Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was born on July 13, 1894 [O.S. 30 June 1894] and died on January 27, 1940. He was a Russian and Soviet writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known for writing Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories and was praised as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry." In 1939, the NKVD arrested him on false charges of terrorism and espionage. He was executed on January 27, 1940.
Early years
Isaac Babel was born in the Moldavanka neighborhood of Odessa, in the Russian Empire (now part of Ukraine), to Jewish parents named Manus and Feyga Babel. Shortly after his birth, the Babel family moved to the port city of Nikolaev. Later, they returned to live in a more fashionable area of Odessa in 1906. Babel used Moldavanka as the setting for his stories in Odessa Stories and the play Sunset.
Although Babel’s short stories describe his family as "very poor and confused," they were actually relatively well-off. In his own writings, Babel said his father, Manus, was a poor shopkeeper. However, Babel’s daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, claimed her father made up this and other details to "create a suitable background for a young Soviet writer who was not part of the Communist Party." In reality, Babel’s father was a seller of farming tools and owned a large storage building.
During his early teenage years, Babel wanted to join the preparatory class at the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School. However, he first had to deal with the Jewish quota, which limited the number of Jewish students allowed to enroll. Even though Babel received passing grades, another boy’s parents gave money to school officials, and he was chosen instead. Because of this, Babel studied at home with private teachers.
In addition to regular school subjects, Babel studied the Talmud and music. According to Cynthia Ozick,
"Although he was comfortable reading Yiddish and Hebrew and understood traditional religious texts and their difficult explanations, he also deeply admired French writers like Maupassant and Flaubert. His earliest stories were written in fluent French. His wide understanding of different people and social groups allowed him to see the world through the eyes of peasants, soldiers, priests, rabbis, children, artists, actors, and women from all classes. He became friends with people like prostitutes, taxi drivers, and horse riders; he knew what it was like to be without money and to live on the edges of society."
Babel’s attempt to join Odessa University was stopped because of his ethnicity. He then enrolled at the Kiev Institute of Finance and Business. There, he met Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and they eventually married.
Work
In 1915, Babel graduated from school and moved to Petrograd, breaking laws that kept Jews from living outside a certain area called the Pale of Settlement. Babel could speak French, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. His earliest writings were in French, but none of those stories have survived.
In St. Petersburg, Babel met Maxim Gorky, who published some of Babel’s stories in his magazine, Letopis ("Chronicle"). Gorky told Babel to gain more life experience. Babel later wrote in his autobiography, "I owe everything to that meeting and still say the name of Alexey Maksimovich Gorky with love and admiration." One of Babel’s most famous stories, The Story of My Dovecote ("История моей голубятни"), was dedicated to Gorky.
There is little information about where Babel was during and after the October Revolution. In one of his stories, The Road ("Дорога"), Babel wrote that he served on the Romanian front until early December 1917. In his autobiography, Babel said he worked as a translator for the Petrograd Cheka, likely in 1917. In March 1918, he worked in Petrograd as a reporter for Gorky’s newspaper, Novaya zhizn ("New Life"). He continued writing for the newspaper until it was closed in July 1918 by order of Lenin.
Babel later wrote, "My work as a journalist gave me many things, especially materials. I collected many facts that helped me write stories. I made friends with people like morgue attendants, criminal investigators, and government workers. Later, when I wrote fiction, I often returned to these people to describe characters, situations, and daily life. Journalistic work is full of adventure."
During the Russian Civil War, when the Party controlled all printed materials, Babel worked for the Odessa Gubkom publishing house, in the food procurement unit (as described in his story Ivan-and-Maria), in the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education), and in a printing office.
After the Civil War ended, Babel worked as a reporter for The Dawn of the Orient ("Заря Востока"), a Russian-language newspaper in Tbilisi. In one article, he expressed regret that Lenin’s New Economic Policy had not been used more widely.
