Isaac Babel wrote some of the most compressed and electric prose of the twentieth century.

You Must Know Everything gathers stories written between 1915 and 1937 — the years that span Babel’s rise as a literary star in revolutionary Russia and his eventual disappearance into Stalin’s terror. Edited and annotated by his daughter, Nathalie Babel, the collection traces the range of Babel’s work beyond his famous Red Cavalry stories.

The pieces move between Odessa’s criminal underworld, Jewish life in the Russian Empire, and the strange moral landscapes produced by revolution. Babel’s style is famously paradoxical: brutal events rendered in jewel-like sentences, tenderness appearing in the middle of violence, humour flickering through catastrophe.

The stories show why Babel became a legend among writers — and why his work remained dangerous enough that the Soviet state eventually silenced him.