Resumo de Mariya - Babel, Isaak

Isaak Babel was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa,
Ukraine. The atmosphere of the persecution of Jews is
reflected in the pessimism of his stories, although his
childhood was relatively comfortable. At a time when most
Jews were forbidden to live in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev,
and other localities, Odessa had many times more Jews than
any other city in the Russian part of the empire. However,
between 1881 and 1917 two million Jews left Russia, mostly
for America. Babel's father was a successful businessman who
installed his family in one of the best streets in Odessa.
Babel studied violin, German, French, and Talmud at the
Nicholas I Commercial Institute (1905-11) and wrote stories
at the age of fifteen in imitation of Guy de Maupassant. In
1915 Babel graduated from Kiev University, which had been
evacuated to Saratov on the Volga because of the war.

After graduating Babel moved to St. Petersburg, where he
studied literature. In that capital city "traitors,
malcontents, whiners, and Jews" were banned and Babel had to
use an apocryphal passport. His first works were published
in 1916 in Letopis, a monthly edited by Maksim Gorky.
Although Babel himself had been untouched during the pogroms
that spread throughout Russia in 1905, he saw in rising
revolutionary movements a promise of freedom, and end of all
persecution. Babel's early satires of the Czarist
bureaucracy attracted the attention of the government and
Babel was accused of pornography and incitement of class
hatred. This is seen in the loosely autobiographical 'Story
of My Dovecote', where he described the fate of a murdered
grandfather. On Gorky's advise Babel decided to see the
world and learn about life. He participated briefly in the
war on the Romanian front. He was injured and after his
discharge Babel joined the staff of Gorky's newspaper Novaya
Zhizn. During the Revolution he worked probably as a clerk
for the Commissariat of Education and for the CheKa, the
Soviet Secret Police.

Babel's wife went in 1925 to Paris for a 'temporary'
separation; his daughter Natalie was raised in France.
Babel's mother and sister lived in Brussels from 1926 on,
but the author himself did not leave the Soviet Union
despite numerous opportunities. Babel visited his wife in
Paris and travelled on journalistic assignments in Ukraine
and the Caucasus. He served also as a secretary of a village
soviet in Molodenovo. Between the years 1925 and 1930 he
wrote a series of fictionalized accounts of his childhood,
and young manhood. In the loosely autobiographical 'Story of
My Dovecote' he described the fate of a murdered
grandfather.

In the beginning of the 1930s, Babel's literary reputation
was high in the Soviet Union and abroad. He revised his
stories for his collected works that appeared in 1932 and
1936. From the mid-1930s, Babel avoided publicity under
increasing Stalinist persecution, although he worked on film
scripts, including Eisenstein's banned Bezhin Meadow and on
a new book. In 1934 Babel joked "If one talks about silence,
one cannot fail to say that I am a great master of that
genre." However, Antonina Pirozhkova, with whom Babel spent
his last years in Moscow, states that he was prolific during
that period. His speech in 1935 at the International
Congress of Writers in Paris about Soviet people and culture
made a great impression. The autobiographical short story
'Di Grasso' (1937) was the last work to be published in
Babel's lifetime. It depicted his enthusiasm about theatre
in his youth - he has pawed his father's watch with Kolya
Schwartz to visit Theatre Street but Kolya does not return
it before his wife gets angry about it.
"Clutching the watch, I was left alone, and suddenly, with a
lucidity I had never known before, I saw soaring columns of
the Duma, the illuminated foliage on the boulevard, the
bronze head ofng faintly in the moonlight,
and I saw for the first time everything around me as it was
in reality - silent, and indescribably beautiful." (from 'Di
Grasso')

Babel was arrested by the N.K.V.D., a precursor of the K.G.
B, in May 1939 at his cottage in Peredelkino, the writers'
colony. Under interrogation and probable torture at
Lubyanka, Babel confessed a long association with
Trotskyites and engaging in anti-soviet activity. His trial
was held in Buturka Prison and on January 27, 1940, he was
shot on Stalin's orders for espionage. The Soviet officials
informed Babel's widow that her husband died on March 17,
1941 in a prison camp in Siberia. Babel's charges were
posthumously cleared in 1954. His seized manuscripts have
not been recovered. Babel's collected works, based on the
1936 edition but including new materials, were republished
in 1957 and 1966.

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