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Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel
Hailed as the first great Soviet writer, Isaac Babel was at once a product and a victim of violent revolution. In tales of Cossack marauders and flashy Odessa gangsters, he perfectly captured the raw, edgy mood of the first years of the Russian Revolution. Masked, reckless, impassioned, charismatic, Babel himself was as fascinating as the characters he created. At last, in renowned author Jerome Charyn, Babel has a portraitist worthy of his quicksilver genius.
Though it traces the arc of Babel’s charmed life and mysterious death, Savage Shorthand bursts the confines of straight biography to become a meditation on the pleasures, torments, and meanings of Babel’s art. Even in childhood, Babel seemed destined to leave a mark. But it was only when his mentor, Maxim Gorky, ordered him to go out into the world of revolutionary Russia that Babel found his true voice and subject. His tales of the bandit king Benya Krik and the brutal raids of the Red Cavalry electrified Moscow. Overnight, Babel was a celebrity, with throngs of admirers and a train of lovers.
But with the rise of Stalin, Babel became a living ghost. Charyn brilliantly evokes the paranoid shadowland of the first wave of Stalin’s terror, when agents of the Cheka snuffed out artists like candle flames. Charyn’s chilling account of the circumstances of Babel’s death–hidden and lied about for decades by Stalin’s agents–finally sets the record straight.
For Jerome Charyn, Babel is the writer who epitomizes the vibrancy, violence, and tragedy of literature in the twentieth century. In Savage Shorthand, Charyn has turned his own lifelong obsession with Babel into a dazzling and original literary work.
From the Hardcover edition.
Though it traces the arc of Babel’s charmed life and mysterious death, Savage Shorthand bursts the confines of straight biography to become a meditation on the pleasures, torments, and meanings of Babel’s art. Even in childhood, Babel seemed destined to leave a mark. But it was only when his mentor, Maxim Gorky, ordered him to go out into the world of revolutionary Russia that Babel found his true voice and subject. His tales of the bandit king Benya Krik and the brutal raids of the Red Cavalry electrified Moscow. Overnight, Babel was a celebrity, with throngs of admirers and a train of lovers.
But with the rise of Stalin, Babel became a living ghost. Charyn brilliantly evokes the paranoid shadowland of the first wave of Stalin’s terror, when agents of the Cheka snuffed out artists like candle flames. Charyn’s chilling account of the circumstances of Babel’s death–hidden and lied about for decades by Stalin’s agents–finally sets the record straight.
For Jerome Charyn, Babel is the writer who epitomizes the vibrancy, violence, and tragedy of literature in the twentieth century. In Savage Shorthand, Charyn has turned his own lifelong obsession with Babel into a dazzling and original literary work.
From the Hardcover edition.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published October 18, 2005
8 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
Jerome Charyn
224 books230 followersJerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With more than 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."
Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.
Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.
In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."
Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."
Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."
Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.
Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.
In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."
Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."
Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 26, 2018
I think it was during George Saunders “Lincoln in the Bardo” talk at the Poetry Society in NYC in 2016 that I first heard about Isaac Babel when George talked about his favorite authors. I immediately added the collected stories of Isaac Babel to my Goodread to read list.
This month I was looking for a copy at my local library and found Jerome Charyn’s biography of Isaac Babel and thought it would be good to understand Isaac Babel’s life.
Jerome does an excellent job as biographer, I like biographies when they incorporate modern interpretation, quoting Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." Jerome weaves in contemporary literature like “Minority Report” and Mikhail Khodorkovsky into understanding Babel and his Mentor/Protector Gorky.
The book was also a good refresher of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks for me but mostly it is about Stalin his Cheka killers Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria.
The best part of the book was understanding how Isaac’s fiction and his real-life fiction, pretending to be a Cossack, interwove with his imagination, he created the modern mobster as much as The Godfather with his short story “The King”
This month I was looking for a copy at my local library and found Jerome Charyn’s biography of Isaac Babel and thought it would be good to understand Isaac Babel’s life.
Jerome does an excellent job as biographer, I like biographies when they incorporate modern interpretation, quoting Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." Jerome weaves in contemporary literature like “Minority Report” and Mikhail Khodorkovsky into understanding Babel and his Mentor/Protector Gorky.