Babel married Yevgenia Gronfein in Odessa on August 9, 1919. By 1925, their marriage was troubled. Yevgenia left Russia for France, feeling betrayed by Babel’s infidelities and disliking communism. Babel visited her in Paris. During this time, he had a long-term relationship with Tamara Kashirina. Their son, Emmanuil Babel (1927–2000), was adopted by Tamara’s future husband, Vsevolod Ivanov, and renamed Mikhail Ivanov. He later became a noted artist.
After ending his relationship with Tamara, Babel briefly tried to reconcile with Yevgenia and had a daughter, Nathalie, in 1929. Nathalie later became a scholar and editor of Babel’s work. In 1932, Babel met Antonina Pirozhkova, a Siberian-born Gentile. In 1934, after failing to convince Yevgenia to return to Moscow, Babel and Antonina lived together. In 1939, they had a daughter, Lydia Babel.
According to Antonina, "Before meeting Babel, I read a lot, but not in a focused way. Babel noticed and said, 'Reading that way won’t help. You need to read about 100 books that every educated person should read. I’ll make a list for you.' A few days later, he gave me a list with ancient writers like Homer and Herodotus, and later European authors like Rabelais and Flaubert."
In 1920, Babel was assigned to General Semyon Budyonny’s 1st Cavalry Army, where he witnessed the Polish-Soviet War. He wrote about the war in his 1920 Diary, which later became the basis for Red Cavalry ("Конармия"), a collection of stories like Crossing the River Zbrucz and My First Goose. The brutal scenes in Red Cavalry contrasted with Babel’s gentle nature.
Babel wrote, "Only by 1923 did I learn to write clearly and concisely. Then I returned to writing." Stories from Red Cavalry were published in 1924 in LEF magazine. His honest descriptions of war’s harshness earned him enemies. Marshal Budyonny was angry about Babel’s descriptions of Red Cossacks and wanted him executed, but Gorky’s support protected him. In 1929, Red Cavalry was translated into English by J. Harland and later into other languages.
Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of Red Cavalry, "The style’s music contrasts with the brutal scenes. One story, Salt, is remembered like a poem, known by many people."
Back in Odessa, Babel wrote Odessa Stories, a series of short stories set in the Moldavanka ghetto. Published between 1921 and 1924 and collected in 1931, the stories describe Jewish gangsters before and after the October Revolution. The fictional mob boss Benya Krik, based on Mishka Yaponchik, is a famous anti-hero in Russian literature. These stories inspired the 1927 film Benya Krik and the play Sunset, which focuses on Benya Krik’s mission to fix problems in Moldavanka, starting with his alcoholic father, Mendel.
According to Nathalie Babel Brown, "Sunset premiered at the Baku Worker’s Theatre on October 23, 1927, and played in Odessa, Kiev, and the Moscow Art Theatre. Reviews were mixed. Some praised its 'anti-bourgeois stance' and 'fathers and sons' theme. However, Moscow critics found the play’s attitude toward the bourgeoisie weak. Sunset closed and was removed from the Moscow Art Theatre’s repertoire.
However, Sunset had admirers. In 1928, Boris Pasternak wrote to his father, "I read Sunset, a play by Babel, and for the first time, I saw Jewish culture as a positive, powerful force. I hope you read it."
According to Antonina, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein admired Sunset and compared it to Émile Zola’s works for showing capitalist relationships through a family’s experiences. Eisenstein criticized the Moscow Art Theatre for its weak staging of the play.
Life in the 1930s
In 1930, Babel traveled to Ukraine and saw the harsh treatment of people during forced collectivization and dekulakization. He never spoke publicly about this, but he told Antonina privately, "The good times of the past are gone because of the famine in Ukraine and the destruction of villages across our country."
As Stalin controlled Soviet writers and required them to follow socialist realism, Babel stayed away from public life more often. During the campaign against "Formalism," Babel was criticized for not producing enough work. At this time, many writers were afraid and changed their old work to follow Stalin’s rules. However, Babel was not impressed and told his student, Ilya Ehrenburg, "In six months, they will stop attacking the Formalists and start another campaign."
