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| Isaak Babel Odessa, Ukraine |
Along with other secrets about spies and agents and assassinations and conspiracies, the archives of the former Soviet Union may contain a literary secret: an unpublished novel by the Russian writer Isaac Babel.
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| Isaac Babel |
A review of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel.
by Gary Saul Morson
January 2002
The romance of revolution has repeatedly seduced European intellectuals and nowhere more intensely than in Russia. In the late nineteenth century, Russia became the first country in which young members of the intelligentsia, when asked their career choice, might answer “revolutionary” or “terrorist”—a choice regarded as highly honorable, albeit dangerous. Indeed, the word “intelligentsia” was originally a Russian coinage, meaning not a thinking or educated person, but one, however well or ill educated, committed wholeheartedly to socialism, atheism, and revolution. If we reflect that this group actually succeeded in taking over the state—Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were all typical intelligents—then we recognize the importance of cultural battles. We also recognize the larger significance of Russian history and literature for understanding the modern world.
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| Isaac Babel |
Val Vinokur has just published “The Essential Fictions,” a newly translated collection of the works of Odessan Jewish writer Isaac Babel. This story was originally published with the following subtitle: “First chapter from the book Velikaya Krinitsa.” The stories “Gapa Guzhva” and “Kolyvushka” are the only extant sections of Babel’s projected book about the collectivization of agriculture. This story begins during Maslenitsa (also known as Butter Week and, here, Maslenaya, which is taking place now across the Slavic world). The holiday takes place before the start of Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Lent and has roots in a Slavic pagan folk tradition that originally marked the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Much like Mardi Gras, it involves feasting and revelry before the Lenten fast, with blini (crepes fried in butter) as the food of choice.. This story was written in the spring of 1930 and published in 1931. Additional explanatory notes to the story are included under the text.
Vinokur previously published Babel’s seminal Odes to Odessa with The Odessa Review and has also written for the journal about the history of Babel translation in English.
For Maxim Gorky
When I was a kid I longed for a dovecot. Never in all my life have I wanted a thing more. But not till I was nine did father promise the wherewithal to buy the wood to make one and three pairs of pigeons to stock it with. It was then 1904, and I was studying for the entrance exam to the preparatory class of the secondary school at Nikolayev in the Province of Kherson, where my people were at that time living. This province of course no longer exists, and our town has been incorporated in the Odessa Region.
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| The most famous writer of Odessa lived, since 1907, in a historical building in Zhukovskogo street n. 22, 4th floor, apartment 10, with a balcony to Rishelievskaya street. |
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 N.K.V.D., and who wrote a memoir about the last seven years of his life, died on Sept. 12 at her home in Sarasota, Fla. She was 101.
In 1922, following the First World War and the Russian Civil War, Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), the famous Russian modernist poet, wrote: “We are a people without tears. Straighter than you, more proud.” The quote, taken from her much anthologized poem “I am not one of those who left the land,” is as emblematic of Akhmatova’s forceful concision as it is of the famed toughness of the Russian people, hardened over the ages by unceasing loss and suffering. The poem takes the form of a castigation of Russian exiles who fled their country for more peaceful lands, leaving the fate of the nation to its “enemies.” Akhmatova could not, of course, have foreseen the unfathomable levels of violence and suffering that Stalinism and the Second World War were soon to inflict upon the Russian people. If she had, “I am not one of those who left the land” may have taken on a quite different register. Red Cavalry, Isaac Babel’s classic 1926 collection of short stories that recount his experiences in the Red Army’s 1st Cavalry during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, provides an window into the world in which Akhmatova wrote, articulating the delicate balance of discordant forces that comprised the intellectual milieu of Revolutionary Russia in the years after the First World War and before Stalin razed the nascent dream of Lenin’s Soviet Union.
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| Isaac Babel by David Levine |
Isaac Babel was born in the Moldavanka, a poor, raffish district of Odessa, in 1894, and died, it has been established only within the last ten years, in Moscow's Lubyanka prison, early in the morning on January 27, 1940. He was shot by a firing squad after a twenty-minute trial held the day before in the private chambers of Lavrenti Beria, the notorious head of the K.G.B.'s predecessor, the N.K.V.D. Babel was convicted of "active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization" and of "being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments." He had confessed, during the previous eight months of imprisonment and interrogation, to charges of espionage, but his last recorded statement protested, "I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. . . . I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work."
