As I make my way back to my library carrel in the Russian stacks, my eye flickers down the spines and pauses, as it had the day before, on the banana-yellow paperback cover of a book called The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. I remember its publication in 2010, the acclaim, a book by a graduate student, about literary studies, that was said to be “fun.”

“If you liked Eat, Pray, Love,” declared The Guardian of that famously fun book about divorce, “you’ll love this.” I had not, in fact, liked Eat, Pray, Love (a lie: I didn’t read it. I was opposed to its ubiquity.), and I was, besides, then only recently returned from Uganda, where I’d been reporting a very un-fun book, the heart of which was a law under consideration known in Uganda by its supporters—nearly everyone—as “Kill the Gays.” Americans who thought this a solid idea had been sending me threats. One time I answered the phone to what sounded like a gunshot. That was it, the whole message: “Bang.” Or maybe “pop.” It was around this time I first picked up The Possessed, and I put it down. It felt too slow for the panic in my veins.

Now, though, maybe because the “bangs” and the “pops” seem to be coming ever-faster, I find myself in the same slow space as Elif Batuman’s bookish preoccupation. Or is it time? The slow space of never-enough-time.

Batuman begins with the weight of books. As in pounds. The Russian Academy of Sciences’ 100-volume edition of Tolstoy’s collected works, she tells us, is as heavy as a newborn beluga whale. She knows this because she brought her bathroom scale to the library. But how does she know the weight of a newborn beluga? Imagine searching for such knowledge before Google. Swimming through slow time in a library’s depths in pursuit of proof of a simile. I Google: How much does a newborn beluga whale weigh? Answer: A range of 115 pounds to 145. Maybe tomorrow I’ll bring my bathroom scale to the library and weigh Batuman’s volume.

Amazon says Batuman’s The Possessed weighs 9.9 ounces.

Batuman’s point, though, isn’t about Tolstoy; it’s about the weight of a body of work only pieces of which remain. It’s about the weight of the words that we’ve lost, in this case those of  the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. She notes that we can never know the full weight of Babel’s collected writings, because even the exceedingly thorough contemporary Russian Academy of Sciences offers only two volumes.

I have before me a Complete Works in translation that takes up only one.

The book of Babel’s maybe you’ve heard of is Red Cavalry, his fictionalized version of a diary he kept of riding with Cossacks during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. Maybe you’ve come across an oft-cited image from the first page: “An orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head…” Bloody and beautiful, the monstrous paradox at the heart of too many stories.

I fell for Isaac Babel before I knew who he was. I was just out of college, sifting through discarded English books donated to a repository for which I then worked, the National Yiddish Book Center, when I came across a skinny and scuffed paperback, also orange, titled after the character around whom the stories within revolved: Benya Krik, The Gangster. An antihero: neither a Red nor a bourgeois. In the second story, “How It Was Done in Odessa,” we learn of Benya Krik’s rise in the Odessa underworld from an old man sitting on the cemetery wall. It began with a shakedown. The tenth attempt, in fact, on a rich man called “Nine Shakedowns”, for the previous efforts by lesser gangsters which Nine Shakedowns had thwarted. Benya Krik alone gets the operation right: “The Transference of Property,” as Babel puts it in a screenplay of the story he’d later publish. But Benya Krik gets it wrong, too, because one of his assistants accidentally shoots one of the rich man’s toadies, a man named Muginshteyn. The comic sorrow of the next line, delivered by our chorus, the old man on the cemetery wall, erases from the Book of Life the clerk called Muginshteyn: “Are words necessary here? There was a man, and the man is no more.”

Red Cavalry, the Odessa stories, some bits and pieces; the rest of Babel’s work is lost, not “to history,” as the saying goes, but to Stalin’s goons, the secret police, the NKVD, which in 1939 absconded not just with Isaac Babel himself, once favored, by then fallen out, but also 24 folders—how thick with pages?—in which what might have become a third volume in the post-Soviet Russian Academy’s collected works was taking form. Why did they take Babel? I could rehearse for you the ebb and tide of art and political favor within authoritarian regimes, but suffice it to say, as above, “comic sorrow”; or, “an orange sun rolls…” Babel’s first words upon the NKVD’s arrival, Elif Batuman reports in The Possessed, were—

Too good to be true. The meaning of the words, that is. Too apt for my purposes here. How did the library conspire to place Batuman’s banana-yellow book at the end of a row upon which the light fell just so as I passed by returning to my carrel, a past reader having dogeared *The Possessed’*s page 28, at the top of which are words I didn’t know, when I paused, that I needed?

But were these too-good-to-be-true words—wait for them—really what Babel said? Again, to Google: Batuman’s source is a memoir by Babel’s common-law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova. Published in Russian in 1989, the last days of the U.S.S.R., when—Soviet communism proven to itself unrealizable—it gave up its secrets and uncovered its lies. It took nearly a decade for the memoir to make it to America, where it was published by Steerforth Press—just up the road from me in Vermont—as At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel. I stare at the cover: I’ve seen it before. My father’s books. It is, I realize, at home, either on a shelf or in a box in my garage. But it is also, I realize, closer at hand. Bukharin, Babel… Pirzhkova’s account is right beside me, here on the library’s shelves.

It’s 1939, May 15, 5 a.m, Moscow. A knock on the door awakes Pirozhkova: “two men in army uniforms,” she writes. They demand her husband. They have, they tell her, a question. She understands, of course, that there are no answers, just as she knows there is no hope in lying. So she tells them the truth. He is at their dacha. The men in uniforms drive her there. They don’t ask for directions. At the dacha, she stops before the door to Babel’s room. Knock, one of the men tells her. She knocks. Babel must surely know what is coming, it’s dawn and he can hear the boots of men outside his door. What is he thinking? They say he was a funny man in life as he was in ink. Later, when Pirozhkova has been returned alone to their apartment, she’ll hear one of the goons quizzed about whether Babel had cracked jokes when they took him, and she’ll hear the goon answer, “He tried.”

Knock-knock.

“Who’s there?” asks Babel.

“‘Me,’” says Antonina Pirozhkova.

So her love, Isaac Babel, opens the door.

He says nothing. Surely, he has already read the plot of this story.

Are words necessary here?

The men in uniforms disappear Babel’s pages into their 24 folders. They order the perpetrator of the pages into the car. It is time.