Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the narrator's dual personality in "My First Goose."

Red Cavalry, Isaac Babel's 1926 collection of 35 stories, drew on the author's experience as a war correspondent for the Red Army during the tumultuous Russian Civil War. From the start, Babel conceived the collection as a larger whole composed of individual parts. In fact, he referred to the stories as "excerpts" or "chapters" of a book. Writes David McDuff in the Reference Guide to World Literature, Red Cavalry "marks the pinnacle of Babel's literary achievement." In his study Isaac Babel, Milton Ehre further commends the collection, finding it the "most important fiction to come out of the Russian Revolution." Most of the stories are told from the point of view of Lyutov, a...