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| Isaac Babel’s mugshot from Stalin’s dreaded Lubyanka prison, where he was executed in 1940. |
We have needed Isaac Babel sorely these past few years, during which weve had to depend on the treacly fantasies of Spielberg and Hanks for too much of our understanding of war. Weve needed him even more these past few months, as carnage has yet again been dressed up as moral crusade. It is hard to think of anyone who has written about war with as much subtlety, honesty and devastating beauty as Babel, whose Red Cavalry stories fictionally recount the months that he, a bespectacled Ukrainian Jew, spent riding with a brutal and anti-Semitic Cossack cavalry unit on the Polish front in the Russian Civil War.
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| Isaac Babel |
On an August 2013 episode of The New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast, author Donald Antrim read and discussed Denis Johnson’s short story “Work.” Antrim said he remembered the liberation he associated with reading the story when it was published in The New Yorker in 1988: “At the time, I was trying to write stories myself, but they were somewhat dead and I think I felt a little lost…I think reading Denis Johnson had to have something to do with a sense of permission, a sense of freedom to do something that I didn’t understand fully and didn’t know how to imagine or envision.”
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
trans Peter Constantine
1,072pp, Picador, £30
Reading The Complete Works of Isaac Babel is an experience at once horrifying and exhilarating. This large volume is a history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and a monument to the dead and the living. It is full of energy and poetry and slaughter. It smells of war and horses, of onions and herrings, of hunger and blood. It is also a testimony to the stubborn survival of literature.
"In late May 1920, the First Cavalry of the Soviet Red Army, under the command of General Budyonny, rode into Volhynia, today the border region of western Ukraine and eastern Poland. The Russian-Polish campaign was under way, the new Soviet government's first foreign offensive, which was viewed back in Moscow as the first step toward spreading the doctrine of World Revolution to Poland, then to Europe, then to the world. Babel chronicled this campaign in his Red Cavalry stories",... blending "fiction and fact, creating a powerful effect that is particularly poignant in his rendering of the atrocities of war. The stories were published in magazines and newspapers between 1923 and 1926.... In 1926, thirty-four of the stories were included in the book Konarmia (translated into English as Red Calvary), which quickly went into eight editions and was translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German."
The Hotel Danton, where I was staying, was rattled to its foundations by moans of love from five until seven in the evening. Experts were at work in the rooms. Having arrived in France with the conviction that its people had lost their spark, I was somewhat taken aback by their vigor. In our country, we do not bring women to such a boiling pitch. Nowhere near it.
“Mon vieux” Monsieur Bienalle, my neighbor, once told me, “in our thousand years of history we have created woman, food, and literature. No one can deny this.”
If we can agree—somewhat tautologically—that modernist fiction depicts the experience of a world transformed by modernization, we might further assert that the process of modernization itself is rarely so powerfully depicted in fiction as in Isaac Babel’s writing. Joyce and Woolf will give us the modernist consciousness, Proust will reveal the workings of modernized memory, and Kafka shows the sanctified bureaucracy—but Babel is different in that he shows not the effects of modernization by the very process in action. The state goes to war with the most up-to-date technology, exerting its influence over populations and geographical spaces previously inconceivable; outlaws strike whatever claims they can amid the chaos of transformation, desperately trying to outfox the encroaching law; those left behind exist more and more as outcasts among the general dislocation of a rapidly changing world; and of course, the modern political doctrine of communism is put into practice on an epic scale.
Isaac Babel would witness pogroms in his youth, live through times of disdain for Jews and intellectuals—of which he was both—and die at the hands of Stalin’s secret police. Nonetheless, this master of the short story accomplished much. Babel’s intricately styled literary voice tangos with humor in its many forms, from subtle irony to outrageous characters and clever dialogue to jocular plot twists; his stories were, as a result, guaranteed popularity and an immortal place in literature despite their being banned in the Soviet Union from his death in 1940 to 1954, and censored until Glasnost. Now, with antisemitism on the rise worldwide, reading Babel reinforces the power of wit when challenging hatred.
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| Guy de Maupassant |
THE SIXTH DIVISION commander reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn. The staff has moved out of Krapivno and our transport sprawls in a noisy rearguard along the highway that runs from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of peasant men by Nicholas the First.
