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Arp, Hans (Jean Arp) (1887–1966) poet
Hans Arp was born in Strasbourg, Alsace. Now
part of France, Alsace belonged to Germany at the
time of Arp’s birth. His father, Pierre-Guillaume
Arp, operated a cigar and cigarette factory. Arp’s
mother, Josephine, was French, and the family
sympathized politically with France. Arp grew up
speaking German, French, and the Alsatian dialect.
His childhood daydreams translated into an early
literary creativity. Arp published his first poem,
written in Alsatian, at age 15. Two years later, he
published three more poems.
Although a gifted poet, Arp would achieve his
greatest fame as a painter and sculptor. He studied
art in Strasbourg, Weimar, and Paris. After mov-
ing to Switzerland, Arp produced abstract painting
and in 1916 helped found the DADA movement in
art. In 1921, he married the artist Sophie Taeuber.
Five years later, he changed his name from Hans
to Jean.
Arp published his first collection of poetry,
written in German, in 1920. His poems gained a
wider audience in 1948 when a New York firm
published his collection On My Way: Poetry and
Essays, 1912–1947. Arp’s early verse was conven-
tional but amusing and inventive. In the 1940s and
1950s, his poems were written as a series of dream-
like word associations and had more emotional
depth. The historian Hermann Boeschenstein ex-
plains that Arp was a pioneer in “freeing the word
from the task of relating to and disclosing the
meaning of outer and inner realities. Language as
such is advanced to the central position in poetry
and forms its theme.”
Other Works by Hans Arp
The Isms of Art. 1925. Authorized Reprint Edition.
New York: Arno Press, 1968.
Jean, Marcel, ed. Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories.
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York:
Viking Press, 1972.
A Work about Hans Arp
Last, Rex W. German Dadaist Literature: Kurt Schwit-
ters, Hugo Ball, Hans Arp. Boston: Twayne, 1973.
Arp, Jean
See ARP, HANS.
Arrabal, Fernando (1937– ) playwright,
novelist
Fernando Arrabal was born in Melilla, Spanish
Morocco. His childhood was extremely trau-
matic. In the Spanish civil war his father was an
officer in the liberal republican army, and his
mother was a fascist sympathizer. At the end of
the war, she betrayed his father to the authorities,
and he was condemned to death. The violent loss
of his father, combined with Arrabal’s knowledge
of his mother’s betrayal, permanently scarred
him.
When Arrabal was four years old, his family
moved to Spain, where he attended school. As a
young boy, he would entertain himself by
constructing puppet theaters and putting on
plays. These experiences play an important role in
some of his later works. Arrabal was also fascinated
by Charlie Chaplin movies; later in life, he used
slapstick and the stylized acting techniques
of Chaplin in the context of his Panic Theater
movement.
Unable to find attractive career opportunities in
Franco’s Spain, Arrabal moved to Paris to pursue
his career as a playwright. Ironically, around the
same time he arrived in Paris, he discovered he had
tuberculosis. Nevertheless, he persisted in working
arduously at his writing and, in 1958, his efforts
paid off when a Paris publisher gave him a lifetime
contract.
The Labyrinth (1956), one of Arrabal’s early
plays, reflects the depressing and daunting quality
of his early life. It resembles to some degree the
dark fantasies of Franz
KAFKA. A nightmarish play,
it portrays the horrors of the modern world as a
sort of absurd hell. As Arrabal developed as a
writer, he persisted in his use of absurdity. In his
later plays, however, the effect was more often
black humor rather than terror or angst.
In the 1960s, Arrabal emerged as one of the
central writers of the THEATRE OF THE ABSURD,a
28 Arp, Hans
movement pioneered by such writers as Antonin
ARTAUD and Samuel BECKETT. The movement had
many subcategories of playwrights who shared a
common use of absurd elements as a method to
revitalize the stolid conventions of traditional
Western theater.
Arrabal’s particular subcategory was a style of
theater he called Panic Theater. The Greek god of
surprise and confusion, Pan, for whom the move-
ment was named, brings both pleasure and terror
when he appears. It is important to remember that
the scope of Panic Theater extends beyond the
simple definition of fear that we normally associate
with panic.
