Publisher's Synopsis
Isaak Babel, the Russian short-story writer and playwright, is best known in the West for his collection of short stories, "Red Cavalry". His earlier collection of war stories, "On the Field of Honour", is still regarded as "undiscovered", but the present critical work on Babel aims to bring it into the limelight. Babel produced an earlier version of "On the Field of Honour" which was itself an adaptation with the original and demonstrates how, through tiny embellishments, additions and omissions, he radically alters the original effect of the stories and gives them his unmistakably ironic and ambivalent stamp. Thus the reader obtains an insight into Babel's style of creation. Luck traces the development technique of story-telling from the first collection of war stories to the development of technique in the second, "Red Cavalry".
