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“... Zhitomir, 5 June 1920. Jews beside a large house, including a yeshivah-bokher in glasses. An old man with a yellow beard. I want to stay, but the men from signals are winding the wires in. Naturally, since the headquarters has gone. I decide to stop with Duvid the Disciple. The soldiers try to dissuade me, but the Jews ask me to stay ... I wash ... Bliss ...”

“... Isaac Babel was a middle-class Jew from Odessa who rode to war with a Cossack regiment. This extraordinary conjunction occurred during the Russo-Polish war of 1920. It is not news, because the single work that made Babel a famous writer – the short story collection Red Cavalry – is based on his experiences that summer, when he turned 26, at the First Cavalry Army HQ in a Volhynian village ...”

“... times like this’. Must I read this? ‘You must know everything,’ said the master storyteller Isaac Babel a few years before he disappeared into a Stalinist labour camp. A taboo on such material, whether self or socially imposed, would inflict its own kind of moral injury. For a start we should concentrate on the excellence or otherwise of the art ...”

“... herself in 1941), her one-time lover Osip Mandelstam (who died in a transit camp in 1938) and Isaac Babel (who was executed in 1940). He takes on not just the burden of translating the political and erotic energies of 20th-century Russian poetry into a new language, but also a burden of historic suffering. There are moments in his early work when his ...”

“... If the world could write by itself,’ Isaac Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ The remark is quoted at the head of Richard Pevear’s introduction to this handsome new translation of War and Peace. I should like to think Babel meant that if the world was given to intricate thematic contrasts and parallels among its materials, to careful cross-cutting between city and country, high society and hunting, the salon and the racetrack, home and abroad, it would have written War and Peace and Anna Karenina ...”

“... that Roman worked as a masseur along ‘the Baltic coast’. Bezmozgis has surely learned from Isaac Babel, even if his sentences lack the blazing oddity of the Odessa master. He has learned from Babel how to turn his sentences into provocations and near exaggerations – ‘torture’, ‘enemy’, ‘Soviet ...”

“... with long-standing traditions. Professors exhibit mild intellectual vanity – ‘Why,’ an Isaac Babel specialist wonders in the course of recruiting the writer as a graduate assistant, ‘would you study the gospel with anyone but St Peter?’ – but also a lovable completism. At Yasnaya Polyana, an ‘International Tolstoy Scholar’ insists on ...”

“... picture of the art critic David Sylvester – and dug up an extraordinary billowing image of Isaac Babel. In 1989 he arrived with a previously unpublished photograph of Jean Genet, which he had taken in the early 1970s. It was the most tremendous close-up: just nose, eyebrows and set mouth. You could count the pores. As he handed the picture ...”

“... of the contemporary Western male’. It shamelessly deployed Descartes, Hegel, Henry James, Isaac Babel and the Naqba as fodder for the rom-com exploits of its protagonists. Mark – an unmoored PhD student obsessed with Russian history, literature, beer and women – justifies sleeping with someone he doesn’t much care for by invoking Lenin in ...”

“... to play cat-and-mouse with him throughout the war, until he died of a heart attack in 1945.) Isaac Babel, a man with a career as many-sided as his talent, was given the job of cleaning up the screenplay and apparently did so with due zeal. But by now, the project had the smell of death on it: Babel, less ...”

“... about diamond smugglers and carnival artistes that is narrated by a filmmaker obsessed with Isaac Babel. The stories’ subtlety with their sources allows them, unlike the novels, to be read as pure noir entertainment: ‘Night Drive’, in Landers’s translation, was first published in Ellery Queen’s Prime Crimes 5. It’s one of Fonseca’s ...”

“... underdeveloped and short on illustration. Dan Jacobson’s subjects range from Byron to Isaac Babel, from Theodore Herzl the Zionist to the South African Olive Schreiner, and also include some mordant reflections on a D.H. Lawrence conference at Sante Fe and a note on the biblical genesis of his own novel The Rape of Tamar. There ...”

“... from the perspective of Jewish assimilation, one work that jumps out as a literary precursor is Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry story cycle, which appeared in Russia in 1926 (the first English translation was published in 1929). The cycle comprises 33 very short stories based on Babel’s experiences working for the Red ...”

“... the more literal the better. Levi’s words bring to mind the art of the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel, who rode with Budyonny’s Red Cavalry after the Revolution, through scenes of hardship and atrocity. Babel’s art is imaginative, figurative. It has been said, by Dan Jacobson, that he ...”

“... but recreating in fiction, promoting to a second and possibly less perishable life. She describes Isaac Babel, whom she admires, as using his imagination ‘to understand what had happened, what was real’, and also as having ‘the imagination to be just’, and her fiction is full of small but earnest attempts to save people and places by imagining ...”