REVIEW ARTICLE Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, No. 1, March 2011 Val Vinokur How the Curd Was Clotted: Accounting for Isaac Babel… and a Life of Literature ∗ “[Babel’s style] shows what can be done. Even when you’ve got all the water out of them, you can still clot the curds a little more.” Ernest Hemingway “All went as I wished, and all went badly,” declares the narrator of Isaac Babel’s “Story of My Dovecote.” Babel fans know how he feels. The closer we get to the author whom many consider the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century, the slower Zeno’s arrow. More than a decade has passed since the publication of a serious scholarly monograph on Isaac Babel, fifteen years itching in vain for promising volumes by Patricia Blake and Gregory Freidin and by younger scholars like Janneke van de Stadt and Rebecca Stanton. This on top of the frustration that those of us who teach Babel to undergraduates have endured on account of the often uneven and absurd qualities of Peter Constantine’s translations, which have pushed Walter Morrison and Max Hayward’s more elegant versions out of print. (Let us pass over McDuff’s Babel in polite silence.) And yet, despite all this, it is an exciting time for Babel scholars, as his work continues to attract and perplex smart readers in Russian Studies and beyond. In 2004, Freidin and the Hoover Institution at Stanford held an exhibition, workshop, and international conference, chronicled in Elif Batuman’s long essay “Babel in California” (n+1 [2005]), now included as the first chapter in her brilliant work of memoir and literary nonfiction, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. It is telling that n+1 and FSG published Batuman’s trade paperback account of the conference years before an academic press released the actual conference volume (don’t be fooled by the misleading publication dates), masterfully curated by Freidin; and, for someone who did not attend the conference, The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context reads like the documentary record upon which Batuman’s illuminating and hilarious roman-à-clef was based. Here, for example, it is revealed that the “famous professor of comparative literature [who gave] an ∗ Review of Gregory Freidin, ed., The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 (xvi, 270 pp. Illustrations. Index. $60.00, cloth) and Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 (296 pp. Bibliography. $15.00, paper).