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Babel'’s Red Cavalry: Epic and Pathos, History and Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
Isaak Babel'’s masterpiece of revolution and civil war, though a collection of short stories, is also a book shaped into an artistic whole by patterns of style and a central action or plot. Renato Poggioli detected two major stylistic strains in the work —the “epic-heroic” and the “pathetic“—an insight that criticism has yet to pursue. Though much of Red Cavalry is devoted to genre sketches and anecdotes (many told in the speech of its characters, or skaz), the epic and pathetic modes function as polarities about which the diverse tales are organized. Each has its own language and clusters of imagery, and their interplay lends the work its distinctive shape and meanings.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1981
References
1. Poggioli, Renato, “Isaak Babel in Retrospect,” The Phoenix and the Spider (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 235 Google Scholar. Unless noted otherwise, citations in this article are from Babel, I. E.', Konarmiia. Odesskie rasskazy, p'esy (Chicago, 1965 Google Scholar). Though based on a 1957 Soviet edition from which excisions have been made (for example, Trotskii's name has been deleted), it is the most readily available Russian version (hereafter cited as Konarmiia 1965). I have also consulted the first full Russian edition (excluding “Argamak,” which Babel’ added in 1931) Konarmiia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926) (hereafter cited as Konarmiia 1926). Translations are largely my own, though I have borrowed from Walter Morison's able renderings (see Babel, Isaac, The Collected Stories, trans. Walter Morison [New York and Cleveland, 1960]Google Scholar). A literal translation of the title would be the more neutral “Horse Army,” but I have stuck with the standard English title.
2. Babel’ is less interested in the region's Ukrainian peasantry, depicted in the book as an undifferentiated mass. In the civil war between the Reds and Whites of 1918-20, the Cossacks largely sided with the latter, but the Polish campaign of 1920, which is the occasion of the book, witnessed a nationalistic reversal in reaction to the Polish intervention.
3. There is no mention of the Cossacks’ notorious anti-Semitism in Red Cavalry, undoubtedly out of fear of censorship, but it is evident in the diary Babel'kept in 1920, when he was serving as a journalist with the First Cavalry Army. He concealed his Jewish identity under the name Kirill Vasi'levich Liutov. Excerpts are quoted in the notes to other excerpts from his “Plans and Outlines for Red Cavalry,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 74 (1965): 490-99. A more extensive selection has been made in the United States, where editors do not have to shun unflattering facts of Soviet history or references to Jewish life (see Babel, Isaac, The Forgotten Prose, ed. and trans. Nicholas Stroud [Ann Arbor, 1978], pp. 120–13Google Scholar).
4. “Babel’ saw Russia,” writes Viktor Shklovskii, “as a French writer attached to Napoleon's army might have seen her” (Shklovskii, “I. Babel': Kriticheskii romans,” LEF, 1924, no. 2, p. 154).
5. Babel', Konarmiia 1965. p. 23.
6. Eisenstein thought Babel’ could teach film makers “the specific texture of image and word … and the technique of… the extreme laconicism of literature's expressive means” ( Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory and The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda [Cleveland and New York, 1957], p. 93 Google Scholar).
7. Albert Cook speaks of “the simple declarative base” of epic and of “the relation between statement and rhythm [that] is one of contrast or counterpoint” (Cook, The Classic Line: A Study in Epic Poetry [Bloomington and London, 1966], p. 11).
8. Babel', “Guy de Maupassant,” Konarmiia 1965, p. 262; Konstantin Paustovsky. “Reminiscences of Babel, , “in Patricia Blake and Max Hayward, eds., Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature (New York and Evanston, 1964), pp. 34–35 Google Scholar.
9. Except for its modern tautness, Babel “s prose recalls the lush and metaphoric prose of Russian romanticism, especially of Gogol’ in works like ” Taras Bulba. “
10. Babel', Konarmiia 1965, p. 57.
11. Ibid., p. 98.
12. Ibid., p. 135.
13. Ibid., p. 23.
14. Ibid., p. 98.
15. Ibid., p. 87.
16. See Frankel, Hermann, “Der Homerische Mensch,” in Dichtung und Philosophie des friihen Griechentums, 3rd ed. (Munich, 1969), pp. 83–94 Google Scholar. See also James M. Redfield's brilliant Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago, 1975). Redfield writes: “The warrior stands on the frontier between culture and nature” (Nature and Culture, p. 101).
