Isaac Babel (born 1894) was a short-story writer, playwright, literary translator and journalist. He joined the Red Army as a correspondent during the Russian civil war. The first major Russian-Jewish writer to write in Russian, he was hugely popular during his lifetime, respected by the Communist authorities and the public alike. But he fell to Stalin's purges, and was murdered in 1940, at the age of 45.
Boris Dralyuk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UCLA. He has translated Leo Tolstoy's How Much Land Does a Man Need and co-translated Polina Barskova's The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems, and is the co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of the forthcoming Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky.
