Friday, September 9, 2011

My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller

Isaac Babel

My hero: Isaac Babel by AD Miller


'A writer of stunning emotional understatement'

AD Miller
Fri 9 Sep 2011
Of the Russian authors I have come to revere, Isaac Babel was the biggest revelation, and not only for his style. He was born in 1894 in Odessa: technically in the Russian empire, in practice a cosmopolitan city state unto itself. In the bittersweet tales he wrote about his hometown, Babel chronicled the beginning of the end of its old, tolerant way of life. The best-known ones feature Benya Krik, Odessa's Jewish gangster king, and a narrator with "glasses on [his] nose, and autumn in [his] soul".
As much as any writer I know, Babel transmuted journalism into art. He covered the 1919-21 Polish-Soviet war, riding into battle with the Cossack cavalry. It was an unlikely and brave assignment for a Jewish intellectual. Babel kept a diary, whose staccato account of the campaign's horrors is punctuated with exhortations to its author to "remember" and, above all, to "describe". He is already grieving for the revolution. At the same time, the diary is a sort of instruction manual for descriptive fiction. The stories about the Cossacks that he produced soon afterwards, collected in English as Red Cavalry, are among the best war fiction I've read, partly because of their stunning emotional understatement.
He is as much my hero for what he didn't write. Red Cavalry made Babel famous (though it also made him powerful enemies) and earned him the perks that the Soviet system bestowed on favoured artists. But he stubbornly published very little more, though he stayed in Russia when he might have emigrated – the classic act of Russian self-sacrifice. In 1934, in a moment of suicidal irony, Babel declared himself a "master of the genre of silence".
Political almost in spite of himself, he nevertheless cultivated the worst secret policemen – whether out of writerly curiosity or in the hope of protection, nobody knows. You could go mad thinking about how he and many others must have lived and felt during the terror.
Stalin had him shot in 1940.
AD Miller's Snowdrops (Atlantic) has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.

THE GUARDIAN



2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016

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