17. Babel', Konarmiia 1965, p. 66.
18. Ibid., p. 33.
19. Ibid., p. 49.
20. For another view, see Victor Terras, “Line and Color: The Structure of I. Babel's Short Stories in Red Cavalry,” Studies in Short Fiction. 3 (Winter 1966): 141-56.
21. Babel', Konarmiia 1965, p. 34.
22. “Clever Babel’ is able to justify … the beauty of his things by means of irony. Without it, it would be embarrassing to read him. He anticipates our objection and places a heading over his portraits—opera” (Shklovskii, “I. Babel': Kriticheskii romans,” p. 154).
23. See Lionel Trilling's pioneering and brilliant introduction to the Collected Stories. The opposition of nature and culture is stated by Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Identities of Isaac Babel,” Hudson Review. 8 (Winter 1956): 620-27. That Babel’ had in mind a contrast of culture and the Cossacks is suggested by a diary entry of July 21, 1920: “How I inhale the fragrance of Europe here [Poland]. And what about the Cossack? Traits: tale-bearing, professionalism, revolutionary spirit, bestial cruelty” (Babel, Forgotten Prose, p. 128).
24. Babel', Konarmiia 1965, p. 107.
25. Ibid., p. 39.
26. Babel “s diary entry of August 11, 1920, includes the remark: ” heroic epopee. That is not a Marxist revolution, but rather a Cossack rebellion” (Babel, Forgotten Prose, p. 138).
27. Babel', Konarmiia 1965. p. 47.
28. Ibid., p. 99.
29. Ibid., p. 100.
30. Ibid., p. 55.
31. Ibid., p. 103.
32. Ibid., p. 76.
33. Ibid., p. 101.
34. Aristotle, Politics I. 2. 1253a.
35. Babel', Konarmiia 1965, p. 87.
36. From an incomplete letter written at the front, addressee not given (Babel, Forgotten Prose, p. 139).
37. Babel', Konarmiia 1965. pp. 25-26.
38. Ibid., p. 88.
39. Ibid., pp. 46-47.
40. Ibid., p. 77.
41. Ibid., p. 88.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., p. 39.
44. Ibid., p. 25.
45. Ibid., p. 48.
46. Ibid., pp. 88 89. 53.
47. Babel'. Konarmiia 1926, p. 35. The reference to the Talmud was apparently deemed subversive by Soviet watchdogs of culture, for it has been excised from the 1957 edition.
48. Babel'. Konarmiia 1965. p. 27.
49. Ibid., p. 55.
50. Ibid., p. 41.
51. Ibid., pp. 23-24.
52. Ibid., p. 60.
53. Ibid., p. 46.
54. Ibid., pp. 35-36.
55. Ibid., pp. 35-39.
56. Ibid., pp. 47-48.
57. Ibid., p. 42.
58. Ibid., p. 51.
59. Ibid., p. 95.
60. Ibid., p. 53. Martin Buber describes the “Mother” as one of several conceptions “of the divine soul imprisoned in the material world” which were adopted by the Cabbala from Gnosticism and thence made their way into Hasidism. She is a being “who must walk through all the sufferings of the world of things… mediating between primal good and primal evil” ( Buber, , The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, ed. and trans. Friedman, Maurice [New York, 1960], p. 118 Google Scholar).
61. Babel', Konarmiia 1965, p. 55.
62. Ibid., p. 54.
63. Ibid., p. 146.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., p. 104.
66. Ibid., p. 152.
67. In “Zamost'e” he dreams that he has been crucified: a woman proffers her breast “like a nurse proffering food” ; then, seeing himself dead, he hears her intone, “Jesus, receive the soul of thy departed servant,” and awakes as “the back of a horse cleaves the sky like a black crossbar” (ibid., p. 127). Besides the moral dilemma, we find the ingredients of an Oedipal crisis in this overattachment to the mother, inability to take aggressive action, and fear of (or desire for) martyrdom (castration). In “My First Goose,” a key story, he attempts to resolve the crisis by the symbolic act of killing a goose, which wins the Cossacks’ approval. But the act is tawdry, and he is consumed by shame.
68. See Marcus, Steven, “The Stories of Isaac Babel” Partisan Review. 22, no. 3 (Summer 1955): 400–11.Google Scholar
69. Babel', Konarmiia 1965, p. 35.
70. Ibid., p. 147.
71. Robert A. Maguire writes that Liutov “longs to find an allegiance that will pull together all these conflicting and incomplete identities; yet circumstances compel him to make constant acts of allegiance that he knows fall far short of perfection” ( Maguire, , Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920's [Princeton, N.J., 1968], pp. 328–29Google Scholar).