The Essential Fictions offers contemporary readers seventy-two short stories by one of twentieth-century Russia’s premier storytellers, Isaac Babel. This unique volume, which includes Babel’s famous Red Cavalry series and his Odessa Stories, is translated, edited, introduced, and annotated by Val Vinokur, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Translation, and features illustrations by Yefim Ladyzhensky, a painter known for his depictions of everyday life under Soviet rule in Babel’s native Odessa. Babel was born in 1894 into multicultural Odessa’s thriving Jewish community. Working as a journalist, he witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, and accompanied the Cossack horsemen of the Red Cavalry during the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, distilling these experiences into his fiction. Vinokur highlights Babel’s “horrified hopefulness” and “doleful and bespectacled Jewish comedy” in the face of the bloody conflicts that plagued his generation. On the centenary of the revolution that toppled the Romanov tsars, Babel’s fictions continue to absorb and fascinate contemporary readers interested in eastern European and Jewish literature as well as the history and politics of the twentieth century. OPENINGS Odessa Shabbos Nahamu Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna Mama, Rimma, and Alla Through a Crack The Sin of Jesus Line and Color Bagrat-Ogly and the Eyes of His Bull My First Advance Guy de Maupassant The Road THE STORY OF MY DOVECOT (CHILDHOOD CYCLE) Childhood. At Grandmothers The Story of My Dovecot First Love Awakening In the Basement Di Grasso ODESSA STORIES The King How It Was Done in Odessa The Father Justice in Brackets Lyubka the Cossack Sunset Froim the Rook The End of the Poorhouse You Missed the Boat, Captain! Karl-Yankel RED CAVALRY The Crossing of the Zbruch The Church at Novograd A Letter Chief of the Remount Service Pan Apolek The Sun of Italy Gedali My First Goose The Rebbe The Road to Brody A Teaching on the Tachanka Dolgushov’s Death Brigcom Two Sashka Christ The Life Story of Pavlichenko, Matvei Rodionych The Cemetery in Kozin Prishchepa The Story of a Horse Konkin Berestechko Salt Evening Afonka Bida At Saint Valentine’s Squadron Commander Trunov The Ivans The Story of a Horse, Continued The Widow Zamoste Treason Chesniki After the Battle The Song The Rebbe’s Son RED CAVALRY: ADDITIONS Argamak The Kiss CLOSINGS Our Batko Makhno The End of St. Hypatius Dante Street The Trial (from a notebook) The Ivan & Marya Crude Sulak Gapa Guzhva: The First Chapter from the “Velikaya Krinitsa” Book Kolyvushka (from the “Velikaya Staritsa” book)