The book was also a good refresher of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks for me but mostly it is about Stalin his Cheka killers Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria.
The best part of the book was understanding how Isaac’s fiction and his real-life fiction, pretending to be a Cossack, interwove with his imagination, he created the modern mobster as much as The Godfather with his short story “The King”
March 29, 2019
An interesting commentary on the life and work of the greatest Soviet short story writer. I enjoyed the book, but I have previously read most of the stories included in the book. Babel is an interesting personality, with an unusual background. The son of a well to do Jewish, Odessa merchant, he was plucked out of obscurity by Maxim Gorky and was protected by him through the early years of the Russian Revolution and Soviet Power. His collected stories of his time with Soviet forces in the 1920 war with Poland, Red Calvary, is a classic work of the period. This was translated into the major European languages and Babel lived the high life, traveling to Paris to visit his wife and child, while living with a Soviet engineer working for the Moscow Metro. He was involved with the Cheka, Secret Police, and his mistress was Yagoda’s sister. When Yeshov replaced Yagoda, Babel was accused of being a French spy and was shot in the Lubyanka cellars in 1940. His ashes were placed in a mass grave in the Donskoy Monastery. After Stalin’s death, he was rehabilitated is now rightly seen as a writer in the tradition of Pushkin and Chekhov.
September 1, 2009
Isaac Babel was one of a number of great Russian writers who were silenced - both literally and metaphorically in the case of Babel and Osip Mandelstam - by Stalin's regime. Perhaps nothing could have saved him from the executioner's bullet in the cellar of the Moscow's Lubyanka, but it surely didn't help matters that he had once had an affair with the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD during the great purges of the mid-1930s. (In a fitting display of dramatic irony, Yezhov's own life also ended in the Lubyanka and a mass grave as unmarked as Babel's.)
Jerome Charyn's Savage Shorthand is a strange amalgam of biography, history and literary appreciation in which he traces Babel's own fictions about himself in his short stories and tries to make us appreciate Babel's unique contribution to Russian literature. Unfortunately, Charyn is a little too enamored of his "savage shorthand" phrase, because he uses it repetitively. Also unfortunately, I felt that for some reason Charyn was very enamored of Babel's daughter Natalie, and he gave very short shrift to Babel's second wife, Antonina, who suffered the fate of the families of "enemies of the people" after her husband's fall, perhaps solely because Antonina, a stoic engineer who worked on the Moscow subway system, wasn't literary or "deep" enough in her descriptions of life with Babel. I ended up resenting Charyn for this, which clouded my view of his book, although it did inspire me to purchase Red Cavalry!
Jerome Charyn's Savage Shorthand is a strange amalgam of biography, history and literary appreciation in which he traces Babel's own fictions about himself in his short stories and tries to make us appreciate Babel's unique contribution to Russian literature. Unfortunately, Charyn is a little too enamored of his "savage shorthand" phrase, because he uses it repetitively. Also unfortunately, I felt that for some reason Charyn was very enamored of Babel's daughter Natalie, and he gave very short shrift to Babel's second wife, Antonina, who suffered the fate of the families of "enemies of the people" after her husband's fall, perhaps solely because Antonina, a stoic engineer who worked on the Moscow subway system, wasn't literary or "deep" enough in her descriptions of life with Babel. I ended up resenting Charyn for this, which clouded my view of his book, although it did inspire me to purchase Red Cavalry!
January 11, 2012
I am enthralled - it's a story of one man, but also an era - I am learning so much about Stalin. It is the perfect book to read after I finally had the chance to see The Pianist. I am reading it on iPad, which is perfect, because I can bookmark all the wonderful lines I want to remember. "Stalin surrounded himself with half-men and hacks."
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December 12, 2017I fell off @ the end, + didn't quite finish it. I don't know what about this book made me read it. I know nothing about Russian literature. I enjoyed the writing at the beginning. The author really loves Babel, and the way that comes through is charming as well as educational. It's been a long time since I read it, + I don't remember well what I enjoyed abt it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews