Red Cavalry

The stories in this classic collection are set in the summer of 1920, when Babel was 25 and sent to cover the Polish-Soviet War for the Red Cavalryman newspaper. Sympathetic to the revolution yet having a satiric eye, he describes the newspaper%E2%80%99s writers who %E2%80%9Croam about in the barren dust of the rear and spread the riot and fire of their leaflets.%E2%80%9D Babel was a Jew assigned to a Cossack regiment; his stand-in first-person narrator overcomes the soldiers%E2%80%99 animosity when, in the story %E2%80%9CMy First Goose,%E2%80%9D he breaks a fowl%E2%80%99s neck and orders it to be roasted up. In %E2%80%9CThe Story of a Horse%E2%80%9D and %E2%80%9CThe Story of a Horse, Continued,%E2%80%9D a dispute between a squadron commander and a division commander over a horse produces an exchange of letters full of heartfelt (though jargony) prose and brutal honesty%E2%80%94the commanders have more of an emotional connection to the horses than to other people. Casual violence (%E2%80%9C[he] grabbed her hair, bent back her head and smashed her face with his fist%E2%80%9D) alternates with beauty, sometimes in the same sentence (%E2%80%9CWe fled without staining our swords crimson with the wretched blood of traitors%E2%80%9D). The stories, which are often not much more than anecdotes, mostly focus on characters like Apolek, an itinerant painter; squadron commander Trunov; and a rabbi in Zhitomir, as well as the occasional flashes of battle. This translation is of the first 1926 edition, before censorship and the author%E2%80%99s own revisions altered the text. (May)