A collection of “electric, heroically wrought” Russian short stories of violence, crime, and sex set in Ukraine—for fans of hard-boiled fiction by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (John Updike) Odessa was a uniquely Jewish city, and the stories of Isaac Babel—a Jewish man, writing in Russian and born in Odessa—uncover its tough underbelly around the time of the Russian Revolution. Gangsters, prostitutes, beggars, smugglers: no one escapes the pungent, sinewy force of Babel’s pen. From the tales of the magnetic cruelty of Benya Krik—infamous mob boss, and one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature—to the devastating semi-autobiographical account of a young Jewish boy caught up in a pogrom, this collection of stories is considered one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian literature. Translated with precision and sensitivity by Boris Dralyuk, whose rendering of the rich Odessan argot is pitch-perfect, Odessa Stories is the first ever stand-alone collection of Babel’s narratives set in the city and includes the original stories as well as later tales. “The salty speech of the city’s inhabitants is wonderfully rendered in a new translation by Boris Dralyuk . . . Hard-boiled language reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett.” —Vice

To read Babel is to experience the wild and often terrifying swings of Russian history."--BOOK JACKET.

Focusing on language contact involving Russian, and the linguistic varieties that emerged from that contact in different social settings, this book analyzes issues and methodologies in reconstructing both the linguistic effects of language contact and the social contexts of usage. In-depth analyses of Odessan Russian, a southern Russian contact variety with Yiddish and Ukrainian elements, and Russian lexifier pidgins illustrate the reconstruction process, which involves making the most of all available documentation, particularly literature and stereotypical descriptions. Historical sociolinguistics of this kind straddles the fields of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and contact; this book brings together the methods and theories of these areas to show how they can result in a rich reconstruction of linguistic and socially-conditioned variation. We reconstruct the circumstances and social settings that produced this variation, and demonstrate how to reconstruct which variants were used by different types of speakers under different circumstances, and what kinds of social identities they indexed.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

Presents the collected short stories of a master of the form, along with his letters, plays, diaries, and screenplays.

Plot elements such as adventure, travel to far-flung regions, the criminal underworld, and embezzlement schemes are not usually associated with Soviet literature, yet an entire body of work produced between the October Revolution and the Stalinist Great Terror was constructed around them. In Writing RoguesCassio de Oliveira sheds light on the picaresque and its marginal characters – rogues and storytellers – who populated the Soviet Union on paper and in real life. The picaresque afforded authors the means to articulate and reflect on the Soviet collective identity, a class-based utopia that rejected imperial power and attempted to deemphasize national allegiances. Combining new readings of canonical works with in-depth analysis of neglected texts, Writing Rogues explores the proliferation of characters left on the sidelines of the communist transition, including gangsters, con men, and petty thieves, many of them portrayed as ethnic minorities. The book engages with scholarship on Soviet subjectivity as well as classical picaresque literature in order to explain how the subversive rogue – such as Ilf and Petrov’s wildly popular cynic and schemer Ostap Bender – in the process of becoming a fully fledged Soviet citizen, came to expose and embody the contradictions of Soviet life itself. Writing Rogues enriches our understanding of how literature was called upon to participate in the construction of Soviet identity. It demonstrates that the Soviet picaresque resonated with individual citizens’ fears and aspirations as it recorded the country’s transformation into the first communist state.

Collects stories by Isaac Babel, including "In the Basement," "Awakening," "The Sun of Italy," and "My First Goose," and features notes on the text.