Isaak Emmanuilowitsch Babel

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Isaac Babylon

Isaac Babel ( Russian Исаак Эммануилович Бабель ; born July 1, jul. / 13. July  1894 greg. In Odessa ; †  27. January 1940 in Moscow ) was a Soviet journalist and writer. His best-known work is the volume of short stories Die Reiterarmee published in 1926 . After initial success in the young Soviet Union , he fell victim to the Stalinist purges and was executed in 1940 (according to another source in 1941); In 1954 he was rehabilitated.

Life

Childhood and youth

Isaak Babel was born in 1894 as the son of Emmanuel Isaakowitsch and his wife Fejga into a family of Jewish traders in the Moldavanka quarter in Odessa, which he later described in his stories from Odessa . Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Nikolayev , where Babel's father became prosperous. In the winter of 1905 Babel returned to Odessa and attended the prestigious Odessa Business School named after Tsar Nicholas I , which he graduated in 1911. Inspired by his teacher of French and literature, Babel read the authors Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant . He also began to write first stories in French.

Beginning of the literary career

Since studying at the University of Odessa was out of the question because of the quota for Jews, Babel went to Kiev to the Institute for Economics and Finance . Here he met Yevgenia Gronfein, his future wife. In 1916 Babel completed his studies and moved to Petrograd (today: Saint Petersburg ), which did not belong to the Pale of Settlement ( Черта оседлости ), in which Jews were allowed to settle in Russia. In the city he met the writer Maxim Gorky , who published some of the short stories of Babel in his magazine Letopis ( "Летопись" ). Gorky advised the budding writer to gain more life experience. Babel later wrote in his autobiography: "[...] I owe everything to this meeting and I still pronounce Alexej Maximowitsch's name with love and admiration. [...]". One of his most famous autobiographical stories with the title The story of my pigeon house ( "История моей голубятни" ) he dedicated to Gorky. The story The bathroom window seemed obscene to Russian censors, and Babel was punished for violating Article 1001 of the Criminal Code as a result.

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The First World War and the subsequent Russian Revolution also completely changed Babel's life. For the next seven years he fought on the Romanian front in the First World War and worked for the Cheka as a counterintelligence translator. In addition to other activities, he was a member of the regional committee of the Bolsheviks in Odessa, a unit for the requisition of food, in the Narkompros (commissariat for education and training) and reporter for newspapers in the cities of Tbilisi and Petrograd. On August 9, 1919, he married Yevgenia Gronfein in Odessa.

Babel as a Soviet writer

In 1920, at the height of the Russian Civil War , he was assigned to General Budyonny's cavalry army as a reporter after he had volunteered for service in the Red Army , following Maxim Gorky's advice . He witnessed the unsuccessful attempt of this cavalry army to occupy the Polish heartland after the advance of the Polish army on the territory of the Ukraine had been successfully repulsed. The Red Army managed to threaten Warsaw in the Polish-Soviet War , but was repulsed. During this time Babel made friends with commanders of the Red Army who later fell victim to the Stalinist purges like himself , including Iona Jakir and Dmitri Schmidt .

Babel wrote: “It was not until 1923 that I learned to express my thoughts in a clear and concise manner. Then I started to write again. ”Various stories, which were later summarized in the volume Die Reiterarmee , were published in 1924 in Vladimir Mayakovsky's magazine LEF ( “ ЛЕФ ” ). Babel's honest description of the brutality of the war and his lack of euphemisms earned him a number of powerful enemies, including Budjonny. This accused Babel of having distorted the "figures of the fighters". The intervention of Gorky prevented the destruction of the book, which was soon translated into different languages. Gorky accused Budjonny of judging the book “from the height of the horse's back” and not “from the height of art”.

After returning to Odessa, Babel began writing a series of short stories about life in the Odessa district of Moldavanka before and after the October Revolution. These were first published in various magazines and journals, in 1931 the collected stories were published as a book under the title Tales from Odessa . During this time Babel met Ilya Ehrenburg and became friends with him. He published his short stories throughout the remainder of the 1920s. In 1925 his first wife, Yevgenia Gronfein, emigrated to Paris. He later married Antonina Piroschkowa .

