The Essential Fictions

ISBN-13: 9780810135956 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 424 str.

Isaac Babel; Val Vinokur

Opis

The Essential Fictions offers contemporary readers seventy-three short stories by one of twentieth-century Russia's premier storytellers, Isaac Babel. This unique volume, which includes Babel's famous Red Calvary series and his Odessa Stories, was translated, edited, introduced, and annotated by Val Vinokur, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Translation, and features illustrations by Yefim Ladyzhensky, a painter known for his depictions of everyday life under Soviet rule in Babel's native Odessa.

Babel was born in 1894 into multicultural Odessa's thriving Jewish community. His work is tinctured with the sentiments of his childhood, but exhibits an acerbity that could have only been acquired during Babel's time as a journalist, when he witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, and accompanied a mounted division of the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War. Translator Vinokur deftly highlights both Babel's "doleful and bespectacled Jewish comedy" and "horrified hopefulness" in the face of the bloody conflicts that plagued his generation.

On the centenary of the revolution that toppled the Romanov tsars, Babel's fictions continue to engross and enthrall contemporary readers interested in Eastern European and Jewish literature, as well as the history and politics of the twentieth century.