The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel; trans. Peter Constantine

In the bloody wake of 1917, Isaac Babel turned witness into art. Robert Chandler rediscovers a Russian master

My first reaction to this book was surprise at its size: had Isaac Babel, the meticulous Russian stylist, the man who referred to himself as a master of "the genre of silence", really written so much? The book includes two plays, several screenplays and Babel's diaries from his spell as a war correspondent with the Red cavalry in 1920. It includes vivid sketches of post-Revolutionary Petersburg and Georgia, which prompt the translator, Peter Constantine, to call Babel a "pioneer of investigative journalism".

There is also a memoir by Babel's daughter, Nathalie, who writes of the pain of being exposed, over almost 50 years, to ever-changing revelations about her father's life and death. Only in the early Nineties was it established that he was shot, accused of being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, on 26 January 1940.

Most important, there are the short stories for which Babel has long been famous. There is a group of semi-autobiographical narratives, mostly set in the Black Sea port of Odessa where Babel was born in 1894. There are the Odessa Tales: a comic, expressionistic celebration of the lives of gangsters and whores in the Jewish quarter of this sun-drenched Russian equivalent to Naples or Palermo. And there is Babel's greatest work, Red Cavalry: the fruit of his months as a war correspondent.

The first stories from this cycle were published in 1924 and brought Babel immediate recognition. With their demotic language and vivid depictions of violence, they seemed a perfect response to demands for a new, truly Soviet prose. The poet Nadezhda Mandelstam has written: "I had the feeling that Babel's main driving force was the unbridled curiosity with which he scrutinised life and people." She has also written that Babel always wanted to surprise. These two qualities are as apparent in his writing as in his behaviour. His style is a constant series of surprises, of leaps between the laconic and the florid, the emotional and the dispassionate, the factual and metaphorical. Babel's curiosity is no less apparent: including his curiosity about matters most of us might prefer not to know about.

It is uncertain whether Babel witnessed pogroms in his youth, but he was clearly fascinated by sadism and violence. Once he boasted to a friend: "I've now learned to watch calmly as people are shot." He was on friendly terms with Yezhov, head of the secret police during the height of the Purges. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, her husband Osip once asked Babel why he was drawn to such people. Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he want to touch it with his fingers? No, Babel replied. "I just like to have a sniff and see what it smells like."

However perverted this seems, there is nothing voyeuristic about Babel's art. The greatness of Red Cavalry stems from the depth and clarity of Babel's understanding of the human capacity for violence. Sadism and vengefulness, in Babel's world, come in a variety of guises, and victims and executioners absorb one another's identity.

"My First Goose", for example, begins with Lyutov, the Babel-like figure who narrates many stories, arriving at a divisional HQ. The commander mockingly warns him: "Here you get hacked to pieces just for wearing glasses." Lyutov is duly tormented by the Cossacks with whom he is billeted. Even the mistress of the house refuses to feed him. In his frustration, Lyutov catches a "haughty goose" as it waddles through the yard and finishes it off with a sabre, winning some respect from the Cossacks he so admires. But Lyutov's triumph is incomplete. His heart "screeched and bled" through the night: his inner being, like the goose, has been "hacked to pieces".

In another story, Lyutov (whose name, ironically, means "fierce one") is unable to shoot Dolgushov, a mortally wounded telephonist who fears that, as the cavalry retreat, he will be captured – and tortured – by the Poles. Another Cossack calmly shoots Dolgushov and then turns on Lyutov: "Get lost, or I'll shoot you ... You spectacled idiots have as much pity for us as a cat has for a mouse."

Not all of Babel's depth and subtlety is conveyed by these translations. Babel revered Flaubert and Maupassant and is no less fine a stylist. And his deepest insights are often voiced through careful effects of style. In the passage above, the intensity of Lyutov's unconscious identification with wounded Dolgushov is brought out by a simple repetition. Dolgushov's "intestines were slithering on to his knees" and "sweat was slithering down my body". The effect is easy enough to reproduce, but Constantine has the intestines "spilling" and the sweat "slithering".

These translations are the best we have, but Babel is an uncommonly difficult writer to translate. Some pages of this volume read superbly, others are marred by lapses of tone or understanding. Had he been able to devote another year or two to the task, Constantine might well have produced a definitive translation. Not all publishers will accept it can take many times longer to translate a writer of the calibre of Babel than a less subtle writer.