Isaac Babel: Red Cavalry

"Red Cavalry" is one of the masterpieces created by Isaac Babel, a master of the short story, a profound, subtle, and ironic narrator who, as he wrote in his autobiography, was "sent out into the world" by Maxim Gorky. Babel lived through the Civil War with Budyonny's First Cavalry Army. The harrowing and dashing events of those years are reflected in the pages of the Red Cavalry cycle; there is room here for both generosity and cruelty, victory and defeat, the tragic and the ridiculous. Upon the book's release, Budyonny called "Red Cavalry" a "super-insolent Babelian slander." And yet, despite the commander's opinion, the writer's work, largely thanks to "Red Cavalry" itself, was regarded as one of the most significant phenomena in the literature of the first third of the 20th century. I. Ehrenburg writes of this book: "Everyone was stunned by the power of his imagination; some even spoke of fantasy. And yet, Babel described what he had seen." Confirmation of this is found in the writer's miraculously preserved diary, which he kept in 1920 while in the ranks of the First Cavalry, and which we are publishing alongside the "Red Cavalry" story cycle in this edition.

Author: Isaac Babel

Pages: 288 (newsprint). Paperback

Dimensions: 180x115x17 mm

Series: Azbooka-Classics