Isaak Babel is widely recognized today as a leading twentieth-century short-story writer and the undisputed master of the genre in the Soviet period. By the mid 1920s he had already achieved considerable literary fame and was a prominent, if not extremely productive, figure on the Soviet cultural scene until his arrest during the Stalinist purges of 1939. Since his political rehabilitation in 1954 he has aroused much attention both in Russia and abroad. A growing body of scholarly books and articles has been supplemented by the appearance of obscure or previously unpublished works and new editions of the familiar stories. The most significant recent editions in English include Collected Stories (1994) and The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (2002).

Most of the facts about Babel's life and career come from memoirs written by his daughter, Nathalie Babel, and by his second wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, and from writings by others who knew him...