This diary by the famed twentieth-century Russian writer recounts Babelās experiences with the Cossack cavalry during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919ā1920.Ā The basis forĀ Red Cavalry, Babelās best-known work, it records the devastation of the war, the extreme cruelty of the Polish and Red armies alike toward the Jewish population in the Ukraine and eastern Poland, and Babelās own conflicted role as both Soviet revolutionary and Jew.
Ā āBabelās 1920 Diary,Ā the source for many of his remarkable Red Cavalry stories, is itself as remarkable as the stories, particularly when one considers that the diarist was a journalist of only twenty-six. The staccato sentences in which Babel rapidly describes the horrific details of revolutionary brutality have the impact of an accomplished style, one that in its spontaneously elliptical way is strangely no less artful than the artfully nuanced directness that is the triumph ofĀ Red Cavalry.āāPhilip Roth
Ā āAn electrifying translation accompanied by an indispensable introduction. . . . Babelās journey is a Jewish lamentation . . . a tragic masterwork.ā
āCynthia Ozick, The New Republic
Ā āA precursor of Holocaust literature, and more powerful in its effect than any Holocaust literature that I have managed to read.āāHarold Bloom, New York Times Book Review
Ā Isaac BabelĀ was born in Odessa in 1894 and was shot in Lubyanka prison in 1940.Ā Carol J. Avins is associate professor of Russian literature at Rutgers University.