“... but recreating in fiction, promoting to a second and possibly less perishable life. She describes Isaac Babel, whom she admires, as using his imagination ‘to understand what had happened, what was real’, and also as having ‘the imagination to be just’, and her fiction is full of small but earnest attempts to save people and places by imagining ...”

“... the stairs and die. Most of all, couples fight, cheat and savage each other. Michaels wrote that Isaac Babel was the writer who influenced him ‘more than any other’. And in his stories it sometimes seems as if the violence of Odessa’s underworld, or Cossack cavalrymen on the rampage, has been imported incongruously into a world of drug-addled ...”

“... farm population dropped steeply, from nearly 1.1 million in 1944 to 147,000 a decade later. What Isaac Babel called obyezloshadenie, or dehorsification, unfolded over a longer period, and more recently, than we might think.Horses were as ubiquitous in the 19th century as cigarettes were in the 20th and some saw them as no less a threat to public ...”

“... sure of one ally: the future. Silone and Moravia, Brecht and Döblin outlived fascism, just as Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam outlived Stalinism – though it killed them ... This was the case until today, or rather, until yesterday. For with the loss of mankind’s future, the ‘immortality’ of literature, taken as a certainty until now, has ...”

“... if we pay strict attention to them; and they are set up as arbitrarily as a magazine scenario. Isaac Babel, whom Pritchett admired and on whom he wrote a shrewd critique, can be shameless in his exploitation of consciousness in relation to event. As Pritchett pointed out, the peasant’s goose whom the narrator ruthlessly kills in one of his most ...”

“... non-elite groups. Jews in the Soviet cultural and intellectual elite – among them the writers Isaac Babel and Eduard Bagritsky, and Meyerhold, the great theatre director – suffered along with non-Jews during the Great Purges, especially if they had close personal ties to purged Communist leaders. And no doubt many of them, like ...”

“... As Misha Glenny says, the rule of the great Karabas recalled the pre-1917 Odessa described by Isaac Babel, with its cast of fabled Jewish gangsters, such as Benya Krik, with his car-horn that played ‘Laugh, Clown, Laugh!’ Karabas was not a Jew, but fitted perfectly into that urban legend. ‘The more I spoke to Odessites of any nationality, the ...”

“... the wolves, and let go of your need. ‘I see you,’ a Cossack says to a Jewish officer in an Isaac Babel story, ‘I see all of you. You are trying to live without enemies.’ This must be appeasement a pathetic failure to acknowledge and live with the violence and privation of out condition. But what would it be like to live only with enemies, to ...”

“... Odessa is a Russian or Ukrainian city, the evidence is mixed. In ‘How It Was Done in Odessa’, Isaac Babel has his Jewish mobster Benya Krik, whose associate has shot an innocent man during a robbery, explain that everyone makes mistakes, even God. ‘Was it not a mistake on God’s part to settle the Jews in Russia, where they have been tormented as ...”

“... different sense from someone like Philip Roth, and though she was often placed in the tradition of Isaac Babel, she told an interviewer that she hadn’t read him before she started publishing fiction and that it was a question of familial rather than literary lineage: ‘I would say we had the same grandfather. So it’s an influence that’s linguistic ...”

“... Thom said. Which I did, and it dazzled me. Another time Thom said to me, ‘I’ve been reading Isaac Babel for the first time. He’s very important to you, isn’t he? Well, of course he is, he’d have to be.’ I gave Thom a copy of Charles Nicholl’s The Fruit Palace, which he loved, likewise Trainspotting. Almost anything scatological had great ...”

“... she herself chose to follow was that of ‘writers within the traditional form but abbreviated’: Isaac Babel, Grace Paley. She’s on record as an admirer of the fragmentary and the unfinished. In her twenties, she spent a lot of time with Kafka’s Diaries. ‘In just a few words, he offers a different way of seeing a commonplace thing. I wondered if I ...”

“... which Tolstoy’s is not, although it may seem to be. In some ways Grossman is much more like Isaac Babel, on a huge scale. So much for the stock claim in terms of construction, technique, effect. But what about the message of War and Peace, its celebration of Russian life, the drive of its propaganda? This is a different and more complex matter, and ...”

“... to the Lubyanka, and killed with a single bullet to the back of the head. The same fate awaited Isaac Babel, who was taken from Peredelkino in May 1939. There were others, less well known, but equals in the manner of their death. ston05_3618 GalleryHow Pasternak survived the necropolitics of the Stalin era was a mystery. ‘It is surprising that I ...”