for wed may 15
“I was a deceitful boy. This was the result of reading. My imagination was always inflamed.” Babel, “In the basement” on May 15 1939/41 Babel was arrested and probably immediately shot in the (in)famous Soviet prison Lubyanka, tho the authorities lied for years; an extraordinary brave luminous talent, ending as yet another corpse on the Lubyana killing room floor, with a small bullet-sized hole in his skull. On one hand, does it matter when children are dying every day in Syria and politicians here worry more about protecting the sancity of marriage from gays or some other happy horseshit. Babel cultivating silence. Babel is dead, killed by disgusting animals like Stalin…but what Stalin, in his bloodthirsty barbarity didn’t know, is that every time someone reads and discovers Babel he lives again, while that odious, pock-marked, short Georgian is a pile of rotted ash.
link to Babel’s collected stories.