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Kinship and Concealment in Red Cavalry and Babel'’s 1920 Diary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Carol J. Avins
Carol J. Avins*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University
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Extract

To begin, three encounters, and then some ruminations about two deaths, the veiling of identity and the expression of kinship. The encounters are from the diary Isaac Babel' kept during his service with Budenny's First Cavalry Army in the Polish campaign of 1920; the deaths are those that frame the work of fiction he drew from this experience, Red Cavalry. That book begins and ends with the narrator contemplating a corpse–in each instance, the body of a Jewish man whose passing leads the narrator to confront the meanings of kinship and loss. In the first case, he witnesses bereavement; in the second, he experiences it. On one important level, the narrator's trajectory in Red Cavalry is captured in the contrast between his links to the first death and to the last. Reading the story cycle against the background of the diary, one can see this feature of the cycle's design in terms of the central dilemma for Babel' (bearing papers in the name of Kirill Vasilievich Liutov, the name he bequeathes to his narrator) in his dealings with the civilians of the heavily Jewish towns through which his division passed: whether or not to reveal that he was himself a Jew.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , Fall 1994 , pp. 694 - 710
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1994

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References

1. Here and elsewhere in this essay, the edition of Red Cavalry referred to is the first (Konarmiia [Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1926])Google Scholar. My source is the most readily available text of that edition, in Isaak Babel', Detstvo i drugie rasskazy, ed. Efraim Sicher (Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliya, 1979Google Scholar). From the 1st through the 6th editions, the final story in the cycle was “Syn rebbe ” ; in the 7th and 8th editions (1933) “Argamak” was added, becoming the final story. The most recent publication of Red Cavalry ( Babel', Isaak, Sochineniia, 2 vols. [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990], 2: 5–140 Google Scholar) adds another story at the end, “Potselui,” first published separately in 1937 and not included in the cycle during Babel''s lifetime. According to his widow (Sochineniia, 2: 561 n), Babel’ intended to add it to the next edition. It does not seem to fit, however, particularly as a conclusion. My focus on the 1926 redaction reflects my view that this original version has the greatest compositional unity. The diary first appeared in full in the above-cited 1990 Sochineniia, 1: 362-435. The manuscript was given in the mid-1950s to Babel''s widow, Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova, by the writer's friend, T.O. Stakh, who had received it (along with other papers) from another Kiev friend, M.Ia. Ovrutskaya. Pirozhkova surmises that Babel’ might have left the papers with Ovrutskaya circa 1927, when he closed up the Kiev home of his first wife's family after her father's death and her mother's emigration (interview with A.N. Pirozhkova, Moscow, 8 May 1993). Fragmentary excerpts were first published in La. Smirin, “Na puti k ‘Konarmii’ (Literaturnye iskaniia Babelia),” Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 74: 467-82, and in Smirin's notes (497-98) to the drafts of stories published in the same volume. More substantial portions appeared, with an introduction by Galina Belaya, in Druzhba narodov, no.4 (1989): 238-52 and 5: 247-60Google Scholar. A complete English edition, translated by H.T. Willetts and with my introductory essay and notes, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

2. I translate Babel''s titles directly from the Russian rather than using the less accurate translations ( “Crossing into Poland,” “The Rabbi's Son ” ) commonly used. There is a substantial critical literature on Red Cavalry, on BabeP's depiction of Jews there and elsewhere in his work, and on BabeP's identity as ajew. While I cannot give here a complete bibliography, I refer readers to the most complete one available, that of Efraim Sicher in his Style and Structure in the Prose of I sank Babel’ (Columbus Ohio: Slavica, 1986). Among the studies relevant to my subject (though not, by and large, to my approach) are Sicher's book itself; his article on the diary (cited in n.3 below); E. A., Dobrenko, “Logika tsikla,” in G.A. Belaia, E.A. Dobrenko and I.A. Esaulov, “Konarmiia” lsaaka Babelia (Moscow: Rossiiskii universitet, 1993), 33–101 Google Scholar; Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992 Google Scholar; Milton Ehre, Isaac Babel (Boston: Twayne, 1986); Arkady Lvov, “Babel the Jew,” Commentary (March 1983): 40-49; Carol Luplow, Isaac BabeV's “Red Cavalry” (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982); Simon Markish, “The Example of Isaac Babel,” Commentary (November 1977): 36-45; James, Falen, Isaac Babel: Master of the Short Story (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974 Google Scholar; and Patricia, Carden, The Art of Isaac Babel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972Google Scholar). A number of useful studies are included in Harold Bloom, ed., Isaac Babel: Modern Critical Views (New Haven: Chelsea House, 1987) An overview with useful insights is Gregory, Freidin, “Isaac Babel,” European Writers of the Twentieth Century (New York: Scribner's, 1991), 11: 1885–1914 Google Scholar.

