ABSTRACT
The two principal events in russian prose fiction of the last six years are the silence of Isaac Babyel and the humiliation of Boris Pilnyak. The appearance of his Odessa stories and horse army is the only event since the revolution which can be described as the arrival of a new star in the zenith. With all the advantages, and with a nature apparently sociable and subtle enough to make the most of them, Babyel has managed throughout the whole period of its florescence to elude the pressure of the literary inquisition. Babyel refused to surrender his incomparable pen into the hands of these new slave-drivers of creation, these brigadiers of the boy scouts of poetry, these professional vulgarians prostituting the idea of the liberation of all society by the proletariat to the task of enslaving all utterance and all creative life to an iron-ribbed bureaucratic political machine.
