies, Isaac began to write. At that time he was barely 15 years old. For two years he composed in French under the influence of G. Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and his teacher French Vadona. Father spoke of him this way literary creativity: “There were “slips” - at night I scribbled paper, wrote something in French, and hid what was written.” Emmanuil Isaakovich jokingly called his son "Count Montekristov" for this. Isaac Babel himself later recalled his first stories: “I take a trifle - an anecdote, a bazaar story - and make a thing out of it that I myself can’t tear myself away from ...” French sharpened the sense of the literary language and style of the young writer. Already in his first stories, Babel strove for stylistic elegance and the highest degree artistic expressiveness. The main property of prose was formed early: the novice writer was able to combine the heterogeneous layers of life and language.
In 1912, Isaac Babel graduated from the Odessa Commercial School. But, unfortunately, he did not have the right to enter the Odessa University, because this required a gymnasium certificate. Therefore, the parents decided to send their son to Kyiv, where there was a Commercial Institute. During the First World War, Isaac Babel had to be evacuated along with the institute to Saratov. Despite the difficulties, the young man graduated from the institute in 1916, receiving the title of candidate of economic sciences.
In Kyiv, where his father continued to send him on commercial matters, Isaac met Evgenia Borisovna Gronfain, whose father supplied agricultural machines to the elder Babel. On August 9, 1919, young people got married according to all the rules of the synagogue. The bride's father did not accept this marriage, considering it a real misalliance, disinherited his daughter and cursed the entire Babel family to the tenth generation.
In 1916, the young man came to St. Petersburg, deciding for himself to earn a living by writing. He knocked on the thresholds of various editorial offices and publishing houses, offered his stories, but to no avail. Many editors in well-known St. Petersburg magazines advised the young writer to give up paperwork and engage in trade. The situation was complicated by the fact that Babel lived in St. Petersburg in an illegal position. In the Russian Empire, there was a Pale of Settlement for Jews, and without special permission they could not settle in major cities. At the same time, Isaac Babel became interested in psychology, psychiatry and jurisprudence. In 1916 he entered the fourth year Faculty of Law Bekhterevsky Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute, which, unfortunately, did not graduate.
The worst thing was that Isaac was left without the support of his family and friends. Desperate, the aspiring writer turned to Maxim Gorky for help. He showed the famous writer some of his early works. Gorky, after reading them, gave advice: go to the people, gain life impressions, as he himself once did. Alexei Maksimovich at that time was the editor-in-chief of the Chronicle magazine. Two stories by the young writer were published in the 11th issue of the magazine in 1916. They aroused great interest among readers and ... the judiciary. For the stories “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna”, “Mother, Rimma and Alla”, Babel was going to be prosecuted for distributing pornography. Only February Revolution saved him from a trial scheduled for March 1917.
The end of the First World War was approaching. Isaac Babel managed to be a soldier on the French front. And in the summer of 1918 he was an active participant in the food expeditions of the People's Commissariat for Food. During the years of revolution and civil war he changed many professions: he worked in the People's Commissariat for Food and the Odessa Provincial Committee, fought on the Romanian, northern, Polish fronts, worked as a reporter for Tiflis and St. Petersburg newspapers. Babel the publicist was always ideologically correct, and instead of humor he used the honed syllable of revolutionary vocabulary.
In 1919, the aspiring writer joined the Extraordinary Commission as a correspondent for the First Cavalry Army. Documents in the name of Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov helped him to get the secretary of the Odessa Regional Committee S. B. Ingulov - "Comrade Sergei." According to the documents, the correspondent Lyutov was Russian, which gave him the opportunity to take part in the hostilities. During his stay in the First Cavalry, Babel constantly kept a diary, which became the basis of a cycle of stories about the Cavalry of 1923–1926. Babel's "cavalry" was very different from the beautiful legend that the official media composed about the Budenovites. The young writer showed both the unjustified cruelty and the animal instincts of the soldiers, which overshadowed the weak sprouts of humanity that the writer saw in the revolution and the cleansing Civil War. It can be said without exaggeration that Cavalry became a document and a literary masterpiece, for the sake of which the writer sacrificed himself.
