It is best to start getting acquainted with the work of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel with the stories included in this collection. The most outstanding of them are collected here. They are combined into two main cycles - “Cavalry” and “Odessa Stories” and give an idea of the time when this first Soviet Russian-Jewish writer worked. The writer’s artistic world appears here in all its uniqueness: the characteristic portraits of Red Army soldiers from the “Cavalry” series show a contradictory fusion of selflessness and unbridled passions, devotion to the revolutionary idea and anarchism, and “Odessa Stories” gives vivid images of the urban poor and representatives of the criminal world.< /p>