At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel [Paperback]

A.N. Pirozhkova (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998

I WISH TO RESTORE to public memory certain features of a man endowed with great goodness of spirit, a passionate interest in people, and a miraculous gift for depicting them." So begins A. N. Pirozhkova's moving memoir of her life with Isaac Babel, perhaps the Soviet Union's greatest writer, and one of the literary world's most lively and endearing characters. Pirozhkova was the only female engineer working on Stalin's grand Moscow subway project when she met Babel in 1932 and they spent the next eight years as husband and wife. At His Side is populated with Babel's wide circle of friends - among them Maxim Gorky, Sergey Eisenstein, and André Malraux - and includes some wonderful vignettes, as when Babel accompanies a cantankerous Boris Pasternak on a long train ride to Germany to receive a literary prize. But it is Babel himself, the affable and always witty writer, who is given vivid life on this pages. And then, in 1940, Stalin's secret police arrive at the door to take Babel away, and there begins the long and sorrowful aftermath to the story. After a mock trial, Babel was summarily executed, but his fate was kept from Pirozhkova and for years she was led to believe he was alive - and writing - in a Siberian prison camp. It was not until 1952 that she learned that Babel was dead, but even then the authorities played with the truth, claiming he'd died of a heart attack. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Pirozhkova learned the true circumstances of Babel's murder.

"Babel lives in his wife’s lucid yet adoring prose. We are with her, at his side"--New York Times Book Review
"This glimpse into Babel’s last few years on earth, written by the person closest to him, will be a treasured possession" --Richard Bernstein
The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Antonina Pirozhkova, Isaac Babel's widow, recounts the last seven years of the man many consider the finest short-story writer of the 20th century. Although no complete biography has ever been written of Babel, Pirozhkova's book goes a long way toward bringing out Babel's complex and at times contradictory nature, as well as the exhilarating and terrifying period of Stalin's Russia. Through it all we are given a clear view of Babel, the man: a man of burning curiosity and intellect, as well as a man of great humor and aplomb. When he was arrested by the secret police, Babel remarked to one of the arresting officers, "So, I guess you don't get much sleep, do you?" --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 171 pages
• Publisher: Zoland Books; New edition edition (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642981
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642983
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,734,931 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How Stalin murdered the Soviet intelligentsia., November 19, 2005

By 

Kevin M Quigg (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel (Paperback)

This is a sad story of Isaac Babel, a Soviet writer of short stories. Isaac was a good writer but fell on the foul side of Stalin's policies. This is the story of the last seven years of his life as told by his common law wife. As the terror grows, artists on all sides of Isaac start to disappear. Isaac even befriends the former leader of the Soviet NKVD who gives him some sage advice---If they arrest you, deny everything. Babel was arrested and disappeared. The NKVD tells his wife he is at a labor camp when in actuallity he was executed by a firing squad approximately six months after his arrest.
Two things stand out about this book. One was Babel never getting to spend time with his three children before he died. The second is his common law wife spending significant time trying to recover him and documenting his life's work. Their married life was one of true love. A nice story about the destruction of the Soviet intelligentsia.