Isaac Babel and the Competition over the Readers in the 1920s.

Publications in the literary-artistic and literary-critical periodicals of the 1920s offer valuable insights into a largely overlooked dimension of Soviet literary history. They reveal the reception of Isaac Babel by participants in the literary polemics of the time, all within the broader framework of the fierce competition over the reader that defined the decade. During the 1920s, the reader was placed at the center of diverse ideological projects aimed at reshaping human nature and forging a new consciousness. Babel was commonly grouped with the so-called poputchiki (fellow travelers), a classification that shaped his reception both among critics aligned with RAPP and among Trotskyist sympathizers, as well as independent Marxist literary thinkers such as Vyach. Polonsky and V. Pravdukhin. The study demonstrates that in the reader-centric literary and sociopolitical climate of the 1920s, Babel found support among that segment of Bolshevik criticism which upheld the aesthetic value of literary form. Conversely, he was rejected by the RAPP critics and, in turn, by the readership they cultivated. Babel’s literary singularity — his f lorid, ornamental style; his avoidance of explicit authorial judgment; and the structural complexity of both phrase and text — resisted incorporation into RAPP’s rigid classificatory schemes. In place of sustained critical engagement with his work, RAPP critics resorted — contrary to the actual dynamics of readership — to a formulaic refrain: “Babel is not read.”