Pirozhkova, A.

At his side. The last years of Isaac Babel

South Royalton, VT: Steerforth press, 1996.

Item #15337
ISBN: 188364237X

Binding: Hardcover, dust jacket
Pages: 171, illustrations

With inscription by the author Antonina Pirozhkova (1909-2010) - Isaak Babel's wife on the title page.

When the writer Isaac Babel was arrested by Stalin's secret police in May of 1939, he said to A. N. Pirozhkova, his wife of seven years, 'They didn't let me finish.' Eight months later, he was shot by the NKVD—although it would be another fifty years before the full story of his trial and execution was revealed. In At His Side, A. N. Pirozhkova brings to vivid life this man whom many consider to be the greatest prose writer of the Soviet period, a modern master of the short story, and a figure about whom surprisingly little has been known or written. She describes a disarmingly generous man of wit, surprise, and whimsy—a man endowed with great goodness of spirit, a passionate interest in people, and a remarkable gift for depicting them. Babel was at the height of his literary fame in 1932 and had a wife and daughter living in Paris when he first met Pirozhkova, the attractive twenty-three-year-old construction engineer. Pirozhkova writes here of their courtship, of their domestic life, of encounters with some of the important artists and intellectuals of the time (Eisenstein, Pasternak, André Malraux, Gide, and H. G. Wells are among the many portrayed here), and of their frequent travels into the Russian countryside as Babel wrote articles on mining operations and collective farms for various government publications. Her detailed telling of these stories makes At His Side a valuable contribution to the picture of Soviet social and intellectual life.

The Soviet Union was singularly successful in murdering its intelligentsia. Isaac Babel (1894-1940), one of the great Russian writers of the century, disappeared into the gulag in 1939 and was executed in 1940. Pirozhkova met him in 1932 and became his second "wife" (Babel never divorced his first wife, who had moved abroad) while she was an engineer-designer on the Moscow subway system. She lived with him until the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) arrested him. Comparisons inevitably come to mind with the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned), wife of poet Osip Mandelstam, who was also exterminated by Stalin. Yet Mrs. Mandelstam was intimately acquainted with her husband's work and preserved much of it for posterity, in some cases by memorizing it, whereas Babel ordered Pirozhkova not to read his drafts or engage him in literary conversations, and she obeyed. One wishes she'd contravened his orders. Pirozhkova's observations are often less than edifying about Babel the author: "Babel spent a great deal of time writing, and he finished many works." Still, her memoir is an invaluable guide to the writer's day-to-day existence, and says a lot about his relations with other Soviet and Western writers. Paley's poetic foreword reveals Babel the writer for American readers.

Price: $45.00