Isaac Babel
Russian language journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer (1894-1940) · Russia · Journalists · Died at 45
Read more often than usual, most of all on 19 October.
11 times the usual readers on 19 October. 5,647 readers on 19 October, against about 500 a day before the rise.
A master of compressed violence and dark irony, Babel wrote some of the most searing dispatches from the Soviet frontier - then vanished into it. The NKVD shot him in 1940, and for decades his name was erased.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 10
![Benya Krik as portrayed by Yuri Shumsky [ru] in the 1926 movie of the same name](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Benya_Krik.jpg)
In their own words 2
, When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible.
The vagrant moon trailed through the town and I tagged along, nurturing within me unfulfillable dreams and dissonant songs.
In their orbit
About this person
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was born on 13 July 1894 into Russian Jewry, and by the 1920s had become its greatest prose writer. His two landmark works - Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories - carried a style of brutal economy and moral ambiguity that set him apart. On 15 May 1939, the NKVD arrested him on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage. He was executed on 27 January 1940, his manuscripts confiscated, his legacy suppressed for a generation.
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