The article examines some motifs of G. Flaubert and G. de Maupassant in the stories of I. Babel of the 1920s and 1930s. Stylistic and genre comparisons of Babel's works with the works of French writers were noticed by critics in the first half of the 1920s. Similarities with Maupassant in the structure of the novella, with Flaubert - in the structure of the phrase were noted. Maupassant's novella and Babel's novella have a lot in common, first of all, brevity, saturation, paradoxicity. However, there is a significant difference: Maupassant almost never narrates in the first person, Babel, on the contrary, in the vast majority of his stories speaks on his own behalf, while most often the narrator is the actor. At the same time, the similarity of the narrative manner of Maupassant and Babel is noted. V. Shklovsky, appreciating Babel's stories highly, insists on their similarity to Flaubert's historical novel Salambo. But in this case, it is hardly possible to talk about direct borrowings or allusions, rather, we can talk about random coincidences and not quite obvious roll calls in the depiction of cruelty and death during the war, about some pomp and solemnity of individual descriptions in Babel's stories from Red Cavalry or in Odessa stories, similar to the descriptions in Salambo. This article identifies allusions to the works of Maupassant in the short stories Quaker (1920), My first Goose (1924) and allusions to the works of Flaubert and Maupassant in the story Guy de Maupassant (1932).