A serious scandal erupted around the book. The stories about the First Cavalry Army brought the author fame and at the same time the hatred of such powerful persons as the commander of the First Cavalry Army, Budyonny: “I demand to protect from irresponsible slander those whom the literary degenerate Babel spits with the artistic saliva of class hatred.” The head of the First Cavalry Army, S. K. Timoshenko, who later became a marshal and people's commissar of defense, was furious after reading the story "Timoshenko and Melnikov." Once he told one of Babel's friends, Okhotnikov, that he would kill the writer "to hell, if he caught his eye." When Okhotnikov decided to reconcile the division commander and Babel, he persuaded Timoshenko to come to visit the author of the sensational work. They came to Obukhovsky lane, where the writer lived, in broad daylight. Isaak Emmanuilovich worked… Later he told a school friend: “And then they enter my room, I see Timoshenko ahead. Well, I think you should at least read a prayer before you die.”
Gorky stood up in defense of the Babel Cavalry. In the review, critical articles he often repeated that Babel described the fighters of the First Cavalry Army "more truthfully, better than the Gogol of the Cossacks." It can be said with certainty that without Gorky's intervention, the writer would have immediately fallen under a military tribunal. Cavalry was highly appreciated by Babel's colleagues in the writer's shop: Mayakovsky, Furmanov, Andrei Bely and others. Soon the first translations appeared. In 1928 Cavalry was translated into Spanish. In France, his novel had resounding success. Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, and Martin Dugard read the Cavalry. Among the admirers of Babel's work were Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger. Contrary to ill-wishers, the work of the Odessa writer was considered as the most significant phenomenon in contemporary literature. Literary critic A. Lezhnev wrote: “Babel is not like any of his contemporaries, but a short time has passed - contemporaries are beginning to resemble Babel a little. His influence on literature is becoming more and more evident."
During the Civil War, Isaac Babel miraculously survived, suffered a serious wound, and fell ill with typhus. Only in November 1920 was he able to return to Odessa. And already in February 1921, he became the editor of the Kommunist magazine and worked at the State Publishing House of Ukraine. Despite world fame, the writer remained the same modest and sympathetic person. His kindness was boundless. Isaac Babel handed out his ties, shirts and said: "If I want to have some things, then only in order to give them." His aunt Katya often came to people whom Babel had the imprudence to give something of furniture or family heirlooms and said: “Sorry, my nephew is crazy. This thing is our family, so please return it to me.” That's how she managed to keep some of the family environment. In addition, it was easy to borrow money from Babel. And no one returned the debts to the famous writer. Very often, the writer himself needed money and therefore took an advance payment in various magazines against future stories, not having time to complete the order on time. IN family archive The writer has preserved requests that were sent to him from various magazines: “Dear comrade Babel, when will we still get The Road? Time passes, the reader wants to read. Now we are doing the sixth issue, it would be nice to put it there, but the deadline is on time. Babel really worked very slowly. As a sculptor, he gradually cut off unnecessary details, polished every word, selected the most vivid ways of expression. The language of his works is concise and concise, vivid and metaphorical. In the Department of Manuscripts of the Russian state library a friendly pencil caricature of E. Zozulya on Babel is kept. Text under the picture: "I. Babel conceived new story. It feels like it will be written quickly, in just a year or so.”
Isaak Emmanuilovich was unusually demanding of himself. There is a legend that only one story "Lyubka Cossack" had about 30 serious editings, on each of which the writer worked for several months. Very often he repeated: “We take it with style, with style. I'm ready to write a story about washing clothes, and maybe it will sound like the prose of Julius Caesar. Babel wrote his works in a small room with huge windows. He never had a typewriter, and he simply did not know how to type on it. He wrote with pen and ink. Isaac Emmanuilovich kept the manuscript in the bottom drawer wardrobe. And only diaries and notebooks were in a heavy metal box with a lock. Usually he had at hand cut pieces of paper 10x15 cm, on which he wrote down his stories.
