In 1915, Babel graduated and moved to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), in defiance of laws restricting Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement. Babel was fluent in French, besides Russian and Yiddish, and his earliest works were written in French, although none of his stories in French have survived.
In the capital Babel met Maxim Gorky who published some of his stories in his literary magazine
Letopis' ("????????", "Chronicle"). Gorky advised the aspiring writer to gain more life experience and later Babel wrote in his autobiography: "... I owe everything to that meeting and still pronounce Alexey Maksimovich (Gorky's) name with love and admiration." One of his most famous semiautobiographical short stories, "The Story of My Dovecot" ("??????? ???? ?????????"), is dedicated to Gorky.
The story "The Bathroom Window" was considered obscene by censors and Babel was charged with violating criminal code article 1001.
There is no information on Babel's whereabouts during the October Revolution. According to one of his stories, "The Road" (??????), he served on the Romanian front until early December 1917. He resurfaced in Petrograd in March 1918 as a reporter for Maxim Gorky's Socialist but Anti-Communist newspaper,
Novaya zhizn (????? ?????). This was where he was published until
Novaya zhizyn was focribly closed on Lenin's orders in July. Later, without mentioning his work for Novaya zhizn, Babel claimed that during that time he was working as a translator for the Petrograd Cheka (queried in 1990s, the Leningrad State Security denied any association with Isaac Babel). During the Russian Civil War, with the Bolsheviks' monopoly on the printed word, Babel worked for the publishing house of the Odessa Gubkom (regional Bolshevik party committee), in the food procurement unit (see his story "Ivan-and-Maria"), in the
Narkompros (Commissariat of Education), and in a typographic printing office.
After the end of the Civil War, Babel worked as a reporter for
The Dawn of the Orient (???? ???????) a Russian-language newspaper published in Tiflis. In one of his articles, he expressed regret that Lenin's controversial New Economic Policy had not been more widely implemented.
Isaak Babel married Yevgenia Gronfein on August 9, 1919 in Odessa. In 1929, after Babel's sojourn in Paris in 1927-28, their marriage produced a daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, who grew up to become a scholar and editor of her father's life and work. In 1925 Babel's marriage was souring, and Yevgenia Babel, feeling betrayed by her husband's infidelities and motivated by her increasing hatred of communism, emigrated to France. Babel saw her several times during his visits to Paris. During this period, he also entered into a long term romantic relationship with Tamara Kashirina. Together, they had a son Emmanuil Babel, who was later adopted by his stepfather Vsevolod Ivanov. Emmanuil's name was changed to Mikhail Ivanov, and he later became a noted artist..
After the final break with Tamara, Babel briefly attempted to reconcile with his wife Yevgenia and they had their daughter Natalie in 1929. In 1932, Babel met a young engineer named Antonina Pirozhkova (1909-2010), and in 1934 the two began living together, in 1939 having a daughter, Lydia Babel.
According to Pirozhkova,
"Before I met Babel, I used to read a great deal, though without any particular direction. I read whatever I could get my hands on. Babel noticed this and told me, 'Reading that way will get you nowhere. You won't have time to read the books that are truly worthwhile. There are about a hundred books that every educated person needs to read. Sometime I'll try to make you a list of them.' And a few days later he brought me a list. There were ancient writers on it, Greek and Roman -- Homer, Herodotus, Lucretius, Seutonius -- and also all the classics of later European literature, starting with Erasmus, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Coster, and going on to 19th century writers such as Stendhal, Mérimée, and Flaubert."