At the first meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, Babel joked that he had become "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence." American writer Max Eastman wrote about Babel’s quietness in his 1934 book Artists in Uniform. According to Nathalie Babel Brown, his life was relatively comfortable:
"The young writer quickly became popular in Moscow. In Russia, writers were often honored, and Babel became one of the few with special status and benefits in a poor and strict country. In the late 1930s, he was given a villa in Peredelkino, a writers’ colony near Moscow. It was known that he had a wife and daughter in Paris. Few people outside Moscow knew about two other children he had. Babel had many secrets, lived with many contradictions, and left many unanswered questions."
In 1932, after many requests, Babel was allowed to visit his wife, Yevgenia, in Paris. While with his wife and daughter, Nathalie, Babel struggled with whether to return to the Soviet Union. In letters and conversations, he expressed a desire to be "a free man" but also worried about not being able to earn a living through writing. On July 27, 1933, Babel wrote to Yuri Annenkov, saying he had been called back to Moscow and would leave immediately.
Babel’s common-law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, remembered this time:
"Babel stayed in France for so long that people in Moscow began to think he would never return. When I wrote to him about this, he replied, 'What can people who know nothing say to you, who knows everything?' Babel wrote to me almost every day from France. I saved many letters from him during his 11-month absence. When Babel was arrested in 1939, all these letters were taken and never returned to me."
After returning to the Soviet Union, Babel moved in with Pirozhkova, beginning a common-law marriage that resulted in a daughter, Lidya Babel. He also worked with Sergei Eisenstein on the film Bezhin Meadow, which told the story of Pavlik Morozov, a child who worked for the Soviet secret police. Babel also helped write screenplays for other Stalinist propaganda films.
According to Nathalie Babel Brown, "Babel came to Paris in the summer of 1935 as part of a group of Soviet writers attending an international meeting. He likely knew this would be his last chance to stay in Europe. As he had done before, he asked my mother to return with him to Moscow. He described the comfortable life the family could have there, even though he knew the situation was dangerous. This was my mother’s last chance to refuse, and she never forgot it. Her fears about the Soviet Union were later proven correct."
Arrest and execution
On 15 May 1939, Antonina Pirozhkova was awakened by four NKVD agents who knocked loudly on the door of their Moscow apartment. Although surprised, she agreed to go with them to Babel’s dacha in Peredelkino. Babel was then arrested. Pirozhkova later described the journey: "In the car, one of the men sat in the back with Babel and me, while the other sat in front with the driver. 'The worst part of this is that my mother won't be getting my letters,' Babel said, then he was silent for a long time. I could not say a single word. Babel asked the secret policeman next to him, 'So I guess you don't get too much sleep, do you?' And he even laughed. As we approached Moscow, I said to Babel, 'I'll be waiting for you, it will be as if you've gone to Odessa… only there won't be any letters.' He answered, 'I ask you to see that the child not be made miserable.' But I don't know what my destiny will be." At this point, the man beside Babel said to Pirozhkova, "We have no claims whatsoever against you." They drove to the Lubyanka Prison and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed Pirozhkova hard and said, "Someday we'll see each other…" Without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door.
According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Babel’s arrest became the subject of an urban legend within the NKVD. NKVD agents, she explains, liked to "tell stories about the risks they ran" in arresting "enemies of the people." Babel, according to NKVD lore, "seriously wounded one of our men" while "resisting arrest." Mandelstam contemptuously declared, "Whenever I hear such tales, I think of the tiny hole in the skull of Isaac Babel, a cautious, clever man with a high forehead, who probably never once in his life held a pistol in his hands."
According to Peter Constantine, from the day of his arrest, Isaac Babel "became a nonperson in the Soviet Union. His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi. He became unmentionable in any public venue. When the film director Mark Donskoi’s famous Gorky trilogy premiered the following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplay, had been removed from the credits."