In 1930 Babel traveled through Ukraine and saw the brutality with which the forced collectivization was carried out in the Soviet Union . As Stalin tightened his grip on Soviet culture, and especially after the emergence of " Socialist Realism ", Babel began to withdraw from public life. “Working,” he noted, “is much more difficult than before.” Praised in Germany by Kurt Tucholsky on the Weltbühne , the personal difficulties that arose at home that arose from his unadorned handling of the reality of the Russian civil war grew at home. What made Babel's truth uncomfortable, even dangerous: There were still eyewitnesses, responsible for the events described by Babel in the cavalry army, some of which were in influential positions in the Soviet state apparatus. He was therefore no longer able to speak publicly against the allegations that he had distorted the image of the Red Cavalry Army.

After a few unsuccessful inquiries, Babel was finally allowed to travel abroad to Paris and visit his family there. In 1935 he gave a speech at the congress of anti-fascist writers in Paris . After his return he worked with Sergei Eisenstein on the film Beschinwiese and wrote scripts for other Soviet films. In 1935 his second play Marija appeared in print. It takes place in revolutionary Petrograd after 1917, in a city of misery and death. The sharp reactions to the publication led to the cancellation of rehearsals at various theaters. It was not performed on any Soviet stage. The drama had its world premiere in 1964 in Italian at the Piccolo Theater in Florence.

After Maxim Gorki's death in 1936, Babel spent his time in constant fear of arrest. Although he had been a writer and abroad, he was initially spared by the Great Terror under Nikolai Yezhov . Babel was friends with Yezhov's wife. He also maintained good contacts with Yezhov's deputy, Yakov Agranov , who was responsible for monitoring writers and artists in the NKVD. It was only after Yezhov's deposition in December 1938 that he was in acute danger.

Photo of Isaak Babel taken by the NKVD (Lubyanka, May 1939)

Arrest and death

Babel was arrested on May 15, 1939 at his dacha in the village of Peredelkino on the basis of a denunciation . He was taken to the large Lubyanka prison in Moscow with his wife (who was not arrested) and charged with spying for the West. The allegations were mainly based on the fact that Babel had good contacts with the former NKVD chief Yezhov and his predecessor Yagoda due to an affair with the wife of the former NKVD boss. In addition to these actually decisive facts, through which he was viewed as an enemy by the new NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria , he was also accused of “forbidden” conversations with various other “public enemies” in the course of the interrogations. Babel was severely tortured during interrogation and eventually admitted to having been a member of a Trotskyist group for which Ehrenburg and the French writer André Malraux recruited him when he was in Paris. The film director Sergej Eisenstein and the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold were also involved in the conspiracy.

On the day of the trial, he revoked the forced confession. Nevertheless, on January 26, 1940, he was found guilty by a tribunal chaired by Vasily Ulrich and shot in Butyrka prison the following day . The execution was carried out personally by the head of the Moscow NKVD firing squad, Vasily Blochin . Babels widow Antonina Nikolajewna did not find out about his death until 15 years later - before that she was repeatedly given the wrong information that her husband was still alive - and the full truth was not revealed until 1988. According to an official version, he was supposed to be in a camp in Siberia on Died March 17, 1941. His manuscripts were confiscated by the NKVD when he was arrested and later burned.

On December 23, 1954, Babel was publicly acquitted of the charges made against him. This enabled his widow to republish his surviving works from 1957.

Works (in selection)

  • An evening with the empress. Stories, dramas, personal testimonies . People and World, Berlin 1969.
  • Budjonny's cavalry and other. The narrative work . With an afterword by Walter Jens. Walter-Verlag, Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau 1960.
  • Stories from Odessa. Autobiographical narratives . German by Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann . Munich 1987 ISBN 3-423-10799-5 .
  • Marija (play). 1935.
  • The cavalry army: stories (also Budyonnyj's cavalry army , first published in 1926). Translated from the Russian by Dmitri Umanski. Frankfurt 1994. ISBN 3-518-22151-5 .
  • Sunset ("Sunset", play), 1928.
  • First aid: all stories , Greno-Verlag, Nördlingen 1987, series Die Other Bibliothek , ISBN 978-3-89190-232-5 .
  • Diary 1920 . Translated from Russian, edited and commented by Peter Urban . Berlin 1990 ISBN 3-921592-59-3 .
  • Two worlds (selection of 46 stories). Translated from Russian and provided with an afterword by Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann. Verlag Kurt Desch, Vienna, Munich, Basel, 1960.
  • My dovecote. All the stories. Ed. Urs Heftrich, Bettina Kaibach. Übers. Das., Peter Urban (uniform new translations of all stories). Carl Hanser, Munich 2014 ISBN 3446243453 .
  • The Complete Works of Isaac Babel , trans. Peter Constantine, ed. Nathalie Babel, introduction Cynthia Ozick, Norton, New York, 2002 ( online ).