In 1923-1924, Babel worked on the Odessa Tales cycle, which became the pinnacle of his work. At this time, the writer was experiencing a real mental crisis: “Why do I have an unending longing? Because I am at a big, ongoing memorial service,” he wrote in his diary. Exit from the soul and creative crisis he found in an exaggerated, almost mythological city populated by characters who, in the writer's words, have "an ardor, a lightness, and a charming, now sad, now touching sense of life." Odessa and its real inhabitants - Mishka Yaponchik, Sonya the Golden Hand - in the writer's imagination turned into artistically reliable images: Beni Krik, Lyubka Kazak, Froma Grach. Talking in detail about the life of Odessa crime, he very often tried on their life for himself. In order to plunge into the atmosphere of Odessa everyday life, Babel rented a room on Moldavanka from an old Jew Tsiris, who was a gunner for bandits and received his “karbach” from every robbery. According to legend, it was there that Babel spied the plots for his world-famous "Odessa Tales". But the famous writer received information from other sources. On May 29, 1923, a top secret paper came from the provincial committee to the Odessa criminal investigation department to Baryshev about the admission of Comrade Babel as a writer to the study of certain materials of the criminal investigation department to the extent possible. In addition, Isaak Emmanuilovich visited open court hearings. The basis of complete humor, bright colors The story "Karl Yankel", on which the writer worked for seven years, was put on trial, which took place on June 24, 1924 in the tram club.
From year to year, the popularity of Babel the writer grew. He was often invited to evenings hosted by the Kremlin wives. At that time it was fashionable to have your own literary salon. Rumors circulated around Moscow at that time that Babel had close friends, even intimate relationship with Yezhov's wife, the beautiful Evgenia Solomonovna. Young people often gathered in her house and already famous authors. The regulars of the salon appreciated Babel for his love of life. No wonder Ilya Ehrenburg once said about the writer: "He was greedy for life." Communication with Evgenia Yezhova subsequently played a fatal role in the life of Babel.
The famous writer himself believed that a person is born to have fun and enjoy life. He adored funny stories and situations. Isaac Emmanuilovich often invented all sorts of pranks and at the same time had a lot of fun. One Sunday, incredible heart-rending moans were heard from Babel's room. To the question "What happened?" the great hoaxer replied in the most serious tone: "I wanted to show you Jewish groans." According to the recollections of friends, the writer was a man high culture and also a great storyteller. He spoke in a flat voice without an accent, he never imitated anyone. The peculiarity of Babel the narrator was that sometimes in front of funny places he began to laugh, so contagiously that it was impossible not to laugh with him.
Unfortunately, the life of the writer with Evgenia Gronfine was unsuccessful. Beauty Evgenia very often criticized what her husband wrote. In 1925 she left permanently for Paris. The couple broke up due to Babel's frequent betrayals. Isaac Emmanuilovich himself said that his wife had gone to Paris to practice in the arts. After her departure, Babel was able to openly meet with the artist of the theater. Meyerhold Tatyana Kashirina. In July 1926 their son was born, whom happy parents named Emmanuel. Their romance was short-lived. Without legitimizing the relationship, Babel left his beloved and went to Paris to Evgenia Gronfine, where their daughter Natalie was born. During this time, Kashirina married Vsevolod Ivanov, who adopted Emmanuel and gave him a new name, Mikhail. The Ivanovs did everything possible to protect Mikhail from meeting his real father. From Paris, Isaac Babel returned alone. And in 1932 he met his third and last love- Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova. Isaac Emmanuilovich became her first and last spouse. In 1937 their daughter Lida was born. Antonina Nikolaevna remained faithful to her writer husband all her life.
