Isaac Babel's identity is "complicated", he is a Soviet writer, but born and raised in Odessa, Ukraine; he is one of the most important short story masters in the world, but because of his Jewish identity He suffered humiliation and suffering from the day he was born, a fate that followed him until 1940, when he was secretly executed by the authorities. He is a scholar and has the ability to read various literary books unforgettable, but he was rejected by his favorite school because of his Jewish identity; in 1911, he was also not admitted to the University of Odessa in his hometown because of his Jewish identity. . As a teenager, he submitted manuscripts to various Russian and Ukrainian literary journals and was repeatedly rejected, and his Jewishness remained a factor in frequent rejections until he met the writer Gorky. Gorky really admired Babel's literary talent so much that he not only published two of Babel's short stories in the November 1916 issue of the "Chronicle" magazine he edited, but also used his connections to provide the young man Literary opportunities. It is precisely because of Gorky and Ehrenburg that these writers spared no effort to support and support, in June 1936, Babel became one of the chief writers of the Soviet Union of Writers, along with Pasternak, another writer of Jewish descent. After being given a villa, Babel seems to have ushered in his short-lived "peak of life"?
It turned out that it was indeed a brief "brilliancy" in Babel's life. More often, he is struggling with fate. In order to make a living and for his ideals, he worked as a servant in a tavern, fought in Romania, worked as a translator for foreign affairs in the Cheka, worked as a grain collector in the grain collection team, and worked as a reporter for a news agency. In 1920, Babel took the pseudonym Liutov (because Babel was too much like a Jewish name) and joined the First Cossack Cavalry Army in the Soviet-Polish War. Based on what he saw and heard during this period, he successively wrote a batch of excellent short stories, which was "The Cavalry Army" which brought him a worldwide reputation.
Many people know that Babel is derived from "The Cavalry", and somehow I seem to find the true source of the style of Raymond Carver's work in "The Cavalry". But what I like more is Babel's other masterpiece - "The Story of Odessa", and from this I got to know the city of Odessa. This novel, which is set in Odessa, an important port city on the shore of the Black Sea, does not seem to be a novel in a strict sense (some people even think it is a prose work), but a series of stories, of course. , it might be more appropriate to call it a collection of short stories. In many stories, characters are interspersed and entangled with each other, but it allows readers to understand the unforgettable stories that happened in the city of Odessa more intuitively. I always thought that this "Odessa Story" inspired some European and American writers and the proliferation of various "story collections" named after cities in the current Chinese literary creation.
Babel is both Soviet and Ukrainian, but neither his identity as a Soviet nor his Ukrainian background can really "explain" him. He will always have another indelible identity - a Jew. In The Story of My Pigeon Nest, Babel tells the tragic story of his childhood in order to get a pigeon den. When Babel was nine years old, his father told him that he would send him three pairs of pigeons if he could get into the local preparatory class; Babel's cousin also built a pigeon nest for him. But schools in Odessa set the admission rate for Jewish children very low—for a class of forty places, there are only two places for Jewish children. Although Babel did well in his exams (yes, he always did), another wealthy businessman had his son take Babel's place by "donating" five hundred rubles to the school. Babel had no choice but to apply directly to the first grade of middle school. Within a year, he had memorized three books and was directly admitted to the first grade of middle school, but when he happily told the news to his mother, the mother's face was as ugly as death. Babel wrote: " She looked at me with pain and pity, as if she was looking at a disabled person, because she alone knew how bad our family was." This scene vividly tells readers the humiliation, persecution and discrimination that Jews suffered in Europe back then .
The catastrophe followed, and the grandfather who made Babel's pigeon coop was killed. Babel wrote: "Shoyle lay in sawdust, his chest smashed... His legs were splayed, dirty, purple, and stiff."
Of course, Babel's story of Odessa is not all about the heavy undertones mentioned above. Unlike Akhmatova, who left Odessa at birth, and Pushkin, Chekov, Bunin, Gorky and others who lived briefly in Odessa, Babel and Odessa are inseparable. Relationship. Fifty years after his death, Isaac Babel was ranked first among the 100 best novelists in the world by the Italian magazine Europa.
