How to Disappear at the Right Time?: The Life and Adventures of Stepan Babookh

• In Event: How to Be a Scholar

Abstract

This paper examines the biographical trajectory of Stepan Babookh, a forgotten Ukrainian literary scholar and translator from a proletarian background. A lecturer in foreign literature at Moscow’s State Institute for Theatre Arts (GITIS) and contributor to various articles on English literature in the Stalinist Literary Encyclopedia, Babookh’s name vanished entirely from the public sphere after 1937. Given his proximity to the repressed circles of Sergey Dinamov, one might have assumed that Babookh was arrested and killed. However, archival research and interviews with his family reveal that he lived a long life, completely isolating himself from the official public sphere.
Based on archival work in London and Moscow, this paper traces Babookh’s biography—from his childhood in a Belarusian village and his youth working in a factory in Odessa, to his involvement in underground Bolshevik activities and participation in World War I. As a soldier and Bolshevik, Babookh led the Revolutionary Committee in Enzeli (Northern Iran). In 1918, he was captured by British forces, leading to his internment in India and Egypt,which was followed by imprisonment in London in 1920. This period of confinement marked a transformative phase in his life, during which he developed a profound interest in the literature of the empire that he continued to resist. Upon his release, Babookh returned to Soviet Russia, rejecting diplomatic posts in favor of studying the humanities at Moscow’s Workers' Faculty. In 1936, amid increasing repression against his peers and associates, Babookh chose to step away from academia and moved to an isolated village, turning to farming and manual labor. Through Stepan Babookh’s case, this paper will address questions of self-identification and self-determination among the first generation of Soviet proletarian critics in the 1920s and 1930s.

Author

• Peter Budrin, Queen Mary, U of London (UK)