Isaac Babel, a protégé of Maxim Gorky, Babel served in a revolutionary Cossack regiment and later came to be regarded as a leading proletarian writer. He was arrested in 1937, however, and died about two years later in a concentration camp. Recollecting his first reading of some of Babel’s stories Lionel Trilling writes: “It was obviously the most remarkable work of fiction that has yet come out of revolutionary Russia, the only work, indeed, that I knew of as having upon in the mark of expectional talent, even of genius.’