2587346 names saved
Donate

"The Last Great Widow" by Antonina Pirozhkova

She was married for only seven years. Then for 15 years, she waited for her husband from the Stalinist camps, unaware that he was shot. And until the end of her life, she collected his letters, drafts, memories of contemporaries, painstakingly piecing together for us what remained of Isaac Babel.

"Once he told with a somewhat shy smirk that he married a wonderful woman, with an amazing résumé - her mother is illiterate, but she herself is an engineer at Metrostroy, and her surname is displayed on the Honor Board. Her surname is Pirozhkova. By the end of the working day, he rushes to Metrostroy for Pirozhkova and anxiously waits for her arrival - is her surname on the Honor Board today?
Once he came to Gorki from Molodenovo with a delightful, very beautiful young woman, extraordinarily feminine, but by no means lacking subdued authority, will, and energy.
He said to us: 'Here is Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova, meet her,' - and then he mentioned something with a smirk about the questionnaire. Antonina Nikolaevna raised her bright eyes to him, spread across her whole face, and looked sternly at him. Babel wasn't exactly embarrassed, but he seemed taken aback somehow. But still, he had a very happy face."

Valentina Khodasevich. "How I Saw Him"

Antonina's "résumé" was truly remarkable. She was born in 1909 in the village of Krasny Yar in the Tomsk province. In 1930, she graduated from the Siberian Tomsk Technological Institute named after F.E. Dzerzhinsky. She worked in the design bureau of Kuznetzkstroy, and after moving to Moscow, she joined Metroproekt, later becoming its chief designer. Pirozhkova was one of the first to design the Moscow Metro, including stations such as "Mayakovskaya," "Paveletskaya," "Arbatskaya," "Kievskaya," and "Revolution Square." Her colleagues considered her one of the most talented engineering designers.

Antonina met Babel in 1932.

Ivan Pavlovich introduced me to Babel:

"This is a construction engineer, nicknamed Princess Turandot."

Ivanchenko hadn't called me anything else since he once came to Kuznetzkstroy and read a critical note about me in the wall newspaper titled:

"Princess Turandot from the design department"...

Babel looked at me with a smile and surprise, and during lunch, he kept insisting on having vodka with him.

"If a woman is an engineer, especially a construction engineer," he tried to convince me, "she must know how to drink vodka."

I had to drink and not grimace to avoid losing the title of construction engineer.

From the memoirs of A. Pirozhkova.

Two years later, they began to live together. By that time, Babel had already entered into marriage twice. In 1919, he married the daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur, Evgenia Groynefain. In 1925, Evgenia went to Paris, and then Babel briefly lived with the actress Tatiana Kashirina; they even had a son, Emmanuel, but soon Babel left for abroad and reunited with his lawful wife - in 1929, they had a daughter, Natalia. However, he never formalized his relationship with Antonina.

Reading Antonina Nikolaevna's memoirs, one can't help but marvel at how different these two were. She was young, graceful, a magnificent beauty. He, 15 years her senior, was squat, with a short neck, wearing glasses, looking somewhat suspicious. Babel was entirely devoted to literature, to creativity. His wife disappeared at Metroproekt from early morning till late evening.

Babel consistently teased his wife among friends. For instance, he introduced her as "a girl he would like to marry, but she refuses," even though they had long been living together. Or he would repeat in different tones the headline of a wall newspaper article about his wife, the designer - "Equalize by Pirozhkova." Or he would tell stories about marrying a priest's daughter, even though Antonina's father only lived in a priest's family during childhood and never had any connection to the church. And he had a pathological love for giving his things to friends: ties, cameras, watches - and often, lost in thought, he could give away something of his wife's belongings!

But she didn't take offense. Without Babel, without his jokes, she, engrossed in her work and leading a rich life, would be bored. He opened up another world to her - and she later reconstructed this world from memory for decades.

In 1937, their daughter Lida was born. Babel adored children to madness, but he failed to raise any of his own. His son Emmanuel grew up under a different surname, and the real father was not allowed to see him. His daughter Natasha grew up in France. It was not meant for him to see Lida grow up either.

When the arrests of friends began, he couldn't understand for a long time: why those who had made the revolution fifteen years ago were confessing to treason and espionage during interrogations?

"I don't understand," Babel repeated, according to his wife. "They were all brave people."

Relatives of the arrested begged him to intervene. He obediently went to familiar bosses, who themselves could become prey to the "black funnel" any day, talked to them, senselessly and for a long time, and returned home gloomy, darker than a cloud. He couldn't help. Antonina saw her husband suffering. But what could she do? Only imagine his heart cut open, large, wounded, and bleeding. "I wanted to take him in my hands and kiss him." Requests and calls continued. Babel's last strengths were leaving him. At his request, his little daughter Lida approached the phone and in an adult voice said, "Daddy's not home," - thinking it was too little said, she, entirely in Babel's style, added: "Because he went for a walk in his new galoshes." Soon they came for Babel too.

The Chekists feared that Babel would resist, so they covered themselves during the arrest with his young wife. They took Antonina from home at five in the morning and forced her to go with them to the dacha to her husband. Seeing her, Babel didn't try to run away or fight, he let himself be searched. From Peredelkino to Lubyanka, they were also taken in the same car. Under the stern gazes, smiling at Babel, Antonina said that she would think he had simply gone to Odessa.

Isaac Babel was arrested on May 15, 1939, and on January 27, 1940, he was executed. Neither his mother nor Antonina were informed of his execution. With every request about his fate, Antonina invariably received the answer that her husband "is alive and serving a sentence in a correctional facility in Siberia." Only in 1954, after Stalin's death and Babel's posthumous rehabilitation, did she learn the truth.

She never remarried. She engaged in her beloved work, designing the metro and resort palaces in the Caucasus, teaching. Even before 1954, she began collecting materials about her husband's life and work. She became the compiler of a collection that included memories of Babel by Utesov, Paustovsky, Ehrenburg... She wrote the book "I'm trying to reconstruct the features." Literary scholars called her "the last great widow."

In 1996, Antonina Nikolaevna moved to the United States, to her beloved grandson, actor and director Andrey Malaev-Babel. Starting a new life at 87 - many discouraged her from this, saying, "What will you do there?" "Write memoirs," Antonina Nikolaevna replied. About Babel? "No, I'm done with Babel. I've lived my interesting life."

She passed away at the age of 101 on September 12, 2010. Her grandson later wrote: "She was born in the Siberian village of Krasny Yar a year before Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana and died in the city of Sarasota, Florida, having had the opportunity to vote for America's first African-American president." She outlived her husband by 70 years.