The Complete Works of Isaac Babel

"Babel is one of a number of great writers from a Jewish background who started appearing on the Russian literary scene in the early 20th century. If they didn’t appear before, it was because they were mostly restricted to small villages in the iniquitous Pale of Settlement [region of Imperial Russia]. Babel was born in the magical port city of Odessa, which uniquely had a large Jewish population because of the Russian government’s desire to encourage trade. It was in Odessa that Babel published this story in 1921, when he was at the start of his career. He is a brilliant stylist, much better known for the stories in his collection Red Cavalry , but “The Sin of Jesus” is a very funny story. It’s also blasphemous, and would today probably be defined as a piece of magic realism . Like Tolstoy’s story, it is about an angel who is naked when he falls to earth, and both stories feature a woman who has twins – but there the similarities end. The heroine is Arina, an illiterate Moscow chambermaid who is six months pregnant. When her boyfriend beats her up, after she tells him she won’t remain chaste while he is away on military service, she decides to consult Jesus. Despite the references to Forgiveness Sunday, a time for penitence and chastity which falls at the beginning of Russian Lent, Jesus gives Arina an angel to keep her company. He’s called Alfred, and he has been pestering Jesus to let him go back down to earth. Arina brings Alfred down the silken stairway to Tverskaya Street. She dresses him and cooks him a nice supper, but then they start drinking vodka, with inevitable consequences. After carefully unclipping Alfred’s wings from their hinges and putting him to bed, Arina ends up rolling over and crushing him to death. When Arina goes back to Jesus he curses her for being such a slut, but she later raises her swollen belly to the heavens and complains. Jesus now begs her forgiveness for being a “sinful god”, but Arina refuses to grant it. This is another story narrated by an uneducated local who makes no distinction between the fantastical and the everyday. There is a delightful parody of Biblical language when Arina suddenly arrives in heaven and Jesus talks in slang. It would be hard to imagine a story more profane. Probably the same thing which defines Russian writers in general: a creative genius which led them to forge their own tradition. When Russian writers started writing novels they refused to adhere to the traditional European format, and I think that is true for short stories as well."