Izaak Babel w czterech odsłonach (polskich). Część pierwsza

Abstract

The article is an attempt to interpret the literary reports and meetings of three important Russian and Polish writers, who were touched by the curse of living in the age of totalitarianism: Aleksander Weintraub, using the pseudonym Aleksander Dan, would be murdered by the Germans in the Janowska concentration camp in Lviv in 1943 – he would be forty-six years old. Isaac Manievich Bobel, who in 1920 at the headquarters of the First Budyonny's Cavalry Army presented himself as Kirill Vasilyevich Lutow, and who is better known as Isaac Babel (Russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель), would be killed by the Soviets on January 27, 1940 in Moscow – and he would also be forty-six. The youngest of the three, Bruno Jasieński, actually, Wiktor Bruno Zysman, would be shot on September 17, 1938 in a Moscow jail – thirty-seven years old. This paper is a large fragment of a larger – four-part – entity, devoted to the presence of Isaac Babel as a person and the presence of his writings of in the consciousness of a Polish reader. In the first part presented here, I draw attention to the pre-war "traces" of Babel on the Polish reading market.