Critical Analysis
Arrabal’s play The Architect and the Emperor of
Assyria (1965) is an example of the height of
Panic Theater. The play begins when the emperor
of Assyria’s plane crashes on a desert island and
he is the only one who survives. He finds on this
island an architect who is not quite human. He is
a supernatural creature who is able to control
night and day and the seasons. The emperor nev-
ertheless is unimpressed and begins to try to edu-
cate the architect in the manners of bourgeois
society. The two men fall into a sadomasochistic
relationship that involves acting out plays in
which they assume opposite roles, such as a pair
of fiancés, mother and son, a nun and her
confessor, and a doctor and his patient. As the
play progresses, the two actors switch roles,
behave like each other, and act out scenes by
themselves playing two people. It becomes obvi-
ous that they are each other’s double and part of
the same mind.
The use of games and ritualized behavior to
structure the action of the play in lieu of a plot is
one of Arrabal’s major innovations. In addition,
the absurd sequence of events creates confusion
and incomprehensibility that embodies one of the
main aspects of Panic Theater. Arrabal believed
that to be accurate to life, art must be confusing
and filled with chance or absurdity. The Architect
and the Emperor of Assyria can be seen as a psy-
chological drama that, perhaps, takes place within
a single mind, a kind of dream projected onto the
stage.
In the late 1960s, after being censored and ar-
rested in Spain,Arrabal began to become more po-
litical in his drama. He wrote a series of plays that
he called Guerrilla Theater, many of which were
meant to be performed impromptu on the street.
And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers (1969), the
culmination of this period in Arrabal’s work, is
performed in a theater; however, the actors sit with
the audience, and the staging is highly unconven-
tional. Arrabal continues to use many of the meth-
ods of Panic Theater, but now his purpose was to
convey a public, political message.
Arrabal is primarily a dramatist, but he has also
had success in a number of other genres. His novel
The Tower Struck by Lightning (1988) is a semiau-
tobiographical work structured entirely around
the game of chess, at which Arrabal is an expert.
He has made several films, including a film for
children, Pacific Fantasy (1981), starring Mickey
Rooney. He has also exhibited his dreamlike paint-
ings. Although under the Franco regime his plays
were banned in Spain, in 1986 King Juan Carlos of
Spain awarded him the Medalla d’Oro de las Bel-
las Artes. His other awards include France’s Prix
du Centre National du Livre. Arrabal lives and
works in Paris. In a review of the La Mama (New
York) production of The Architect and the Emperor
of Assyria, Clive Barnes wrote: “Mr. Arrabal, with
his perceptions, absurdities, loves and under-
standing, is a playwright to be honored, treasured
and understood. In this play he is saying some-
thing about the isolation, the solitariness and the
need of 20th-century man that, so far, as I can see,
no other playwright has quite gotten on stage
before.”
Other Works by Fernando Arrabal
Baal Babylon. Translated by Richard Howard. New
York: Grove, 1961.
Selected Plays: Guernica; The Labyrinth; The Tricycle;
Picnic on the Battlefield; And They Put Handcuffs
on the Flowers; The Architect and the Emperor of
Arrabal, Fernando 29
Assyria; Garden of Delights. New York: Grove
Press, 1986.
A Work about Fernando Arrabal
Donahue, Thomas John. The Theater of Fernando
Arrabal: A Garden of Earthly Delights. New York:
New York University Press, 1980.
Artaud, Antonin (1896–1948) poet,
dramatist
Antonin Artaud was born in Marseille, France. In
1920, he moved to Paris to become an actor. His
work, both on stage and as a writer, was influential
to the development of experimental theater. In
particular, he visualized a new form of theater,
both for stage and screen, known as the Theater of
Cruelty, in which traditional forms of representa-
tion would be cast aside in favor of new actions
and spectacles and in which language would be all
but abandoned in a carefully choreographed new
creation. His efforts to produce his visions, how-
ever, failed, not so much as a result of a lack of vi-
sion but because he spent most of his life destitute,
addicted to numerous drugs and hampered by
both physical and mental illness. His book The
Theatre and Its Double (1938; translated 1958),
however, was later used as the basis for much of the
ensemble-theater movement as well as for identi-
fying characteristics that would be linked to the
THEATRE OF THE ABSURD.
