1920 Diary

by Isaac Babel

Book Overview

This diary by the famed twentieth-century Russian writer recounts Babel's experiences with the Cossack cavalry during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920. The basis for Red Cavalry, Babel's best-known... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300070543
• ISBN13: 9780300070545
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

JOTTINGS OF GENIUS

The journal Isaac Babel kept when he rode with the Cossacks in the 1919-20 war the Soviet Union waged against Poland served as source material for the stories in his brilliant collection, RED CALVARY. The diaries are a gem in themselves, displaying Babel's immediate response to the situation at hand, later to be transmuted by the writer's alchemy into the gold of the stories. It is a little slice of history in the raw, viewed through the eyes of a great writer, a writer who refused to conform to "socialist realism," a writer who 20 years later would be executed by the State Security Apparatus of the USSR.