The Secret Death of Isaac Babel

Lionel Trilling wrote that “no event in the history of Soviet culture is more significant than the career, or, rather, the end of the career, of Isaac Babel” and offered the view that he was arrested because of his affair with the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD; Cynthia Ozick has expressed another widely shared opinion that Babel “was devoured because he would not, could not, accommodate falsehood”; when asked why someone had been arrested, Anna Akhmatova once shouted, “What do you mean what for? It’s time you understood that people are being arrested for nothing.”

Was Isaac Babel a martyr to art and truth? A victim of Stalin’s antisemitism, the jealousy of a vindictive husband in a position of power, or another random casualty in the brutal chaos and cacophony of Stalin’s Great Terror?

In this class, using NKVD documentation and other sources, we will reassess these different views and beliefs.  Why does this matter?  Unlocking the secret of Babel’s arrest, torture and execution helps us understand the mechanism of Stalin’s power, the significance Trilling referred to, and the abiding tragedy of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union.

Required Reading:

At His Side, The Last Years of Isaac Babel
This book will be available for purchase on the first day of class.

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

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