A prime example of this type of work was his
play The Cenci (1935), which was produced at the
Théâtre Alfred Jarry, a theater cofounded by Ar-
taud himself. An illustration of the Theater of Cru-
elty, it was performed without a traditionally
constructed set and featured minimal spoken dia-
logue, relying instead on movement, gestures, and
incoherent sounds. The goal of this form of art was
to force the audience to confront a “primal self”
devoid of the trappings of civilization.
A pioneer, Artaud first began to publish his
texts, complete with detailed instruction on light-
ing, violent gestures, and a noisy cacophony of
sound in place of music, in 1924, almost 40 years
before Andy Warhol introduced the trend of mul-
timedia spectacle. He initially aligned himself with
the
SURREALISTS, but he was expelled from their
group in 1926 because he was unwilling to follow
the movement’s mission. Finding himself with few
artistic allies, he focused his creative energies on
writing essays and poetry, as well as taking small
roles in mainstream films, something he felt was
degrading to him as an artist.
In 1936 and 1937, Artaud traveled to Mexico
(where he studied the rituals of the Tarahumaras
Indians), Belgium, and Ireland (where he became
increasingly disillusioned with the social restric-
tions placed on creative artists). He suffered a
mental breakdown that involved episodes of
violent behavior and hallucinations. On his
return from Ireland, Artaud was placed in a
psychiatric hospital. Institutionalized from 1937
to 1946, he was subjected to various experimental
forms of therapy, including 51 electric shock
treatments, coma-inducing insulin therapy, and
periods of starvation. As a result, his health
declined rapidly.
The final two years of Artaud’s life, after his re-
lease from the asylum, were unquestionably his
most productive. He sought desperately to give
voice to his vision. His final work was To Have
Done With The Judgment Of God (1947), a radio
script in which Artaud sought revenge against
those who had kept him in the asylum. Billed as
vicious, obscene, anti-American and anti-Catholic,
the script did not air until 30 years after Artaud’s
death; it was eventually banned. In the script itself,
the United States is presented as a baby factory and
war machine. Death rituals are depicted, and
excrement is revered as symbolic of life and
mortality. Questions about reality are answered
with more questions, leading to the final scene in
which God takes the stage as a dissected organ on
an autopsy table.
Artaud died of cancer, shortly after suffering
the disappointment of having his radio broad-
cast banned, but he left behind a legacy that
would influence many generations of artists.
As recently as 1982, the punk musical group
30 Artaud, Antonin
Bauhaus recorded a song in tribute to the genius
of Antonin Artaud.
Another Work by Antonin Artaud
Artaud on Theatre. Edited by Claude Schumacher.
London: Methuen Drama, 1991.
Works about Antonin Artaud
Bermel, Albert. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. New York:
Taplinger, 1977.
Plunka, Gene A., ed. Antonin Artaud and the Modern
Theatre. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University
Presses, 1994.
Astley, Thea (1925– ) novelist
Thea Astley was born in Brisbane, Australia. Al-
most all of her novels are set in south Queensland.
She studied for 12 years in the University of
Queensland, graduated with an arts degree, and
has taught in several schools and institutions in
Queensland, New South Wales, and Sydney. Astley
has won several prizes for her works, including the
Miles Franklin Award on three occasions. She has
published several novels and a few short stories,
and edited an anthology of short stories in 1971.
She is married and has one son.
Astley’s writings are marked by a unique blend
of comedic wit and biting sarcasm. Her novels re-
flect her constant struggle to come to terms with
Queensland society and with Catholicism. Her
characters come from a variety of backgrounds,
and her settings are usually small towns. Astley be-
lieves that the closely knit community of a small
town allows her to express the depths of her char-
acters fully. Her novel Reaching Tin River (1980),
for example, is set in a rural town whose economic
life is centered on the sugar industry.
