The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Read Online Free PDF

geographic information—an act which moved me deeply and helped me to confront more peacefully these difficult episodes of my life.
    This publication is also the realization of a dream of my husband, Richard Harvey Brown, who for over thirty years has hoped that I would be able to master my memories sufficiently to bring this volume to print. His benevolence and loving support throughout these struggles also should be publicly acknowledged.
    I would like to thank Nathalie Babel for offering me this project, and  for her constant support and encouragement. I owe particular thanks to my Russian editor, Anneta Greenlee, for her tireless checking of my translation against the Russian original for stylistic nuance. My translation owes much to her specialized knowledge of early-twen-tieth-century Russian language and literature. I am also grateful to Katya Ilina for her help in editing Isaac Babel's 1920 Diary, and for the weeks she spent studying the many editions of Babel works, checking for editorial variations and instances of Soviet censorship.
    I am also indebted to my editor at Norton, Robert Weil, for his insightful and knowledgeable editing and particularly for his expertise in American and European Jewish literature. I am also grateful to Jason Baskin and Nomi Victor, editors at Norton, and to David Cole for copyediting the manuscript.
    I am indebted to Professor Gregory Freidin for his help and advice, and for his specialized knowledge of Isaac Babels life and works, and to Christine Galitzine for her knowledge of pre-Revolutionary Russia.
    I am thankful to Peter Glassgold for his initial suggestion that I translate Isaac Babel, and for his helpful editorial advice. I am thankful also to my agent, Jessica Wainwright, for her encouragement and constant support as I worked on the translation. I also wish to thank Jennifer Lyons, the agent of the Babel estate, for her help and input.
    I am deeply indebted to the resources of the New York Public Library, where I did all my research and annotation. I owe special gratitude to Edward Kasinec, curator of the Slavic and Baltic Division, for his erudite advice and for the many times he personally located materials for me that were hidden in obscure Soviet publications of the 1920s and 1930s. I am also grateful to Tanya Gizdavcic, librarian of the Slavic and Baltic Division, for her help in locating material, and to Serge Gleboff, Robert Davis, Lev Chaban, and Hee-Gwone Yoo for their help and advice.
    I would like to thank Paul Glasser at YIVO for his helpful explanations of Yiddish expressions. I would also like to express my appreciation to Karina Vamling from the Linguistics Department of the University of Lund, Sweden, for her explanations of Georgian expressions in Isaac Babels texts and the information she provided on aspects of Georgian and Caucasian politics that Babel referred to, and to Peter Gasiorowski of the University of Poznan, Poland, for his linguistic advice on expressions used in the 1920 Diary. I am also grateful to Thomas Fiddick for his help—I benefited greatly from his books and articles on the Russian-Polish war of 1920. I am thankful as well to Patricia Herlihy for her encouragement: I found her book Odessa: A History, 1794-1914 a great help in putting early-twentieth-century Odessa—the Odessa of Babels early years—into perspective. I found the extensive annotations in the German translation of the 1920 Diary by Peter Urban very helpful, as I did the scholarly and bibliographical work on Babel by Efraim Sicher.
    My very special thanks to Burton Pike, who inspired, helped, and advised me throughout the project.

    Peter Constantine

EARLY STORIES

    When the twenty-one-year-old Isaac Babel arrived in St. Petersburg in 1916, he found the city in mid but stimulating upheaval It was still the capital of Russia and the center of Russian literature and art, where the foremost writers of the day lived and published. But the city was shaken by World War I.