literature

  • Enzo Biagi: The Silence of the Writer: Isaak Babel. In: ders .: Lubjanka or Die Gewöhnung an den Tod , Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-87134-015-4 (interview with Antonina Nikolajewna).
  • Ilja Ehrenburg : People - Years - Lives (Memoirs), Munich 1962, special edition Munich 1965, Volume II 1923–1941, pages 133–147 ISBN 3-463-00512-3 (portrait).
  • Gregory Freidin: Cavalry Army. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 156-161.
  • Reinhard Krumm: Isaak Babel. Writing under Stalin. A biography , Norderstedt 2005, ISBN 3-8334-2780-9, extracts online .
  • Petra Morsbach: Isaak Babel on the Soviet stage , Munich 1983, ISBN 3-87690-258-4 .
  • Antonina Piroshkova: I wish you cheerfulness. Memories of Babel , Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-353-00984-1 .
  • Robert A. Rosenstone: King of Odessa , Evanston, Ill. USA 2003, ISBN 0-8101-1992-7 .
  • Witali Schentalinski : The risen word. Persecuted Russian writers in their final letters, poems, and records. Translated from the Russian by Bernd Rullkötter. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe 1996, pp. 43–118; ISBN 3-7857-0848-3 .
  • Wolf Schmid: Ornamental storytelling in Russian modernism. Čechov - Babel - Zamjatin , Frankfurt am Main u. a. 1992, ISBN 3-631-44242-4 .
  • Efraim Safe: Jews in Russian literature after the October Revolution. Writers and artists between hope and apostasy , Cambridge u. a. 1995, ISBN 0-521-48109-0 .
  • Arkadi Waksberg : The Persecuted Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, pp. 47-65, ISBN 3-499-19633-6 .
  • Volker Weidermann : The book of burned books , Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-462-03962-7 (on Babel page 206/207).

Web links

Commons : Isaak Babel  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Single receipts

  1. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, pp. 54-55.
  2. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 53.
  3. ↑ Vitali Chentalinski: Les surprises de la Loubianka. Nouvelles decouvertes in the archives of the KGB. Paris 1996, p. 170.
  4. ↑ Enzo Biagi: [...] Babel loves to make fun of his neighbor. If he doesn't want to be disturbed, he answers the phone with a woman's voice. He even makes fun of Yagoda, whom he meets with friends: "Genrich Gregorijewitsch, tell me how do you behave if you get caught?" And Jagoda replied with amusement: "Deny everything, whatever the allegations are, say no, always just say no. There is nothing we can do about that. "
  5. ↑ Simon Sebag-Montefiore : Isaac Babel; Book of a Lifetime : [...] when Yezhov was thrown from power, so died she and all her lovers - including Babel.
  6. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, pp. 57-58.
  7. ↑ NI Lebedeva (Ed.): Katyn '1940-2000. Documenty. Moscow 2001, pp. 35-36.
  8. ↑ Doris Liebermann: Isaak Babel: The tragic end of a writer. In: Calendar sheet. January 27, 2015. From Deutschlandfunk.de, accessed on October 12, 2019.
  9. ↑ So also Fritz Mierau in the preface to: Isaak Babel, Die Reiterarmee and other stories. Verlag Kultur und Progress, Berlin 1965, p. 13. f .: "In response to a defamatory advertisement he was arrested on May 15, 1939 and died on March 17, 1941 shortly before the age of forty-seventh."
  10. ↑ The manuscripts included several dozen stories, a script, a half-finished play and a collection of material for a biography of his friend Maxim Gorki. This emerges from a request from Babel to Lavrenti Beria, in which he asked to view the material and prepare it for publication. see Enzo Biagi: Lubyanka or Habituation to Death .
  11. ↑ Der Weg for the first time in uncensored form in the last edition.
personal data
SURNAME Babel, Isaak Emmanuilowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Babel, Isaak Emmanuelovich; Бабель, Исаак Эммануилович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian journalist and author of Jewish origin
DATE OF BIRTH July 13, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Odessa , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH January 27, 1940
Place of death Moscow , Soviet Union