The most intriguing aspect of Astley’s novels is
the point of view from which she writes. She often
chooses to write from the perspective of the misfits
or outsiders of a society. In A Boat Load of Home
Folk (1968), Astley relates how the inability of a
group of elderly Australians to cope with the
strange environment of a tropical island reveals
their inadequacies. In another novel, The Slow Na-
tives (1965), she examines relationships between
the elders and the young in the Leverson. She ex-
poses the estrangement between generations and
laments the way the aged are marginalized and
neglected within the community. This novel won
both a Miles Franklin Award and a Moomba Festi-
val prize and is considered to be one of Astley’s
best novels for the way it finds the depths in shal-
low, constricted lives.
Astley’s poetic prose explores the depth of ex-
perience and emotions of her flawed characters.
She mixes her chastisement and mockery with
humor, as in her depiction of Paul Vesper in The
Acolyte. This penchant for injecting humor in her
narrative makes a deeper impact on her readers.
In the view of the Australian writer and critic Brian
Matthews, Astley is “one of the most impressive of
major Australian novelists currently writing.”
Other Works by Thea Astley
A Descant for Gossips. St. Lucia: University of Queens-
land Press, 1986.
Girl With A Monkey. New York: Viking Press, 1987.
Hunting the Wild Pineapple. New York: Penguin USA.
1982.
An Item from the Late News. New York: Viking Press,
1984.
It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from a Family Album.
New York: Penguin USA, 1988.
A Kindness Cup. New York: Penguin USA, 1989.
The Well Dressed Explorer. New York: Penguin USA,
1988.
A Work about Thea Astley
Matthews, Brian. “Life in the Eye of the Hurricane:
The Novels of Thea Astley.” Southern Review 5
(1973): 148–73.
Atwood, Margaret (1939– ) novelist,
poet
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, to
Carl Atwood, an entomologist, and Margaret Kil-
lam, a nutritionist. She spent her childhood ac-
Atwood, Margaret 31
companying her father on his researches in the
wilderness of Quebec. Graduating from the Uni-
versity of Toronto with a B.A. in 1961, she received
an M.A. from Radcliffe in 1962 and did some grad-
uate work at Harvard University, beginning a the-
sis on Gothic fiction.
Atwood’s first published work, Double Perse-
phone (1961), was a book of poetry exploring the
mythological figure Persephone. Her most impor-
tant collection of verse, The Circle Game (1966) uses
Gothic imagery to explore issues of gender; for ex-
ample, the first poem,“This Is a Photograph of Me,”
is narrated by a dead woman:“The photograph was
taken / the day after I drowned.” Atwood’s first
novel, Edible Woman (1969) is a darkly comic tale of
a woman who fears marriage and stops eating.
Her most celebrated novel, The Handmaid’s
Tale (1985), is set in a horrifying future society,
Gilead, where women are condemned to illiteracy
and servitude. The novel purports to be the
recorded narration of Offred, a servant: “Where
the edges are we aren’t sure, they vary, according
to the attacks and counterattacks; but this is the
centre, where nothing moves. The Republic of
Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds. Gilead
is within you.” Critic Sandra Tomc sees the novel as
a critique not merely of male oppression but also
of United States domination over Canada: “In the
nightmare future she imagines, women have suc-
cumbed to a totalizing patriarchy. Appropriately,
given Atwood’s conflation of feminism and na-
tionalism, Canada, in some analogous gesture, has
succumbed to its totalizing southern neighbor.”
The Robber Bride (1993), focuses on the de-
monic Zenia’s haunting of her three friends, rob-
bing them of their money and men, and has dark
Gothic undertones: “Zenia, with her dark hair
sleeked down by the rain, wet and shivering, stand-
ing on the back step as she had done once before,
long ago. Zenia, who had been dead for five years.”
