Ilya Repin’s painting “Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin recites his poem before Gavrila Derzhavin during the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum exam on January 8th, 1815” Picture sourceAlexander Pushkin was a member of the first Imperial Lyceum founded by Alexander I. (Several of his classmates would lead the Decembrist uprising.) The painting above is by Ilya Efimovich Repin. A […]
Tag: Isaac Babel
Picture sourceMy posts on Isaac Babel, and all the quotes in them, come from The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel and translated by Peter Constantine. This review of the translation is far from glowing, noting “other translations give you a much better sense of his [Babel’s] abilities.” But I liked the completeness […]
List of victims in 1905 Odessa pogrom The most terrible pogrom in the history of Jewish Odessa took place on October 18-22, 1905, when there were some 175,000 Jews living in the city. It enveloped the entire city and the bloody [activity] spread from the central streets to the outlying districts, primarily Moldovanka, which had […]
Pratique Harbor, Odessa (circa 1890 – 1900) Picture sourceBabel’s stories of life in Odessa, or more properly in the Moldavanka neighborhood, were published starting in 1921 and continued into the 1930s. Jan Dudas’ recent pictures of the district can be found on Flickr here. If possible, these works feel more direct than The Red Cavalry […]
Konarmiya (Red Cavalry) and The Odessa Stories “In late May 1920, the First Cavalry of the Soviet Red Army, under the command of General Budyonny, rode into Volhynia, today the border region of western Ukraine and eastern Poland. The Russian-Polish campaign was under way, the new Soviet government’s first foreign offensive, which was viewed back […]
Isaac Babel Picture sourceThere is a wealth of information regarding Isaac Babel available online, a tribute to the power of his stories despite having been “erased” by the Soviet regime for many years. Here is a list of some of the available resources: Babel’s Wikipedia entry Gregory Freidin, Professor, Director of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities […]