📚Hello, seekers of meaning and lovers of intellectual walks! — 24 июля 2026 г. в 06:00:06.587
📚Hello, seekers of meaning and lovers of intellectual walks! The Book Compass is setting the route again - and today we are not in a lecture hall or a clinic, but on the noisy streets of old Odessa, where the air smells of the sea, fried seeds and adventures, and the Book Compass itself is in the hands of Igor Valeryevich Barabanov, head of the radiology department of the First City Clinical Hospital named after him. E.E. Volosevich: "I want to recommend to read "Odessa stories" by Isaac Babel. I recently reread this work once again in order to immerse myself in the life of Odessa around 1904-1919. This is a series of short stories that show the life of the Odessa Jewish quarter of Moldavanka at the beginning of the 20th century. This book is easy to read, imbued with humor and brightened up by the writer's "signature" narrative style. The manner of writing, the phrases used, make me come back to this work again and again. The central character of the cycle is Benya Krik, the "king" of the Odessa raiders. His prototype is considered to be the famous Odessa bandit Mishka Yaponchik. Babel portrays Benya not just as a criminal, but as a colorful, charismatic hero with his own code of honor and even a kind of justice. Along the way, Babel shows the colorful life of the Odessa seabed and its inhabitants: binders, merchants, petty crooks, ordinary residents. The writer masterfully conveys the atmosphere of the city, its noise and smells. Babel mixes literary speech with Odessa dialect, jargon, and Hebrew phrases, creating a unique style. There are a lot of witty dialogues, irony, grotesqueness and vivid humor in the stories, but behind this humor there is often tragedy and cruelty."