Library

This book contains three parts: "Red Cavalry", "Stories of Odessa" and "Collected Stories", which show the essence of Babel, who is the first of "the one hundred best novelists in the world". The themes and materials of these short stories come from two major sources: one is the military combat life and military figures with distinctive personalities; the other is the many characters in the author's hometown of Odessa (including the author himself), especially the lower class and poor people and their legendary life experiences. Babel is good at capturing strong and vivid details, using a specific action, event or a picture that brings together many dramatic elements to show the complex social landscape, the potential energy of different groups competing with each other and the unstoppable historical trend.

This book is the representative work of the famous Russian short story writer Babel. In 1920, at the age of 26, he followed the First Cavalry Army of the Soviet Red Army led by Budyonny in attacking Poland as a war correspondent. This was the last large-scale cavalry battle in European history and in human history. This tragic war lasted for three months. Babel recorded everything he witnessed in his battlefield diary: bravery and cowardice, integrity and hypocrisy, killing and death, as well as repeatedly trampled towns and unarmed and fearful civilians. From 1923 to 1924, he successively wrote more than 30 novels based on these battlefield diaries, which is "Cavalry Army". In addition to objectively and sincerely recording many astonishing facts, these novels also have many extraordinary features in terms of language, details and structure, and thus have extremely high artistic achievements. "Cavalry" was republished in 1975 and translated into more than 20 languages, shocking the European and American literary circles. In 1986, "European" magazine selected 100 world novelists, and Babel ranked first because of this novel.