Ellenburg said: "Babel is not like anyone, because no one can be like him. He is always writing his own things in his own way." Hemingway believed that Babel's works were more condensed than his own. . Borges, on the other hand, believed that every paragraph of Babel's words was as beautiful as poetry. John Updike's assessment of Babel is brief but powerful: "He's a dazzling star!"
Odessa was built in May 1794 and was rebuilt after being seized from the Ottoman Empire by the then Russian Empress Catherine II, who wanted to build another St. Petersburg on the southern tip of the Ukrainian steppe. Catherine II was a German, and the first two governors of Odessa were the battle-hardened French soldiers Richelieu and Langeron, which made Odessa a veritable "international city" , Odessa has been contaminated with "mixed blood" from the very beginning. This is presented in the book "Stories of Odessa".
To be honest, I don't think Babel's novels (stories) are easy to read, and the combination of short stories is not very smooth. In many cases, its structure is even contradictory and "unbelievable", but it is carefully designed by the writer. The writer Paustovsky, famous for his book "The Golden Rose", thought "a Russian magician was born" after reading Babel's works. This evaluation is pertinent and professional. In the face of Babel, the literary "magician", the reader's reading intelligence needs to be tested.
The people of Odessa erected a statue of Isaac Babel in Odessa in 2010, the seventieth anniversary of the author's death. The statue is located not far from Babel's former residence, and although it does not look majestic, Babel finally becomes one with the city he loves and describes. Also in 2010, Odessa set up the "Isaac Babel Prize for Literature".
In 1990, the KGB archives were lifted. Details of Babel's interrogation and death have come to light. On May 13, 1939, Babel was falsely accused of being a Western spy and arrested. In his final statement, he said: "I am completely innocent, I have never been a spy, and I have never done anything against the Soviets. The testimony I gave during the interrogation was to slander myself. I have only one request, that Just to allow me to finish my final work."
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Before, it was widely believed that Paul Celan was German, or that he was a German Jew. This is of course because he wrote in German all his life, and his poetry is highly sought after in German-speaking countries. His famous work "Death Fugue" shocked the whole of Germany, and he won the Bremen Literature Prize in Germany and the Bichner Prize, the highest literary award in German-speaking countries. Of course, Paul Celan's recognition as a German is also related to the fact that his works have always been highly praised by German philosophers, thinkers, and writers, including Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Kazakhstan Bermas and other world-class German cultural giants. Before Paul Celan, only Kafka, Rilke and Thomas Mann were the only German-language writers who were so admired.
However, Paul Celan did not actually live in Germany, and there is no evidence that he ever represented Germany in any literary activity. Paul Celan's father and his dearly loved mother both died at the hands of the Germans. His mother was shot through the neck by a Nazi officer at Mikhailov concentration camp in Ukraine, and he himself was displaced during World War II to escape Nazi persecution.
As a result, many people attribute Paul Celan's "nationality" to Ukraine, especially now that Ukraine is being focused on by the world. The name Paul Celan has been included in the ranks of famous Ukrainian writers and poets by a large number of online and offline media. I think this is of course related to his famous poem "Winter"——
It's snowing, Mom, it's snowing in Ukraine:
The halo of the savior is a thousand grains of sorrow.
Here, my tears can't reach you.
The beckoning of the past leaves only the silent and proud farewell...
We're going to die: shack why don't you sleep?
The wind, too, fled like it was being driven away...
Is it them, those who are cold in the slag—
The heart flutters, and the arm is a candlestick?
I am still me in the dark:
Soft can relieve sorrow, just heartbroken?
In my stars there is a resonant harp,
The strings are blowing until they are torn apart...
Occasionally there is a rose of time hanging from the string.
is going out. one. forever one...
What would it be, Mom: Growth or trauma—
Am I also stuck in snow in Ukraine?
