Red Cavalry

Name: Red Cavalry
ISBN: 9780393324235

Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel (Editor), and Peter Constantine (Translator)

One 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.

About the Authors

Isaac Babel was born in Odessa in 1894, the son of a Jewish tradesman. At the age of twenty-one he went to St Petersburg, where he had to avoid the Tsarist police because he lacked the residence certificate required of all Jews. Gorky was the first to encourage Babel by printing two of his stories in his magazine. During the First World War, Babel fought with the Tsarist army and in 1917 went over to the Bolsheviks. In 1923 he returned to literature with a number of short stories printed in periodicals. An instant literary success, these formed the nucleus of the Odessa Stories, a group of vivid sketches of Russian Jewish life, and the unforgettable Red Cavalry (1926), written out of his experiences with Budyonny’s cavalry in the Polish campaign of 1920. Other stories, scenarios and plays followed. Unable to conform to the demands for political conformism that were being made on him, however, Babel was arrested suddenly in 1939. He died, possibly in 1941.

Nathalie Babel, his daughter, edited two other books of Babel's writing and is the author of Hugo and Dostoevsky.

Peter Constantine is the director of the Program in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut, the publisher of World Poetry Books, and editor-in-chief of the magazine New Poetry in Translation. A prolific translator from several modern and classical languages, Constantine was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of The Bird Is a Raven by Benjamin Lebert, and the Koret Jewish Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation for The Complete Works of Isaac Babel.

Michael Dirda, who won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism at the Washington Post Book World, is the author of An Open Book, Bound to Please, and Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.