Isaac Babel's Selected Writings (Norton Critical Edition)

Name: Isaac Babel's Selected Writings (Norton Critical Edition)
ISBN: 9780393927030

3/5

(5 votes)

Background materials include "Selected Letters of Isaac Babel to His Sister and Mother, 1926-1939," a rich collection of letters-sixty-eight in all, as well as "Isaac Babel Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries," reminiscences by the contemporaries.

Format: 400 pages, Paperback
First published: February 29, 2012
Publishers: W. W. Norton
Subjects: Other prose·From c 1900 ·Short story·Fiction·Literature·Classics·Criticism·Short stories ·Fiction·Short stories
Language: English

This Norton will appeal to readers new to Babel but also to those who have read his creative fiction and want to know more. Freidin offers in the volume a wonderfully lively introduction describing Babel's place in Russian literature--not really the most un-intense of traditions.

About Isaac Babel

Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель; 1901 - 1940) was a Russian language journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry, Story of My Dovecote, and Tales of Odessa, all of which are considered masterpieces of Russian literature. Babel has also been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry." Loyal to, but not uncritical of, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Isaak Babel fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge due to his longterm affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Babel was arrested by the NKVD at Peredelkino on the night of May 15, 1939. After "confessing", under torture, to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, Babel was shot on January 27, 1940. The arrest and execution of Isaak Babel has been labeled a catastrophe for the world of literature....

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