According to his file, "Case #419, Babel, I.E.," the writer was held at the Lubyanka and Butyrka Prisons for a total of eight months as a case was built against him for Trotskyism, terrorism, and spying for Austria and France. At his initial interrogations, "Babel began by adamantly denying any wrongdoing, but then after three days he suddenly 'confessed' to what his interrogator was suggesting and named many people as co-conspirators. In all likelihood, he was tortured, almost certainly beaten." His interrogators included Boris Rodos, who had a reputation as a particularly brutal torturer, even by the standards of the time, and Lev Schwartzmann, who tortured the renowned theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Among those he accused of conspiring with him were his close friends Sergei Eisenstein, Solomon Mikhoels, and Ilya Ehrenburg.
Despite months of pleading and letters sent directly to Beria, Babel was denied access to his unpublished manuscripts. In October 1939, Babel was again summoned for interrogation and denied all his previous testimony. A statement was recorded: "I ask the inquiry to take into account that, though in prison, I committed a crime. I slandered several people." This led to further delays as the NKVD frantically attempted to salvage their cases against Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and Eisenstein.
On 16 January 1940, Lavrentiy Beria presented Stalin with a list of 457 "enemies of the party and the Soviet regime" who were in custody, with a recommendation that 346, including Isaac Babel, should be shot. According to Babel’s daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, his trial took place on 26 January 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria’s private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately. He was shot at 1:30 am on 27 January 1940.
Babel’s last recorded words in the proceedings were: "I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others… I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work." He was shot the next day, and his body was thrown into a communal grave. All of this information was revealed in the early 1990s. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Babel’s ashes were buried with those of Nikolai Yezhov and several other victims of the Great Purge in a common grave at the Donskoy Cemetery. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a plaque was placed there which reads, "Here lie buried the remains of the innocent, tortured, and executed victims of political repressions. May they never be forgotten."
According to the early official Soviet version, Isaac Babel died in the Gulag on 17 March 1941. Peter Constantine, who translated Babel’s complete writings into English, has described the writer’s execution as "one of the great tragedies of 20th century literature."
Rehabilitation
On 23 December 1954, during the Khrushchev thaw, a typed half sheet of paper ended the official silence. It said, "The sentence of the military group dated 26 January 1940 concerning Babel, I.E., is revoked because new information was found, and the case against him is closed because there was no proof of a crime."
Babel's works were published again and received praise. His public rehabilitation as a writer began with the help of his friend and admirer Konstantin Paustovsky. A collection of Babel's selected works was published in 1957 with a praising introduction by Ilya Ehrenburg. Additional collections of Babel's works were published in 1966, 1989, and 1990. However, some sensitive parts, such as references to Trotsky, were censored until the glasnost period, which happened just before the Soviet Union ended. The first complete collections of Babel's works were prepared and published in Russia in 2002 and 2006.
Lost writings
After completing her recovery, Antonina Pirozhkova worked for nearly 50 years to help return Isaac Babel's manuscripts. These included Babel's translations of Sholem Aleichem's stories from Yiddish to Russian, as well as several stories and novellas that had never been published before. According to Pirozhkova,
Isaac Babel said he translated Sholem Aleichem's works to "feed his soul." Other "food for the soul" came from writing new stories and the novella "Kolya Topuz." He told Pirozhkova, "I am writing a novella where the main character is a former Odessa gangster, like Benia Krik. His name is Kolya Topuz, and that is also the name of the novella. I want to show how a person like this adjusts to life in the Soviet Union. Kolya Topuz works on a collective farm during a time when farms were taken over by the government, and later he works in a Donbass coal mine. However, because he still thinks like a gangster, he often breaks the rules of normal life, leading to many humorous situations." Babel spent much time writing and completed many works. His arrest stopped these works from being published.
Even requests from Ilya Ehrenburg and the Union of Soviet Writers did not get answers from the Soviet government. The truth about Babel's manuscripts was not known until the time of Perestroika.
