Isaak Babel (1894 - 1941) was born into a Jewish middle-class family in Odessa, a city that at that time was a bustling port with a rich and colorful mix of different ethnic groups; it was also a center of Jewish culture, with writers working in Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. While many questions about the details of Babel's life remain, he seems to have had some kind of religious training, and echoes of Biblical texts and rabbinical commentaries can be felt in many of his short stories. He served in various capacities in the Red Army - including a brief stint as a member of the secret police - and his work as a reporter and propagandist for a military newspaper in 1920 is reflected in his stories Red Cavalry. Babel was an incredibly demanding stylist, who worked through endless revisions and "parings-down" of his stories. His most famous collections are the Odessa Tales (1921 - 23) and Red Cavalry (1924 - 25). His accounts of the Red Army campaign drew immediate criticism from one of the army's commanders, Semyon Budenny, who felt the stories were "slanderous" in their portrayal of Bolshevik soldiers. Babel found it extremely difficult to publish in the 30's, a period in Soviet culture when Babel's practice of ambiguity and paradox came under attack. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1939,

Evgenii Zamyatin (1884 - 1937) was born into the provincial family of a (Russian, Christian) Orthodox priest. He was trained as a naval architect, lived for a time in England, and was briefly involved in revolutionary activities at the time of the 1905 revolution (see Eisenstein/Potemkin). Zamyatin was the author of an important "anti-utopian" novel, We [1924], which prefigures in many ways the critiques of totalitarianism in George Orwell's 1984 (Zamyatin's novel was actually published in English translation before it was published in Russian; it was first published in the Soviet Union only in the late 1980's). Zamyatin is also the author of numerous short stories and essays, many of which demonstrate his interest in Old Russian culture, and an aesthetic which melds the grotesque and the satirical. Zamyatin was publicly attacked in the late 1920's, in a period of rapid and aggressive politicization of culture. He was an adamant defender of the role of the artist as perpetuating "endless revolution" - leaving no truths uncriticized - a stance which put him at odds with the growing cultural and political dogmatism. Zamyatin left the Soviet Union in 1931. "The Cave" was written in 1922

.In reading the stories by Babel and Zamyatin (in your coursepack), you should consider the following questions:

What aspects of the revolution is each author concerned with?
Whose points of view are represented in these stories? Whose "voices" are we hearing? Whose view of the revolution are we getting?
What moral dilemmas does each author present?
Each of these authors suggests the existence of "value systems" which are opposed to - or at least in tension with - the revolution. What are those value systems for Babel and Zamyatin? How do they suggest their existence? Do they suggest that those values will continue to exist in a post-Revolutionary Russia, or will they disappear?

The images below give a visual sense of the world(s) of St. Petersburg, known from 1914 to 1924 as Petrograd, and from 1924 (the year of Lenin's death) until the early 1990's as Leningrad.