Gorky's death was one of the most significant losses in Babel's life. Together with him, the unsteady balance between the creator of the Cavalry and the authorities went into oblivion. Immediately after the fateful news reached the writer, he uttered a phrase that anticipated further events: “Now they won’t let me live.” Isaac Emmanuilovich understood well that Gorky's death was violent, but he could not speak openly about it. At the same time, the literary critic Elsberg was assigned to the Odessa writer. This man worked at the Academy publishing house, which allowed him to constantly patronize Babel and his family. Many years later, after the XX Party Congress, at one of the writers' congresses, Elsberg was expelled from the Writers' Union for informing activities.
Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs that Stalin and Beria planned the arrest of Yezhov's wife in the late 1930s. Evgenia Solomonovna, warned by her husband, committed suicide in the hospital. On May 11, 1939, the Commissar of State Security Kobulov interrogated the arrested Yezhov about what his wife's literary salon was like. The former iron commissar spoke of the fact that his wife had a special friendship with Babel, who, as you know, constantly twirled in a suspicious Trotskyist environment and, moreover, was closely associated with French writers. On May 15, 1939, Babel himself was arrested - at a dacha in Peredelkino, due to the fact that they could not find the writer at home.
Already in the courtyard of the Lubyanka prison, the arrested Babel said: "It's terrible that there will be no letters from my mother." Unable to withstand the torture, Isaac Emmanuilovich named dozens of names and surnames, but the NKVD archives preserved a statement by the writer in which he recanted his words. The court verdict was brief: Babel was accused of conspiratorial and terrorist activities and preparation of terrorist attacks against the leaders of the CPSU (b) and the Soviet government. The materials of the investigation mentioned the name of Lord Beaverbrook, with whom the writer allegedly established contacts in order to carry out his subversive tasks. The sentence (execution) was carried out by the commandant of the NKVD Blokhin on January 26, 1940 in the Lefortovo prison.
During the arrest of the writer, 24 folders with his manuscripts were confiscated. The secretary of the board of the Union of Writers A. Surkov, who sent a letter to the Minister of State Security, General Serov, was busy searching for the Babel archive. "Manuscripts not found," was the short reply. He came so quickly that it became clear that no thorough search was carried out.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Pirozhkova-Babel went abroad. There she wrote the book "Seven Years with Babel", which sold millions of copies.
"Babel was doomed as outstanding personality like a writer incapable of dealing with the government. It is very difficult for me to write about this,” recalled Antonina Pirozhkova. The pain of loss never leaves me. And the thought that for eight months in the NKVD he had to experience a lot of humiliation and insults, torture, and live his last day as the day before his death after the verdict, breaks my heart.
In one of his letters to his relatives, Isaac Babel wrote: "At my birth, I did not give the obligation of an easy life." We now know that these words have become prophetic.
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Babel's biography
Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel (real name Bobel) (July 1 (13), 1894 - January 27, 1940) - Russian writer.
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 the 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.
In order to enter the preparatory class of the 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 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 one more failed attempt to enter Odessa University (again because of quotas), he ended up at the Kiev Institute of Finance and Entrepreneurship. There he met his future wife Evgeny 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 Chronicle magazine. 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 stories, which later formed the Cavalry and Odessa Stories 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 portrays 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. His flowery, metaphorical language early stories in the future is replaced by a strict and restrained narrative manner.
In May 1939, Babel was arrested on charges of "anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activity" 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 received wide recognition 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. Self-sufficiency of the phrase, unprecedented diversity human condition per unit of literary area. 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 death, but also, without hesitation, are ready to chop from the shoulder of 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 musical theme, no, no, yes, and it will stir up in the Cavalry.
One smart critic once expressed doubts about Babel's Odessa stories in a conversation with me: 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 as in folk songs, glorifying the 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.
Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel
Born: June 30, 1894
Died: January 27, 1940
Biography
In Autobiography (1924) Babel wrote: “At the insistence of his father, he studied the Jewish language, the Bible, and the Talmud until the age of sixteen. It was difficult to live at home, because from morning till night they were forced to study many sciences. I rested at school. The program of the Odessa Commercial School, where he studied future writer, was very busy. Chemistry, political economy, jurisprudence, accounting, commodity science, three foreign languages and other subjects were studied. Speaking of "rest", Babel meant 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.
