Da Mosca a Parigi: alchimie russo-francesi. Isaak Babel’, L’armata a cavallo e la casa editrice Rieder

The intellectual fervor that animated Paris during the interwar period stimulated the publication in France of Isaak Babel, a Russian author who had been censored and sentenced to death by Stalin. By immersing in the Parisian 1920s, this article reconstructs the journey that led to the French translation of Cavalerie rouge [L’armata a cavallo] by the Parisian publisher Rieder, which revived Babel’s work outside his homeland. From the meeting between Maksim Gor’kij and Romain Rolland to the openness of the publishing house editors towards new horizons, to Gor’kij’s identification of an ideological and stylistic- contextual affinity between Babel, his work and the editions, this paper unearths the interdependence of cultural and socio-political issues between the Russian and French literary circuits.