Konarmiia - Babel' Isaak Emmanuilovich

"Conarmia" is one of the masterpieces created by Isaac Babel, the master of short novel, a soulful, subtle and ironic narrator, "sent to people," as he wrote in his autobiography, Maxim Gorky. Babel's Civil War was held with Budenny's First Equestrian Army. The terrible and decimate events of those years were reflected in the pages of the Conarmy cycle; there is a place of generosity and cruelty, victories and defeats, tragic and ridiculous. Budenny called "Conarmia" a "super-naked Babel slander." And yet, contrary to the opinion of the commander, the writer's work, largely thanks to "Conarmia", was considered as one of the most significant phenomena in the literature of the first third of the 20th century. Ilya Ehrenburg writes about this book: "Everyone was shocked by the power of fantasy; they even talked about fiction. Meanwhile, Babel described what he saw." Confirmation of this is the miraculously preserved diary of the writer, which he kept in 1920, being in the ranks of the First Horse, and which we publish together with the series of stories "Conarmia" in this edition.