Write Babel started at fifteen. For two years he wrote in French - under the influence of G. Flaubert, G. Maupassant and my French teacher Vadona. 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 expressiveness. “I take a trifle - an anecdote, a bazaar story, and make 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 (Stariy Shloyme, 1913, etc.), published in Odessa and Kiev, 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 magazine "Chronicle" where the stories were published Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna and mother, Rimma and Alla(1916, No. 11). The stories aroused the interest of the reading public and the judiciary. Babel were 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 newspaper correspondent "Red Cavalry" 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.
TO artistic creativity returned in 1923: in the magazine "Lef"(1924, No. 4) the stories Salt, Letter, Death of Dolgushov, Korol and others were published. Literary critic A.Voronsky wrote about them: « Babel not before the eyes of the reader, but somewhere away from him, a great artistic way studies 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 ... ". With time fiction the writer 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 served diary entries. The first equestrian shown 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 the Gogol of the Cossacks". Budyonny called the Cavalry "super-arrogant Babel slander". However, creativity Babel already regarded as a significant phenomenon in modern literature. “Babel was not like any of his contemporaries. But a short time has passed - contemporaries begin to gradually resemble Babel. His influence on literature is becoming more and more evident.", - wrote in 1927 literary critic A. Lezhnev.
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'm at a big, non-stop memorial service", he wrote in his diary. Became a kind of salvation for Babel fantastic, exaggerated world of Odessa stories. The action of the stories in this cycle is the King, How it was done in Odessa, Father, Lyubka Cossack– takes place in an almost mythological city. Babel Odessa is inhabited by characters in which, according to the writer, there are "Enthusiasm, lightness and charming - sometimes sad, sometimes touching - a 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. "King" Odessa underworld Benya Krik Babel portrayed as a defender 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. Only one story by Lyubka Kazak had about thirty serious editings, on each of which the writer worked for several months. Paustovsky in his memoirs quotes the words of Babel: “Style, take, style, sir. I'm ready to write a story about washing clothes, and maybe it will sound like prose Julius Caesar» .
In 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' Theatre) and Maria(1935, first staged in 1994 by director M. Levitin on the stage of the Moscow Hermitage Theatre), 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. In 1937 Babel wrote an article Lie, betrayal and smerdyakovism, glorifying show trials over "enemies of the people". Shortly afterwards 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 Odessa stories embodied in the short story Froim Rook(1933, published in 1963 in the USA): the title character tries to conclude "pact of honor" with power, but dies.
IN 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 Di Grasso (1937).
Babel was arrested on May 15, 1939 and charged with "anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activities", shot January 27, 1940.
Awards
Works
1918 - A series of articles "Diary"1920 - A series of essays "On the field of honor"
1926 - Collection "Cavalry"
1927 - Jewish stories
1927 - The play "Sunset"
1931 - "Odessa stories"
1935 - The play "Maria"
1968 - a fragment of the story "Jew" Babel, Isaak Emmanuilovich Isaac Babel.
Babel, Isaak Emmanuilovich(06/30/1894, Odessa - 01/27/1940, Moscow), Russian writer.
He graduated from the Odessa Commercial School and studied Hebrew, the Bible and the Talmud at home. He continued his education at the Kiev Institute of Finance. According to reports, school and student years took part in Zionist circles.
At the age of 15, he began to write stories in French. In 1915 he came to Petrograd "without the right to reside." With the assistance of Gorky, he published two stories in the Chronicle magazine: “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna” and “Mother, Rimma and Alla”, for which he was prosecuted under 1001 articles (pornography). In the "Journal of Journals" for 1916-17. published several short essays under the pseudonym Bab-El, in one of which he predicted the revival in Russian literature of the early “Little Russian” Gogol line, “erased” by the St. Petersburg Akaki Akakievich, and the appearance of the “Odessa Maupassant”. In this literary declaration of the young Babel, some aesthetic principles the so-called "southwestern school" (I. Ilf and E. Petrov, V. Kataev, Yu. Olesha, E. Bagritsky, S. Gecht, L. Slavin and others).
