33 Facts About Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel is best known as the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, and has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry".

Isaac Babel was born in the Moldavanka section of Odessa in the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents, Manus and Feyga Babel.

Isaac Babel used Moldavanka as the setting for Odessa Stories and the play Sunset.

Isaac Babel then entered the Kiev Institute of Finance and Business.

In 1915, Isaac Babel graduated and moved to Petrograd, in defiance of laws restricting Jews from living outside the Pale of Settlement.

Isaac Babel was fluent in French, besides Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish, and his earliest works were written in French.

In St Petersburg, Isaac Babel met Maxim Gorky, who published some of Isaac Babel's stories in his literary magazine Letopis.

Isaac Babel continued publishing there until Novaya zhizn was forcibly closed on Lenin's orders in July 1918.

Yevgenia Isaac Babel, feeling betrayed by her husband's infidelities and motivated by her increasing hatred of communism, emigrated to France.

Isaac Babel saw her several times during his visits to Paris.

In 1932, Isaac Babel met a Siberian-born Gentile named Antonina Pirozhkova.

In 1934, after Isaac Babel failed to convince his wife to return to Moscow, he and Antonina began living together.

Isaac Babel noticed this and told me, 'Reading that way will get you nowhere.

Isaac Babel documented the horrors of the war he witnessed in the 1920 Diary, which he later used to write Red Cavalry, a collection of short stories such as "Crossing the River Zbrucz" and "My First Goose".

However, Gorky's influence not only protected Isaac Babel but helped to guarantee publication.

Back in Odessa, Isaac Babel started to write Odessa Stories, a series of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka.

Isaac Babel thought that the play had not come off well, but.

In 1930, Isaac Babel travelled in Ukraine and witnessed the brutality of forced collectivisation and dekulakisation.

The tradition in Russia being to worship poets and writers, Isaac Babel soon became one of the happy few, a group that included Soviet writers who enjoyed exceptional status and privileges in an otherwise impoverished and despotic country.

On July 27,1933, Isaac Babel wrote a letter to Yuri Annenkov, stating that he had been summoned to Moscow and was leaving immediately.

When Isaac Babel was arrested in 1939, all of these letters were confiscated and never returned to me.

Isaac Babel collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein on the film Bezhin Meadow, about Pavlik Morozov, a child informant for the Soviet secret police.

Isaac Babel worked on the screenplays for several other Stalinist propaganda films.

Isaac Babel probably knew this would have been his last chance to remain in Europe.

Isaac Babel had, according to NKVD lore, "seriously wounded one of our men" while "resisting arrest".

Isaac Babel's name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi.

In October 1939, Isaac Babel was again summoned for interrogation and denied all his previous testimony.

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.

Isaac Babel was shot at 1:30 am on 27 January 1940.

Isaac Babel was shot the next day, and his body was thrown into a communal grave.

New collections of selected works by Isaac Babel were published in 1966,1989 and 1990.

The first collections of the complete works of Isaac Babel were prepared and published in Russia in 2002 and 2006.

Isaac Babel's name is Kolya Topuz and so far, at least, that's the name of the novella.