Antonina Pirozhkova, who as the widow of the renowned short-story writer Isaac Babel, campaigned for more than half a century to keep his literary legacy alive after his execution by Stalin’s KGB, died Sept.12 at her home in Sarasota, Fla. She was 101.

The death was confirmed by her grandson, Andrei Malaev Babel.

Pirozhkova, a rising young engineer, met her future husband shortly after she began working at the State Institute for Metallurgical Design in Moscow in 1932. She was 23. Babel was 38 and separated from his first wife, Yevgenia Gronfein.

The two began living together in 1934, and in 1937 she gave birth to a daughter, Lidiya.

After her husband’s arrest in 1939, Pirozhkova was advised by a KGB interrogator to forget the matter. “Regulate your life,” she was told. Instead she spent the next 15 years trying to discover her husband’s fate.

In 1954 she received his death certificate. It bore the false date of March 17, 1941, implying that he had died during World War II. Pirozhkova then successfully lobbied for Babel’s official rehabilitation, which was granted later in 1954.

Not until the mid-1990s did accurate information emerge about Babel’s date of execution, Jan. 27, 1940, and the 20-minute trial that took place the day before he was shot. He had been charged with belonging to an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization and with spying for France and Austria.

During and after her life with Babel, Porizhkova continued her engineering career. At the Metroproekt Institute, which she joined in 1934 and where she rose to chief designer, she helped plan the crown jewels of the Moscow subway system: the Mayakovsky, Pavelets, Kiev, Arbat and Revolutionary Square stations.

For many years she was the only woman employed as a subway engineer in the Soviet Union.

After retiring in 1965, she devoted her life to reclaiming her husband’s legacy, fighting with authorities for permission to publish his works, organizing public memorials and commemorations of his birth and helping scholars do research in her personal archives, stored in her apartment in Moscow.

She was particularly concerned with securing the return of unpublished manuscripts seized by the KGB. Their fate remains unknown. In 1972 she compiled and published, in Russian, “I. Babel Recalled by His Contemporaries,” a collection of firsthand biographical material. Babel’s “1920 Diary,” which she transcribed, presented the raw material that the author drew on for “Red Cavalry,” his most celebrated work. The diary was published in the United States by Yale University Press in 1995.

Works compiled, edited by Pirozhkova

The two-volume collection of Babel’s works that Pirozhkova compiled and edited remains the most complete edition in Russian. It was published in 1990.

Her memoir, “At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel,” was published in the United States by Steerforth Press in 1996 and in 2001 appeared in a Russian edition.

Sharply written and full of insights about Babel’s character and life under Stalin, the book was well received. “Babel would have enjoyed Ms. Pirozhkova’s book, concise and full of bright incident,” Richard Lourie wrote in The New York Times Book Review.