Alias Grace (1996) continues Atwood’s exploration
of gender and power, based on the story of Grace
Marks, a servant accused of murdering her master
in 1843. Her most recent novel, Blind Assassin
(2000), contains three interconnected stories, be-
ginning with a woman, Iris Griffin, telling of her
sister’s death in 1945. It won the Booker Prize. Fel-
low Canadian writer Alice MUNRO comments: “It’s
easy to appreciate the grand array of Margaret At-
wood’s work—the novels, the stories, the poems,
in all their power and grace and variety. This work
in itself has opened up the gates for a recognition
of Canadian writing all over the world.”
Other Works by Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
Power Politics. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
A Work about Margaret Atwood
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography.
Toronto: ECW Press, 1998.
Ausländer, Rose (Rosalie Scherzer)
(1901–1988) poet
Rose Ausländer was born in Czernowitz, Austria-
Hungary, a city now situated in Ukraine. Her
father Sigmund Scherzer, a former rabbinical stu-
dent, ensured that the family practiced traditional
Jewish customs and rituals. As part of her up-
bringing, she learned both Hebrew and Yiddish
and later attended the University of Czernowitz
where she studied literature, EXPRESSIONISM, and
philosophy. After her father died in 1920, she emi-
grated to the United States in 1921 to relieve some
of the financial strain on her mother, Etie Scherzer,
and was joined by another student from the uni-
versity, Ignaz Ausländer, whom she married in
1923. The couple divorced after three years, and
she moved back to Czernowitz in 1931.
Rose Ausländer started writing poetry in Ger-
man while in the United States. After returning to
Czernowitz, she published her first book-length
collection of poetry, Der Regenbogen (The Rain-
bow, 1939). Although it received positive reviews,
the Nazis prevented the book from achieving a
wide circulation because Ausländer was Jewish.
During World War II, Ausländer and her mother
avoided Nazi death camps by hiding in a cellar.
Ausländer composed poetry to cope with the trau-
32 Ausländer, Rose
matic situation. During this time, she met Paul
CELAN, a poet who would influence Ausländer’s
works after 1957.
Following World War II, Ausländer published
12 volumes of poetry while living in West Ger-
many and the United States. Her best poems de-
scribe her personal experiences in Czernowitz and
the fear and suffering of the Holocaust. As the lit-
erary scholar Kathrin Bower writes, “Ausländer’s
poems evidence a dialogue of remembrance and
mourning at once historical and redemptive.”
Ausländer thus became a voice for a shattered gen-
eration of German Jews.
Another Work by Rose Ausländer
Selected Poems of Rose Ausländer. Translated by Ewald
Osers. London: London Magazine Editors, 1977.
A Work about Rose Ausländer
Bower, Kathrin M. Ethics and Remembrance in
the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer.
Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000.
Ausländer, Rose 33
34
B
Ba Jin (Pa Chin; Li Feigan) (1904– )
novelist
Li Feigan was born on November 25 in Chengdu
and received a private education. He studied
English at Chengdu Foreign Languages School,
participating in antifeudal activity and studying
Russian writers and anarchist philosophers. He
adopted a pen name from syllables of the Chinese
names of Russian anarchists Mikhail Bakunin
(1814–76) and Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921).
After moving to France in 1927, Ba Jin wrote
autobiographical essays and articles on anarchism,
as well as his first novel, Destruction (1929), about
the life of a young anarchist, Du Daxin. He pro-
duced many works, mostly political in nature, with
clear-cut moral lessons. His subjects were fre-
quently the Chinese gentry class or intellectuals. In
1931, he published his best-known work, Family, a
sentimental melodrama of several generations liv-
ing in one compound. The novel chronicled a fam-
ily’s rise and fall and charted the fate of feudalism
after the May Fourth Movement (1919 student
demonstrations against the weak Chinese conces-
sions of the imperialist Versailles Treaty). Family
became part of Ba Jin’s Torre nt trilogy, which in-
cluded Spring (1938) and Autumn (1940).
The three-year period between 1931 and 1933
brought a novella companion to Destruction called
New Life, as well as two novels about mining life,
The Antimony Miners and The Sprouts. In 1935, Ba
Jin also completed the Trilogy of Love, which
followed the revolutionary activities of a group of
intellectuals.