In the autumn of 1917, Babel, having served in the army for several months as a private, deserted and made his way to Petrograd, where he entered the service in the Cheka, and then in the People's Commissariat for Education. The experience of working in these institutions was reflected in Babel's series of articles "Diary", published in the spring of 1918 in the newspaper "New Life". Here Babel ironically describes the first fruits Bolshevik coup: arbitrariness, general savagery and devastation. In the essay “The Palace of Motherhood”, Babel, on his own behalf, expresses those doubts that later, in “Cavalry”, he put into the mouth of a Hasid junk dealer (see Hasidism) Gedali, a character story of the same name: “...shooting each other is, perhaps, sometimes not stupid. But this is not the whole revolution. Who knows - maybe this is not a revolution at all. This, as in other stories of Babel, reflects the spiritual conflict that the revolution caused among many Jews, loyal to their national and religious traditions. After the closure of Novaya Zhizn by the Soviet authorities, Babel began to work on a story from the life of revolutionary Petrograd: "About two Chinese in a brothel." The story “Walking” (“Silhouettes”, No. 6-7, 1923; “Pass”, No. 6, 1928) is the only excerpt from this story that has survived.
Returning to Odessa, Babel published in the local magazine Lava (June 1920) a series of essays On the Field of Honor, the content of which was borrowed from the front records of French officers. In the spring of 1920, on the recommendation of M. Koltsov, Babel, under the name of Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov, was sent to the 1st Cavalry Army as a war correspondent for Yug-ROST. The diary that Babel kept during the Polish campaign captures his true impressions: this is the “chronicle of everyday atrocities”, which is dully mentioned in the allegorical short story “The Way to Brody”. With documentary accuracy, Babel describes here the wild bullying of Budyonny's horsemen over the defenseless Jewish population of the town of Demidovka on the day of the Ninth Av: "...everything, as when they destroyed the temple." In the book Cavalry (separate ed., with significant changes, 1926; 8th additional ed., 1933), the real material of the diary undergoes a strong artistic transformation: the “chronicle of everyday atrocities” turns into a kind of heroic epic. Main narrative device Babel is the so-called skaz, which refracts the author's thought in someone else's word. So, in the short stories "Konkin", "Salt", "Letter", "Biography of Pavlichenko", "Treason" the narrator is a man from the common people, whose style, point of view and assessments are clearly alien to the author, but are necessary for him as a means of overcoming the generally accepted and worn out literary norms and ideological assessments. It is impossible to identify with the author and the main narrator of the "Konarmiya", since "Kirill Lyutov" himself is a complex speech mask - a Jew with a pretentiously militant Russian surname, a sentimental and prone to exaggeration "candidate for the rights of St. Petersburg University", in which "exotic" savages - Budyonnovites excite delight and horror at the same time. Cavalry is a book about defeat and the futility of the victims. It ends with a note of hopeless tragedy (the story “The Son of a Rabbi”): “... monstrous Russia, implausible, like a herd of clothes lice, stamped its bast shoes on both sides of the cars. The typhoid peasant rolled before him the habitual hump of soldier's death ... when I ran out of potatoes, I threw a pile of Trotsky's leaflets at them. But only one of them extended a dirty, dead hand for a leaflet. And I recognized Ilya, the son of a Zhytomyr rabbi.” The rabbi's son, the "Red Army soldier of Bratslav", in whose chest next to him are piled "mandates of an agitator and memos of a Jewish poet", dies "among poems, phylacteries and footcloths." Only in the seventh and eighth editions of the book did Babel change its ending, placing after the story "The Son of the Rabbi" a new, more "optimistic" epilogue: the story "Argamak".
