Odessa Stories

7 hrs. 23 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Isaac Babel

Narrator Semyon Yarmolinets

Description

Isaac Babel was a Russian writer underrated by his own time. The whimsical originality of his talent could be fully appreciated only by critics and readers who had already passed through the crucible of twentieth-century Russian history. “He was unlike anyone else, and no one could be like him,” writer Ilya Ehrenburg said of Babel. Babel was such a multifaceted and contradictory personality that if anyone tried to imitate him alone, they would fail. To reproduce the roles Babel played in life, an entire company would be needed, including a quiet intellectual, an adventurer, a scholar-researcher, a joker—the life of every feast—and an official from some out-of-the-way office.
Babel’s prose is a rich treasury of jokes, aphorisms, and anecdotes. Humor was his deity. Before you are the prose masterpieces of Isaac Babel, genuine pearls of his “mystical realism.” Odessa Stories is juicy, endlessly colorful skaz prose in which the story of a clan of Odessa raiders acquires truly mythological features…