I’ve been reading a lot of books about the Russian Revolution this year, but the one that’s really turned my head recently is Red Cavalry, a collection of stories by the Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel (newly translated for Pushkin Press by Boris Dralyuk).
For reasons that now escape me, I was tasked last spring with delivering a copy of the book in person to PW’s reviewer. Red Cavalry is composed of 35 stories, ranging in length from short to very short, so I read the first on the subway. It lured me in with scenes of mounted soldiers fording a river with an unpronounceable Slavic name and quivering fields of virgin buckwheat. But like the other stories in the collection, “Crossing the Zbrucz” veers quickly from pastoral beauty to grim realism, of the kind that would have made Goya wince, and at the end of two unassumingly small pages, I was filled with spine-tingling horror at the fate of the Ukrainian Jews with whom the narrator is billeted.
Babel, who was born in Odessa in 1894, based the stories in Red Cavalry on diary entries that he wrote as a war correspondent attached to the Cossack First Cavalry Army during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920—one of the many regional conflicts thrown up in the wake of the revolution and World War I. At the start of the revolution, Babel was an ardent Bolshevik (his hero was Maxim Gorky). It’s clear that his experiences in Poland and Ukraine, where much of the war was fought, dampened his enthusiasm for the cause. He died at the hands of Stalin’s NKVD in 1939 after falling out of favor with the regime, and after possibly having an affair with the NKVD chief’s wife (never a good idea).
Slightly wary after my first encounter with the book, I picked up another copy of Red Cavalry a few months later and soldiered on (as it were), through the consonant-heavy Slavic place names. Babel’s narrative concision and his ability to shift registers, from the prosaic to the poetic and back, are riveting.
One of my favorite stories, “The Italian Sun,” opens with an image of the narrator walking through a burnt-out Ukrainian village: “My soul, suffused with the wearisome drunkenness of yearning, smiled to no one in particular, and my imagination, a blind, happy woman, swirled before me like a summertime fog. It seemed to me that the charred town—the broken columns and the hooks of old women’s fingers sticking from the earth—had been raised up into the air, as snug and fanciful as a dream. The naked brilliance of the moon bathed it with an inexhaustible force. The damp mould of ruins bloomed like a marble bench in an opera.”
But Babel is also funny: in the same story, which again spans only a few short pages, the narrator reads a letter by one of his comrades and mocks the aspiration of this "miserable killer," mired in the remains of a desecrated Ukrainian village, to travel to sunny Italy.
In the crucible of war, Babel forged a new prose equal to the new energies and forms of life opened up by the revolution, and not yet foreclosed by civil war, famine, and terror. I found myself thinking that, in some ways, Babel prefigures the sensibilities of David Simon, juxtaposing grit, gore, humor, and beauty—in a very different kind of ghetto.