Simultaneously with Cavalry, Babel publishes Odessa Tales, written back in 1921–23. (separate ed. 1931). The main character of these stories, the Jewish raider Benya Krik (whose prototype was the legendary Mishka Yaponchik), the embodiment of Babel's dream of a Jew who knows how to fend for himself. Here, Babel's comic talent and his linguistic flair are manifested with the greatest force (the colorful Odessa jargon is played up in the stories). To a large extent, the cycle of autobiographical stories of Babel "The Story of My Dovecote" (1926) is also devoted to the Jewish theme. This is the key to the main theme of his work, the opposition of weakness and strength, which more than once gave contemporaries a reason to accuse Babel of a cult " strong man».
In 1928 Babel published the play Sunset. This, according to S. Eisenstein, "perhaps the best post-October play in terms of dramaturgy," was unsuccessfully staged by the Moscow Art Theater 2nd and found a genuine stage embodiment only in the 1960s. outside the USSR: in the Israeli theater "Habima" and the Budapest theater "Thalia". In the 1930s Babel published few works. In the stories "Karl-Yankel", "Oil", "The End of the Almshouse", etc., those compromise solutions appear that the writer avoided in his the best works. Of the novel he had conceived about collectivization, Velyka Krinitsa, only the first chapter of Gapa Guzhva was published. New world", No. 10, 1931). Babel's second play, Maria (1935), was not very successful. However, as evidenced by such posthumously published works as a fragment of the story "Jew" (" New magazine", 1968), the story "Help (My first fee)" and others, Babel and in the 1930s. did not lose his skill, although the atmosphere of repression made him appear less and less in print.
Back in 1926, Babel began working for cinema (Yiddish subtitles for the film "Jewish Happiness", the script "Wandering Stars" based on the novel by Shalom Aleichem, the film story "Benya Krik"). In 1936, together with Eisenstein, Babel wrote the screenplay for Bezhin Meadow. The film based on this script has been destroyed. Soviet censorship. In 1937 Babel prints latest stories"The Kiss", "Di Grasso" and "Sulak". Arrested after the fall of Yezhov, in the spring of 1939, Babel was shot in the Lefortovo prison (Moscow) on January 27, 1940.
In the publications published in the USSR after Babel's "posthumous rehabilitation" (the best of them: "Selected", 1966), his works were severely censored. In the United States, the writer's daughter, Natalia Babel, did a great job of collecting hard-to-reach and previously unpublished works of her father and publishing them with detailed commentaries.
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was born on July 1, 1894 in Odessa on Moldavanka, in the family of a Jewish merchant. He graduated from the Odessa Commercial School, and then continued his education at the Kiev Institute of Finance. According to some reports, during his school and student years, Babel took part in Zionist circles. At the age of fifteen, Babel began to write. At first he wrote in French - under the influence of G. Flaubert, G. Maupassant and his French teacher Vadon.
After his first stories ("Old Shloyme", 1913, etc.), published in Odessa and Kiev, went unnoticed, the young writer became convinced that only the capital could bring him fame. Therefore, in 1915, Babel came to Petrograd "without the right to reside." However, the editors of St. Petersburg literary magazines advise Babel to quit writing and engage in trade. This continues for more than a year - until, with the assistance of Gorky, two of his stories were published in the Chronicle magazine: "Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna" and "Mother, Rimma and Alla", for which Babel was prosecuted for 1001 articles (pornography). The February Revolution saved him from trial, which had already been scheduled for March 1917.
The Journal of Journals for 1916-17 published several short essays by the writer under the pseudonym Bab-El.
In the autumn of 1917, Babel, having served in the army for several months as a private, deserts and makes his way to Petrograd, where he enters the service in the Cheka, and then in the People's Commissariat for Education. The experience of working in these institutions was reflected in Babel's series of articles "Diary", published in the spring of 1918 in the newspaper "New Life". Here Babel ironically describes the first fruits of the Bolshevik coup: arbitrariness, general savagery and devastation.