According to Pirozhkova,
"In 1987, during a time of great change in our country, I made an official request again for the KGB to search for Babel's manuscripts in their secret storage areas. Two KGB agents came to visit me and told me the manuscripts had been burned. 'So you came in person to avoid needing a written response to your request, is that correct?' 'How could you think such a thing? We came here to express our sympathy. We understand how valuable Babel's manuscripts would be.'"
Legacy
According to John Updike, Maxim Gorky once told André Malraux that Isaac Babel was "the best Russia has to offer." Twenty-five years later, Babel's contemporary Konstantin Paustovsky wrote in his memories that Babel was "the first really Soviet writer."
Judith Stora-Sandor, one of Babel's first biographers, wrote in 1968 that Babel's "literary style was French, his vision Jewish, and his fate all too Russian."
After her husband returned to Moscow in 1935, Yevgenia Gronfein Babel did not know about his other family with Antonina Pirozhkova. Based on statements from Ilya Ehrenburg, Yevgenia believed her husband was still alive and in exile. In 1956, Ehrenburg told her in Paris that her husband had been executed. He also informed her about her husband's daughter with Antonina Pirozhkova and asked her to sign a false statement claiming she had divorced her husband before the war. Yevgenia became angry, spat in Ehrenburg's face, and then fainted.
Her daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, believed Ehrenburg acted under orders from the KGB. With two possible people who could be Babel's widow, the Soviet government chose Antonina, his common-law wife, over Yevgenia, who had moved to the West.
Although Nathalie was too young to remember her father clearly, she later became one of the world's leading scholars of his life and work. In 2002, when W.W. Norton published Babel's Complete Works, Nathalie edited the book and wrote the introduction. She died in Washington, D.C., in 2005.
Lydia Babel, the daughter of Isaac Babel and Antonina Pirozhkova, also moved to the United States and now lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Although Babel's play Maria was popular in Western European colleges during the 1960s, it was not performed in Russia until 1994. The first English translation appeared in 1966 in a collection titled Three Soviet Plays (Penguin) under the name "Marya." Maria's first performance in the United States, directed by Carl Weber, took place at Stanford University in 2004.
Several American writers have praised Babel's work. Hubert Selby called Babel "the closest thing I have to a literary influence." James Salter named Babel his favorite short-story writer, saying, "He has the three essentials of greatness: style, structure, and authority." George Saunders mentioned Babel as a literary influence, saying, "There's a Russian writer named Isaac Babel that I love. When I read him, it reminds me of the difference between an OK sentence and a really masterful sentence. Babel does it for me."
An Isaac Babel memorial was unveiled in early September 2011 at the intersection of Rishelievska Street and Zhukovskoho Street in Odesa, Ukraine. A reading of three of Babel's stories, with musical interludes from Isaac Schwartz's work, was held at the Philharmonic Hall on Pushkinska Street on September 6, 2011. The city also has a street named Babelya Street in Moldavanka.
The memorial became a topic of debate in Odesa. In 2024, the local government decided to remove the memorial and others under the derussification law. Some people argued that Babel supported Soviet collectivization (though he actually opposed it) and believed his statue should be removed. Others said Babel was an important part of Odesa's cultural history and that removing the memorial would harm the city's multicultural identity.
In popular culture
British writer Bernard Kops wrote a poem and later a play titled "Whatever Happened to Isaac Babel?" about the writer Isaac Babel.
Brazilian writer Rubem Fonseca wrote a novel called "Vastas emoções e pensamentos imperfeitos" (1988), which tells the story of someone searching for a lost manuscript by Babel.
American author Travis Holland wrote his first novel, "The Archivist's Story," about an archivist named Pavel Dubrov in Lubyanka Prison. In the story, Pavel must check if a Babel manuscript is real. His meeting with Babel inspires him to save the story, even though it puts him in danger.
Playwright Rajiv Joseph won an Obie Award for Best New American Play in 2017 for his work "Describe the Night." The play follows Babel’s life as a journalist in Poland, his death, and how his personal journal connects people across time and places.