Ba Jin was active in many aspects of literary
and political life. He published two manifestos
on behalf of and with other Chinese artists
and writers, including
LU Xun, for freedom of
speech and against imperialism. He actively
urged a united front against Japanese aggression
during the Sino-Japanese War and continued
his literary output with the novelettes The Garden
of Repose (1944), Ward No. 4 (1946), and Cold
Nights (1946). As a Korean War correspondent, he
wrote two books about the battlefields, Living
Amongst Heroes (1953) and Defenders of Peace
(1954).
Ba Jin has earned many awards and distinc-
tions, including France’s Legion of Honor. He
holds an honorary doctorate from the Chinese
University of Hong Kong and is a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is one
of China’s most prominent writers.
Other Works by Ba Jin
Family. Translated by Sidney Shapiro. Boston: Cheng
& Tsui, 1992.
“My J’accuse Against This Moribund System: Notes
on a Crumbling Landlord Clan of Western
Sichuan.” In Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley,
eds., Modern Chinese Writers: Self-Portrayals. Ar-
monk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992.
Random Thoughts. Translated by Geremie Barmé. San
Francisco: China Books & Periodicals, 1984.
Selected Works of Ba Jin. Beijing: Foreign Language
Press, 1988.
Ward Four: A Novel of Wartime China. Translated by
Haili Kong and Howard Goldblatt. San Francisco:
China Books & Periodicals, 2001.
Bâ, Mariama (1929–1981) novelist, essayist,
activist
Mariama Bâ was born into a prominent family in
Dakar, Senegal. At a time when only Europeans
maintained political positions in Senegal, Bâ’s fa-
ther became the first Senegalese minister of health.
Her maternal grandparents raised her in the Mus-
lim tradition. Against her grandparents’wishes, she
graduated from the Teacher’s College in 1947 and
taught for 12 years. Bâ was married to Obèye Diop,
a member of Parliament, with whom she had nine
children. After they divorced, she remained single,
becoming an advocate for women in Senegal.
Bâ’s first novel, So Long a Letter (1979), was an
international success that illuminated the complex
lives of African women. Although the critics have
mostly viewed the novel as a criticism of polygamy,
exposing the inequalities between men and
women, it addresses multiple women’s issues. The
story centers on two educated women who had
happy, loving marriages until their husbands took
second wives. Each woman responds in her own
way: One stays and one leaves. The book reveals
the limited choices for women and also presents
the strong bonds and support systems between
women. Writing in letter format, Bâ gives the
reader an intimate look at a woman’s internal re-
flections. This novel received the Noma Award for
Publishing in Africa in 1980.
Bâ died prior to the publishing of her second
novel, Scarlet Song (1981), which tackles the diffi-
culties of interracial marriage. Today, she is con-
sidered one of the most important French West
African feminists.
Works about Mariama Bâ
Cham, Mbye B. “Contemporary Society and the Fe-
male Imagination: A Study of the Novels of
Mariama Bâ.” African Literature Today 15 (1987):
89–101.
d’Almeida, Irene Assiba. “The Concept of Choice in
Mariama Bâ’s Fiction.” In Carole Boyce Davies
and Anne Adams Graves, eds., Nagambika: Studies
of Women in African Literature. Trenton, N.J.:
Africa World Press, 1986.
Edson, Laurie. “Mariama Bâ and the Politics of the
Family.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature
17.1 (1993): 13–25.
Babel, Isaac (1894–1941) short-story writer,
novelist, dramatist
Isaac Emmanuelovich Babel was born in Odessa,
Russia, into a Jewish family. Emmanuel Babel, his
father, was a sales representative for an agricultural
firm. At the time, Odessa had the largest Jewish
population in Russia, and Babel grew up in the
city’s Jewish ghetto, Moldavanka. He was con-
stantly faced with anti-Semitism from teachers and
peers, a fact that played a substantial role in his de-
velopment as a writer.
