After his first publications in Maxim Gorky's Petrograd-based journal Letopis, ,Babel next wrote as a war correspondent. Following the Red Army, he wrote the stories and reports that were collected as Red Cavalry, published to an enthusiastic Russian audience in 1926. The first English edition came out in 1929. His next collection, The Odessa Tales, was published in 1931, but the English edition in which these appear, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, did not come out until 1955, after Babel's death. Babel's work has received a complicated critical reception. Considered exemplary from a literary standpoint, his work was not strictly propagandistic. As a war correspondent, or "propaganda officer," Babel was expected to use literature to spread socialist views. While full of political and moral motifs, the stories remain ambiguous as to any final opinion. Instead, they are atmospheric, intense and confusing; their narrators present an amalgam of seemingly contradictory...