In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessa--as a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieu--shaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation. Modeling themselves on the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, Babel and his fellow Odessans Val-entin Kataev and Yury Olesha manipulated their literary personae through complex, playful, and often subversive negotiations of the boundary between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, they cannily took up a...