Babel’s father was a domineering patriarch who
forced young Isaac to practice violin for hours
every day and sent him, when he was 11, to study
business in Kiev, where he stayed until 1914. Al-
though Babel excelled in all areas as a student, lit-
erature was his only passion.
Babel began his career as a writer while study-
ing at Kiev, often drawing upon his experience
growing up in the Jewish ghetto. His first pub-
lished story, “Old Shloyme” (1913), explores anti-
Semitism directly; in the story, a Jewish family
faces a choice between renouncing their religion
and losing their home.
In 1914, Babel moved to St. Petersburg to pur-
sue writing professionally. He had difficulty pub-
Babel, Isaac 35
lishing his material until a meeting with Maxim
GORKY in 1916. Gorky assisted Babel with the pub-
lication of two stories in the prestigious literary
journal Letopis.
Babel supported the Bolshevik cause during
the Russian Revolution. Like many other Jews in
Russia faced with persecution, Babel was in-
trigued by the Bolshevik promises of freedom
and equality for all. Between 1917 and 1919,
Babel served in the Red Army. His most famous
collection of stories, Red Cavalry (1926), reflects
his experiences during the war. The work raises
issues of violence, anti-Semitism, and political
ideology, as well as the themes of friendship, love,
and compassion. The success of Red Cavalry
firmly established Babel as one of the leading
writers in Russia.
In 1929, Babel left Russia and traveled through-
out Europe, visiting France, Italy, Belgium, and
Germany. When he returned to Russia, he became
skeptical of the Communists. During the same pe-
riod, he began writing drama, completing his most
notable play, Sunset, in 1928. Set in Odessa in 1913,
the play explores the social interactions of the Jew-
ish ghetto. In the play, the reader notices a duality
that persistently appears throughout Babel’s
works: He embraces his Jewishness and at the same
time intellectually opposes Judaism. The play was
criticized by the authorities for its lack of socialist
themes.
During the 1930s, Babel was repeatedly criti-
cized by the government. Arrested in 1939, Babel
was executed in 1940 after a 20-minute trial for al-
legedly spying for France and Austria. The charges
were false, as the records, released in 1954, con-
firm.
Babel made an enormous contribution to Rus-
sian literature, emerging as one of the first writers
to discuss openly and positively the cultural and
social position of the Jews in Russia. As Natalie
Babel, his wife, later pointed out,“His life centered
on writing, and it can be said without exaggeration
that he sacrificed everything to his art, including
his relationship with his family, his liberty, and
finally even his life.”
Other Works by Isaac Babel
Babel, Natalie, ed. The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel.
Translated by Peter Constantine. New York: Nor-
ton, 2002.
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. Translated by
Peter Constantine. New York: Norton, 2001.
Works about Isaac Babel
Bloom, Harold, ed. Isaac Babel: Modern Critical
Views. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1987.
Ehre, Milton. Isaac Babel. Boston: Twayne, 1986.
Bachmann, Ingeborg (1926–1973) poet,
novelist, dramatist
A daughter of a teacher, Ingeborg Bachmann was
born in Klagenfurt, Austria. She grew up in a dis-
turbing political atmosphere, as Nazi Germany was
gaining control of Austria, and at the age of 12 she
watched Nazi troops march into her town. Bach-
mann studied philosophy at the universities of
Innsburg, Graz, and Vienna; she completed a dis-
sertation on Ludwig Wittgenstein under the direc-
tion of the famous philosopher Martin Heidegger
in 1950.
Bachmann began her career as a professional
writer in the early 1950s, writing radio plays. In
1953, Bachmann published her first collection of
poetry, The Deferred Time. The collection was criti-
cally praised and received the prestigious GRUPPE
47
award. In 1953 she spent a year in the United States
as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and she
later moved to Italy, where she wrote a number of
political articles for Austrian and German newspa-
pers. In 1959, Bachmann was appointed to the
newly created position as chair of poetics at the
University of Frankfurt, where she lectured on phi-
losophy and literature.
