Novels
- Benia Krik (1935)
Collections
- Collected Stories of Isaac Babel (1955)
- The Lonely Years (1955)
- You Must Know Everything (1966)
- Benya Krik, the Gangster and Other Stories (1969)
- The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (2001)
- Red Cavalry (2003)
- Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings (2009)
- The Essential Fictions (2017)
- Odessa Stories (2018)
- Of Sunshine and Bedbugs (2022)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Isaac Babel Books Overview
Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
‘A book that will last, that you will reread all your life and then pass on to your grandchildren. Or ask to be buried with.’ Michael Dirda, Washington PostFollowing the historic publication of Norton’s The Complete Works of Isaac Babel in the fall of 2001, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel appears as the most authoritative and complete edition of his fiction ever published in paperback. Babel was best known for his mastery of the short story form in which he ranks alongside Kafka and Hemingway but his career was tragically cut short when he was murdered by Stalin’s secret police. Edited by his daughter Nathalie Babel and translated by award winner Peter Constantine, this paperback edition includes the stunning Red Cavalry Stories; The Odessa Tales, featuring the legendary gangster Benya Krik; and the tragic later stories, including ‘Guy de Maupassant.’ This will be the standard edition of Babel’s stories for years to come. Maps
The Lonely Years
The Lonely Years, a collection of private correspondence, is essential to an understanding of Isaac Babel’s life and works. Babel rose to fame in 1920s Russia for such books as Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories. But as Stalin’s regime grew repressive, he found it increasingly difficult to write or publish. He was finally arrested in 1939, never to be heard from again. Alternately tender and biting, and accompanied by nine stories from the ‘lonely years,’ these letters show an individual laboring against all odds to remain true to his craft and ideals. This edition contains a new introduction, based on previously unreleased information from the KGB files.
Benya Krik, the Gangster and Other Stories
A group of stories by Isaac Babel, in which he seeks to balance the image of Jewish violence against the violence done to Jews who are so Jewish that they cannot help but be ‘nonviolent’. The collection includes the tales ‘Benya Krik’ and ‘The Gangster’.
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
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 clas*ses…
. 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.
Red Cavalry
‘Amazing not only as literature but as biography.’ Richard Bernstein, The New York TimesOne of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, the Red Cavalry cycle retains today the shocking freshness that made Babel’s reputation when the stories were first published in the 1920s. Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia. Drawn from the acclaimed, award winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel’s 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.
Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings
This Norton Critical Edition is based on Peter Constantine’s incomparable translations, which are introduced and annotated by the renowned Babel scholar Gregory Freidin. Isaac Babel s work has left an indelible mark on modern literature. The scope of this Norton Critical Edition surpas*ses that of any other Babel paperback edition and includes his fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, plays, and political writings together with the contextual and critical materials necessary for in depth study. Background materials include Selected Letters to Isaac Babel, 1926 1939, a rich collection of letters eighty five in all from Babel s friends, as well as Isaac Babel Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, reminiscences by the contemporaries who knew Babel best, including Maxim Gorky, Tamara Ivanova Kashirina, M. N. Berkov, and Dmitry Furmanov, among others. Criticism reprints four major as*sessments of Babel s legacy by Viktor Shklovsky, Lionel Trilling, Efraim Sicher, and Gregory Freidin. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included. .
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