In 1928, Maxim Gorky named Isaac Babel as "the great hope of Russian literature". Eleven years later, in 1939, during the endless night of Stalin's purges, that hope was taken to the Lubyanka and disappeared. Gorky could not help him, having died a few years earlier. Many rumours circulated. In 1956 Babel's wife, Evgenia, learnt of her husband's rehabilitation, but she continued to be deceived about what had actually happened to him. Not until the 1990s did it emerge how the author of Red Cavalry and the Odessa Stories had been lost to Russia. He was executed in January 1940 after the briefest of trials, at which he recanted his confession and continued to protest his innocence. "I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others . . ." His last recorded words were: "I am asking for only one thing - let me finish my work."
The feeling of something grossly and grotesquely curtailed about Babel's writing lingers, with this reader, at least. It is reinforced by reading this testamentary book. His prose - factual, exhilarating, discontinuous - has a heroic simplicity. Babel worshipped the sun, "the glass sun of Petersburg", the orange sun that "rolled across the sky like a severed head", "the fire of the sunset" that sweeps over a cavalry commander's silhouette "as crimson and implausible as impending doom". Men sing until sunset, die at sunset. The sun is an apt metaphor for his own life and fate. Here is the sun, torn from its path in mid-course. Here is the day, abruptly shredded into night.
Born in 1894 by the Black Sea in Odessa, Babel, who was Jewish, was a storyteller, not born but possessed. The wildness of Odessa city, the sense of catastrophe and humour throughout its Jewish community, the gangster milieu of the Moldavanka district where he grew up - all this channelled his imagination into twisting and distorting every fact and event. He often appears to confirm this in his stories, as in the Odessa story "In the Basement", which opens: "I was a boy who told lies."
In the story, the narrator is befriended by a knowledgeable rich boy called Borgman, who lectures his classmates about Spinoza. "What he told them was nothing but scientific prattle. There was no poetry in Borgman's words. I could not stop myself from cutting in. To whomever would listen, I talked about old Amsterdam, about the gloom of the ghetto, about the philosopher diamond cutters." No scientist, but a considerable inventor. (Incidentally, wild though Odessa was, it was also one of Russia's two great European conduits: witness Borgman's father at the dacha, reading his copy of the Manchester Guardian.)
When Babel was in his early twenties, Gorky gave him an invaluable lesson: that he knew nothing, but was good at guessing a lot. What he had to do was go out in the world. This, with the energy native to him, Babel did. Two of the discoveries of this excellent edition are the light it throws on his fiction by including his revolution- era journalism and sketches and notes for stories he intended to write ("a factual account . . . Pay no attention to continuity"); and his diary of June to September 1920, the months he spent with General Budyonny's Red Cavalry in Volhynia. I had not seen this diary: it is one of the most shocking war memoirs I have ever read.
At the outset, Babel was enthusiastic about the Soviet campaign to spread the revolution to Poland: writing in the Red Cavalryman newspaper, he exhorted his readers to "heroically hack the damn Poles to pieces". By September 1920, defeat could make no impression on him, so numbed was he by the savagery. "Ahead - terrible things. We crossed the railroad tracks by Zadvurdze . . . The military commissar and I ride along the tracks, begging the men not to butcher the prisoners . . . I didn't look into their faces, they impaled them, shot them, one they undress, another they shoot, moans, yells, wheezing . . . This is hell. How we bring freedom - terrible."
By the time he had visited the Ukrainian countryside in 1930 "in search of new material" in the areas of "socialist construction" - as writers were supposed to - and had witnessed the horror of Stalin's forced collectivisation, his enthusiasm for socialism was gone. He began to be criticised for the crime of "silence". He had discovered that telling lies well was impossible without telling the truth unbearable to ideologues, the truth of language, the phrase that "is both good and bad at the same time" which the writer must master. "The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One's fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice."
Babel's gaiety, his love of his own language, were ultimately his enemy. He exchanged his life for his language, unable to tear himself away from what he saw was coming, resisting attempts by his wife and friends to persuade him out of the Soviet Union, saying that without Russia he would be "a fish out of water". Yet such stubbornness does not tell us everything: it does not tell about the astonishing vividness of his prose, or the energy he was able to inject into each and every story.
The publication of this magnificent single volume, a labour of love by his daughter Nathalie and his very fine translator Peter Constantine, reminds us that with Babel's brutal removal, we lost perhaps half the work of one of the finest fiction writers not just of the 20th century, but of any century. The energy is palpable not just in the stories, but in the journalism, plays and film scripts, too. It is the strong note of such a powerful engine spinning that makes the sudden silence so traumatic.
Julian Evans is a literary critic and travel writer
