Lot 172: BABEL, Isaak Emmanuilovich (author; 1894-1940) and SHTERENBERG, David Petrovich (illustrator; 1881-1948). Rasskazy . [Stories]. Moscow: Federation, 1932.

BABEL, Isaak Emmanuilovich (author; 1894-1940) and SHTERENBERG, David Petrovich (illustrator; 1881-1948). Rasskazy. [Stories]. Moscow: Federation, 1932.

8° (190 x 131mm). Seven chromolithographs after Shterenberg and one lithograph. Illustrated endpapers by Shterenberg. (Occasional small marginal stains.) Contemporary blue blind-stamped cloth (extremities rubbed, spine head and tail splitting slightly).

FIRST EDITION. Includes the story 'The story of my Dovecote', dedicated to Gor'kii, the play Sunset and some of the Odessa Tales: 'How it was done in Odessa', 'The Father' and 'The King'. Babel achieved great success and sudden fame following the initial publication in 1926 of Red Cavalry, a novel composed of a cycle of stories based on Babel's experiences while with Budennyi's Cossacks in the Russo-Polish War. The themes of a clash between old and new worlds and between Jewish and Russian identity and community that come to the fore in Red Cavalry are also evident in the Odessa Tales, in which Babel describes vividly the criminal underworld of the Jewish ghetto in Odessa. In the later 1930s, as the state attempted to exert increasing control over the arts, Babel began to practise the 'genre of silence'. He was arrested in 1939 and executed soon after. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1954. MOMA The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1005.

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