Yes, Paul Celan mentioned Ukraine more than once in his writings, but, just as he didn't actually live in Germany, he didn't actually live in his Ukraine, or Saying that Paul Celan did not live in Ukraine as a concept of the state. Technically speaking, Paul Celan's "homeland" is Romania - much like another Romanian who writes in German - 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Miller. Herta Miller was born in Timisoara in western Romania, while Paul Celan was born in Chernowitz in northern Romania. As a place name, Chernowitz first appeared on the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed due to its defeat in the First World War, and Chernowitz became a part of Romania. Two years later, in 1920, Paul Celan was born, in other words, in Romania when Paul Celan was born. In 1938, Paul Celan left his hometown to go to Paris, France to attend a pre-med school, and two years later, in 1940, the Soviet army occupied his hometown of Chernowitz; in 1941, Nazi Germany captured Chell Nowitz; after that, Chernowitz was assigned to Ukraine, until today.
In 1938, when Paul Celan was traveling by train through Berlin, he was just in time for Nazi Germany to begin the first round of the Holocaust of Jews. He later admitted that the experience was something he will never forget. As a Jewish poet, his writing has never been free from suffering and death.
Adorno, a German-Jewish philosopher in exile in the United States, thought: "It is barbaric and impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz." But Paul Celan's poem "Death Fugue" published in Bucharest, Romania in 1945, shocked the post-war Western literary world with its powerful indictment of the evil nature of the Nazis and its profound and original artistic appeal. The latter German-speaking countries can be described as a household name and become an important representative work in the German "ruin literature". Adorno therefore retracted his sentence and added another famous sentence: "The long-suffering one has more right to express, just as the tortured has to shout. Hence the statement about the inability to write poetry after Auschwitz Maybe wrong."
It is generally believed that on April 20, 1970, Paul Celan threw himself from the Pont Mirabeau over the Seine in Paris, and it was not until May 1, ten days later, that an angler was in the Seine. Paul Celan's body was found seven miles down the river.
It is said that the last thing placed on Paul Celan's desk was an open biography of Hölderlin. He underlined one of the passages: "Sometimes the genius went into darkness and sank into the well of his heart," while the rest of the passage was unlined, the remainder read: "But above all, he The star of revelation shone strangely."
After World War II, Paul Celan and Ukraine became inseparable. Because his parents, relatives, including his childhood friends, all died in the concentration camps built by the Nazis in Ukraine.
Ukraine appears in the first line of the poem "Winter", which is loaded with Paul Celan's complex emotions, not only the heartache of his parents' tragic death in Ukraine, but also the yearning for the winter snowfall in his hometown. Depressed. The last thing he asked his beloved mother - did I get caught in the snow in Ukraine too? It moved countless readers; and this sentence, in my opinion, is exactly Paul Celan's comparison of his own broken fate, because his fate is like the snow in the Ukrainian winter that constantly witnesses the misery of this world.
Paul Celan's later works are mostly dark and obscure, showing extreme disappointment and weariness with the world. The death of his mother is the beginning and the end of his poetry. Before his death, Paul Celan had suffered from schizophrenia, and his favorite poet Hölderlin also suffered from schizophrenia.
Nowadays, around us, there are so many doctoral and master supervisors in universities, this and that in research institutes, the biggest names in the literary world, and they are living a prosperous life, but it is Paul Celan who opens his mouth and shuts up Iraq Zack Babel. They made a lot of money from "researching" or consuming Paul Celans, and they enjoyed all kinds of incomparably generous treatment and unattainable status, but they were unwilling to endure the sorrowful life of Paul Celan. In case, even more unwilling to feel Paul Celan's inner pain.
Paul Celan was actually a name "made" by the poet himself. It seems that it is not a bad idea to say that it is his pseudonym. "Celan" means "hide or keep something secret" in Latin. What is Celan trying to hide or keep secret? Perhaps they were buried under the thick snow of the Ukrainian winter.
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