Her poetry is influenced by many sources, in-
cluding CLASSICISM, surrealism, and the avant-
garde movement. The somber tone of her poetry
lyrically and precisely describes the anguish of a
personal experience. Bachmann’s dark, powerful,
and complex imagery is thematically juxtaposed
against simple individual emotions such as love,
36 Bachmann, Ingeborg
guilt, and failed aspirations. Her use of imagery is
exemplified by these lines from “In the Storm of
Roses”: “Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,/
the night is lit up by thorns....”Unlike her prose,
which is often read as social and feminist fiction,
her poetry centers on deeply personal observations.
In 1961, Bachmann published her highly influ-
ential autobiographical work, The Thirtieth Year,
which was awarded the Berlin Critics Prize and the
Georg Büchner Prize in 1964. Her first published
novel, Malina (1971), deals with a number of fem-
inist issues. Malina, the protagonist of the novel,
has a relationship with Ivan, a younger man of
Hungarian descent. The relationship becomes psy-
chologically complex as Malina has recurrent
nightmares of her father as a Nazi who kills her in
a gas chamber, nightmares that seem to contribute
to the deterioration of her relationship with Ivan.
Malina also confronts the theme of national mem-
ory and national identity in postwar Europe. The
issues of ego and alter ego and with the subtle in-
fluence of the memory of genocide create a power-
ful combination. The novel was highly praised and
remains an excellent representative work of Ger-
man POSTMODERNISM.
Just before her death, Bachmann visited
Auschwitz in Poland and gave a series of readings.
She died under mysterious circumstances in a fire
in her apartment. Bachmann was awarded numer-
ous prizes, including the Austrian Medal of Honor,
the highest prize in literature an Austrian citizen
can receive from the government. Her works con-
tinue to be of great social and literary importance.
Other Works by Ingeborg Bachmann
Selected Prose and Drama. New York: Continuum,
1998.
Songs in Flight: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bach-
mann. Translated by Peter Filkins (bilingual edi-
tion). New York: Marsilio Publications, 1995.
The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldman.
Translated by Peter Filkins. Evanston, Ill.: North-
western University Press, 1999.
Three Radio Plays. Translated by Lilian Friedberg.
Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1999.
A Work about Ingeborg Bachmann
Redwitz, Eckenbert. The Image of the Woman in the
Works of Ingeborg Bachmann. New York: Peter
Lang, 1993.
Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1850) novelist
Honoré de Balzac, one of the creators of
REALISM in
literature, was born in Tours, France, to a middle-
class family. Originally from Paris, the family had
moved to Tours during the French Revolution be-
cause of their royalist opinions. In 1814, however,
they were able to return to Paris. Balzac, neglected
by his mother, spent his early years in boarding
schools. After graduating from the Collège de
Vendôme he went on to the Sorbonne, where he
read the works of the mystical philosophers Jakob
Böhme (1575–1624) and Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688–1772) and was particularly interested in
Franz Anton Mesmer’s lectures on animal magnet-
ism. These influences are detectable in his early fic-
tion. After graduation, he began to work in a law
office. When, in 1819, his family was forced by fi-
nancial setbacks to move to the small town of
Villeparisis, Balzac decided that he would return to
Paris alone and embark on a career as a writer.
Balzac rented a shabby room in Paris, a room he
later described in the novel Le Peau de chagrin (The
Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831), and began what would be-
come a habit of late night writing and excessive
consumption of caffeine. In his lifetime, he wrote
more than 100 novels, mostly between the hours of
midnight and six in the morning, always on blue
paper and by candlelight, while drinking large
quantities of thick Turkish coffee. By 1822 Balzac,
using a variety of pseudonyms, had written sev-
eral plays and novels, all of which were ignored.
Undaunted, he continued to write.
A compulsive spender, Balzac had a difficult
time staying ahead of his creditors. He attempted to
run a publishing company and also bought a print-
ing house. Both of these endeavors left him with
large debts that would stay with him throughout
his life. Destitute at 29, he accepted an invitation to
stay at the home of Général de Pommereul in
Balzac, Honoré de 37