Part biography, part history, part critical examination of Babel's legacy in Russian, European, and Jewish cultural context, The Enigma of Isaac Babel offers the first comprehensive view of the great Russian Jewish author since the opening of Soviet archives.

Table of Contents Preface by Gregory Freidin ii Acknowlegements vii I. Attempting a Biography 1. Patricia Blake 2 Researching Babel's Biography: Adventures and Misadventures 2. Gregory Freidin 21 Two Babels'Two Aphrodites: Autobiography in Maria and Babel's Petersburg Myth II. Babel in the Context of Russian History 3. Oleg Budnitskii 92 The Reds and the Jews, or the Comrades in Arms of the Military Reporter Liutov 4 Carol J. Avins 122 Isaac Babel and the Jewish Experience of Revolution 5. Michael S. Gorham 150 Writers At the Front: Language of State in the Civil War Narratives of Isaac Babel and Dmitrii Furmanov 6. Marietta Chudakova 180 Thinned and Diluted: Babel in Published Russian Literature of the Soviet Period III. Babel in the World of Letters and on Stage 7. Robert Alter 215 Babel, Flaubert, and the Rapture of Perception 8. Alexander Zholkovsky 229 Towards a Typology of "Debut" Narratives: Babel, Nabokov, and Others 9. Elif Batuman 240 Pan Pisar': Clerkship in Babel's First-Person Narration 10. Zsuzsa Hetenyi 272 The Child's Eye: Isaac Babel in Russian-Jewish, American, and European Literature of Assimilation 11. Efraim Sicher 304 Text, Intertext, Context: Babel, Bialik, and Others 12. Carl Weber 337 Staging Babel's Maria'for Young American Audiences, Seventy Years After. Notes Index 482