Isaac Babel drew on his experience as a war correspondent embedded with a Cossack cavalry unit during the 1920 Soviet-Polish war to produce one of the most distinctive story collections in modern literature. The stories follow a Jewish intellectual, closely modeled on Babel himself, who rides with the fearsome Cossack horsemen as they sweep through the towns and countryside of Poland and western Ukraine, witnessing acts of extraordinary violence and unexpected beauty in close succession. Babel's narrator occupies an impossible position: a bespectacled Jewish writer among warriors who despise weakness and intellectualism, a revolutionary sympathizer confronting the revolution's brutality, a man who longs to belong to the world of action but cannot shed his reflective, bookish nature. The stories are remarkably compressed—some run only two or three pages—yet contain entire worlds of sensory detail, moral complexity, and emotional force. Babel renders a sunset over a battlefield, the looting of a Polish church, or a dying man's last words with equal vividness and an almost painterly attention to color and light. The Jewish communities caught in the war's path appear frequently, their destruction recorded with a grief that is all the more powerful for being understated. Babel revised obsessively, claiming he could spend a morning putting in a comma and an afternoon taking it out, and the resulting prose has a density and precision that rewards rereading. His literary career was cut short when he was arrested during Stalin's purges in 1939 and executed the following year, making these stories both a literary achievement of the highest order and a document from a voice that totalitarianism silenced.