3. The date given in the diary is 3 June but it seems probable that Babel’ slipped and meant 3 July since this area in early June was still held by the Poles. Norman Davies in “Izaak BabeP's ‘Konarmiia’ Stories, and the Polish-Soviet War” (Modern Language Review 67, no.4 [October 1972]: 847) and Efraim Sicher in “The Jewish Cossack ”: Isaac Babel in the First Red Cavalry” (Studies in Contemporary Jewry IV [1988]: 131) agree on this point. Sicher argues, further, that given BabeP's use of Roman numerals to indicate months, the difference between June and July is merely one stroke; also, the entry at issue clearly takes place on a Saturday and, while 3 July 1920 was a Saturday, 3 June was not.

4. Babel', “Dnevnik 1920 g.,” Sochineniia, 1: 366.

5. Ibid., 1: 385 (entry for 23 July). Subsequent references to the diary are given parenthetically in the text. Most entries are so short that only dates are cited, not page numbers.

6. On interpretations over the centuries of the significance of Tisha b'Av and its paradigm of destruction, see Roskies, David G., Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984 Google Scholar. Roskies briefly discusses Babel''s experience in Demidovka on 136-37.

7. One could explore further here the dichotomy between Babel’ as “Westernized” Jew and the “Ostjuden” (the German term is typically used in discussing these categories) of smalltown Volhynia and Galicia. (Geography was obviously not the only relevant criterion of one's status as “Ostjude” or “Westjude ”: though Odessa was east of Poland, the relatively assimilated Jewish milieu from which Babel’ came was “western” relative to that of the eastern European shtetl.) On the matters of Judaism and modern ideologies, and of western vs. eastern Jewry, see (among many other sources) Cuddihy, John Murray, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, LeviStrauss and the Jewish Struggle for Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1974 Google Scholar; Gilman, Sander L., Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986 Google Scholar; and the fascinating and more historically relevant book by Joseph, Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Berlin: Verlag die Schmiede, 1927 Google Scholar.

8. K. Liutov (Babel “s pseudonym),” Nedobitye ubiitsy,” Krasnyi kavalerist, 17 September 1920, reprinted in Sochineniia, 1: 205-6.

9. Isaak Babel', “Perekhod cherez Zbruch,” Detstvo i drugie rasskazy, ed. Efraim Sicher (Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliya, 1979), 102. Because the stories are so short, I have thought it unnecessary to give page references to subsequent quoted passages. My translations differ, when accuracy requires, from those in the standard English translation by Walter Morison ( Isaac, Babel, The Collected Stories [Cleveland: World, 1960 Google Scholar]).

10. The Morison translation gives that line as “fragments of the occult crockery the Jews use only once a year, at Eastertime.” The translation is inaccurate on two counts. There is nothing occult in “sokrovennyi,” which connotes something secret, hidden and precious. The most difficult problem for a translator is what do with the word “paskha” which can refer to either the Christian or the Jewish holiday. Morison leads the reader to see the narrator as knowing that these are Passover dishes (which only a Jew would be likely to do), but purposely distancing himself by using the Christian rather than the Jewish term.

11. Those who know Red Cavalry will see that I am not attempting to deal with every story that involves Jews or Liutov's identity as a Jew (nor is each of the stories mentioned analyzed fully). That would entail probing more problems and more stories than is possible here. It would include, for example, an analysis of one of the cycle's most complex stories, “Squadron Commander Trunov,” in which Liutov, disturbed by Trunov's murder of two Polish prisoners, his dispute with Trunov over refusing to cover it up and the commander's suicidal death, goes off to lose himself among the Hasidim arguing on the synagogue square.

12. I am indebted to Vera Proskurina, Michael Denner, Julia Volpe and Alina Chesnokova for stimulating discussions of this element of the story. To my knowledge, the first—and almost only—study to give any attention to the identity of Vasilii is the above-cited essay by Simon Markish, “The Example of Isaac Babel.” Markish (41) agrees that the character is previously unseen and that his name identifies him as a non-Jew ( “chuzhoi” is the term he uses). However, he interprets the repetition of the name to indicate that Vasily is so alien as to be unable to understand the story being told. The only other scholar to note the use of Vasilii, E.A. Dobrenko ( “Logika tsikla,” 93), follows Markish in this view.