After the closure of Novaya Zhizn by the Soviet authorities, Babel begins work on a story from the life of revolutionary Petrograd: "About two Chinese in a brothel." The story "Walking" is the only excerpt from this story that has survived.
Returning to Odessa, Babel published in the local magazine Lava (June 1920) a series of essays On the Field of Honor, the content of which was borrowed from the front records of French officers. In the spring of 1920, on the recommendation of M. Koltsov, the writer under the name of Kirill Vasilievich Lyutov was sent to the 1st Cavalry Army as a war correspondent for Yug-ROST. The diary that Babel keeps during the Polish campaign captures his true impressions: this is the “chronicle of everyday atrocities”, which is dully mentioned in the allegorical short story “The Way to Brody”. In the book Cavalry (1926), the real material of the diary undergoes a strong artistic transformation: the “chronicle of everyday atrocities” turns into a kind of heroic epic.
The Red commanders did not forgive him for such "slander". The persecution of the writer begins, 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 also called the Cavalry "super-arrogant Babel slander." Contrary to Budyonny's opinion, Babel's work is already 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.
Simultaneously with Cavalry, Babel publishes Odessa Stories, written back in 1921-23, but published as a separate publication only in 1931. The main character of these stories, the Jewish raider Benya Krik (whose prototype was the legendary Mishka Yaponchik), the embodiment of Babel’s dreams of a Jew who can stand up for himself. Here, Babel's comic talent and his linguistic flair are manifested with the greatest force (the colorful Odessa jargon is played up in the stories). To a large extent, the cycle of autobiographical stories of Babel "The Story of My Dovecote" (1926) is also devoted to the Jewish theme. This is the key to the main theme of his work, the opposition of weakness and strength, which more than once gave contemporaries a reason to accuse Babel of the cult of a “strong man”.
On the strong connection of Babel with the Jewish cultural heritage testify to the stories inspired by Jewish folklore about the adventures of Herschel from Ostropol (“Shabos-Nahmu”, 1918), his work on the publication of Shalom Aleichem in 1937, as well as participation in the last legal almanac in Hebrew, sanctioned by the Soviet authorities, “Breshit” (Berlin, 1926, editor A. I. Kariv), where six stories of Babel are published in an authorized translation, and the name of the writer is given in the Hebrew form - Yitzhak.
In 1928 Babel published the play Sunset. This, according to S. Eisenstein, “perhaps the best post-October play in terms of dramaturgy”, was unsuccessfully staged by the Moscow Art Theater and found a genuine stage embodiment only in the 1960s outside the USSR: in the Israeli Habima Theater and the Budapest Theater Thalia ".
In the 1930s, Babel published few works. In the stories "Karl-Yankel", "Oil", "The End of the Almshouse" there appear those compromise solutions that the writer avoided in his best works. Only the first chapter of Gapa Guzhva (New World, No. 10, 1931) of the novel about collectivization conceived by him, Velyka Krinitsa, saw the light of day. Babel's second play, "Maria" (1935), is not very successful. However, as evidenced by such posthumously published works as a fragment of the story "Jew" ("New Journal", 1968), the story "Help (My First Fee)" and others, Babel did not lose his mastery in the 1930s, although the atmosphere of repression forced appear less and less in print.
As early as 1926, Babel began working for films (with Yiddish titles for the film "Jewish Happiness", the script "Wandering Stars" based on the novel by Shalom Aleichem, the film story "Benya Krik"). In 1936, together with Eisenstein, he wrote the screenplay for Bezhin Meadow. However, the film, based on this script, was destroyed by Soviet censorship. In 1937, Babel published his last stories, The Kiss, Di Grasso, and Sulak.
Babel was arrested on May 15, 1939 and, accused of "anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activity", was shot in Lefortovo prison on January 27, 1940.
In the publications published in the USSR after Babel's "posthumous rehabilitation", his works were subjected to severe censorship cuts. In the United States, the writer's daughter, Natalia Babel, did a great job of collecting hard-to-reach and previously unpublished works of her father and publishing them with detailed commentaries.
