BABEL, Isaak (Emmanuilovich)

Nationality: Russian. Born: Odessa, 1 July 1894. Education: Educated in Nikolaev; Nicholas I Commercial School, Odessa, 1905-11; Institute of Financial and Business Studies, Kiev, later in Saratov, 1911-15, graduated 1915. Military Service: Served in the army, 1917-18. Family: Married Evgeniia Gronfein in 1919; one daughter. Also one daughter by Antonina Pirozhkova. Career: Lived in St. Petersburg from 1918 and worked on Gor'kii's magazine New Life, 1918; editor, Ukranian State Publishing House, 1919-20; news service correspondent with First Cavalry on the Polish campaign, 1920, and correspondent for Tiflis newspaper in Caucasus. In Moscow from 1923; secretary of the village soviet at Molodenovo, 1930; out of favor in the 1930s and arrested, 1939. Died: 17 March 1941.

Publications

Collections

Collected Stories, edited by Walter Morison. 1955.

Izbrannoe. 1957; another edition, 1966.

Destvo i drugie rasskazy [Childhood and Other Stories], edited by Efraim Sicher. 1979.

Short Stories

Rasskazy [Stories]. 1925.

Konarmiia. 1926; as Red Cavalry, 1929.

Odesskie rasskazy [Odessa Stories]. 193l.

Benya Krik, The Gangster, and Other Stories, edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. 1948.

Lyubka the Cossack and Other Stories, edited by Andrew R. MacAndrew. 1963.

The Lonely Years 1925-29: Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence, edited by Nathalie Babel. 1964.

You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915-1937, edited by Nathalie Babel. 1969.

The Forgotten Prose, edited by Nicholas Stroud. 1978; as Zabytyy Babel, 1979.

Novels

Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy: Rasskaz dlia kino [Wandering Stars: ACine-Story]. 1926.

Istoriia moei golubiatni [The Story of My Dovecot]. 1926.

Benia Krik: Kinopovest. 1926; as Benia Krik: A Film-Novel, 1935.

Korol' [The King]. 1926.

Plays

Zakat (produced 1927). 1928; as Sunset, in Noonday 3, 1960.

Mariia (produced 1964). 1935; as Marya, in Three Soviet Plays, edited by Michael Glenny, 1966.

Other

1920 Diary. 1995.

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Critical Studies:

Babel by Richard W. Hallett, 1972; The Art of Babel by Patricia Carden, 1972; Babel, Russian Master of the Short Story by James E. Falen, 1974; An Investigation of Composition and Theme in Babel's Literary upd Cycle "Konarmija" by Ragna Grøngaard, 1979; Babel's Red Cavalry by Carol Luplow, 1982; Metaphor in Babel's Short Stories by Danuta Mendelson, 1982; "Art as Metaphor, Epiphany, and Aesthetic Statement: The Short Stories of Babel," in Modern Language Review, 1982, "The Road to a Red Cavalry: Myth and Mythology in the Works of Babel," in Slavonic and East European Review, 1982, and Style and Structure in the Prose of Babel, 1986, all by Efraim Sicher; The Place of Space in Narration: A Semiotic Approach to the Problem of Literary Space with an Analysis of the Role of Space in Babel's Konarmija by J.J. von Baak, 1983; The Field of Honour by C.D. Luck, 1987; Procedures of Montaine in Babel's Red Cavalry by Marc Schreurs, 1989; Babel and His Film Work by Jerry Heil, 1990; The Dionysian Art of Isaac Babel by Robert Mann, 1994.

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The tradition that Isaak Babel belonged to was a comparatively young one. During the nineteenth century the movement of Jewish secular enlightenment called the Haskala, which had its origins in Germany, gave rise to a Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture in the Russian Empire, with centers in Warsaw, Vilna, and Odessa. One aim of the enlightenment was to bring about a degree of assimilation to European, non-Jewish culture. In Germany this process went much faster than in Russia, facilitated both by the similarity of German to Yiddish and by the relative prosperity of German Jews compared to their Russian counterparts. In Russia Jews had to contend with a much harsher attitude on the part of the authorities, particularly in the last decade of the century. Even so they managed to develop a Russian-language culture that ran parallel to the Yiddish and Hebrew ones, and Russian became another of the languages of the Jewish diaspora.

In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, the territories of Russia that lay within the Jewish Pale became the battleground on which the rival armies fought out the conflict, and the result was an exodus of Jews to the south of Russia, particularly to Odessa. It was in Odessa that the flowering of Hebrew and Yiddish literature took place. Babel was personally acquainted with some of the great figures of Jewish writing who lived there, in particular, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, whose work Babel later translated into Russian. He was also familiar with the writing of Sholom Aleichem, which he also translated. Of books by the newer generation, he had read those of Klausner, Ravnitsky, and Akhad Haam. His early stories show their influence: "Old Shloyme," which describes an old man's suicide after he realizes that his position within the family is untenable, and "Ilya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna," an account of a romance between a Jewish businessman and a prostitute, both stem from this tradition.

Babel's undoubted masterpiece is the story-cycle Konarmiia (Red Cavalry). This bears many similarities to other works by Soviet writers about that region's Civil War, like Furmanov's Chapayev, Fadeyev's The Route, and the short stories of Vsevolod Ivanov. Its experimentalism is in some ways related to that of the literary group known as the Serapion Brothers, and its pictorial vividness has a counterpart in Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don. Yet Red Cavalry is also the work that demonstrates Babel's dualism most forcefully and vividly, and in it his personality splits in two. Without it being immediately obvious, the stories have two narrators: one is the Jewish war correspondent, Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov, bespectacled, bookish, and sensitive, and the other is the person whom Lyutov would like to become, and constantly strives to be—a true revolutionary and Bolshevik soldier with no fear of blood and killing. This dichotomy accounts for the extreme physical violence that is manifested in many of the stories: it is as though Babel were trying to overcome his own horror at what he has seen and witnessed, and to turn it into a kind of vivid, surreal poetry. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the character of the Jew Gedali, who believes in "the International of good men," and with whom Lyutov vainly remonstrates, more than half-convinced that the old man is right.

After Red Cavalry, Babel turned to writing semiautobiographical stories that focused on memories of his childhood in Odessa. The qualifier "semi" is important, though, as much in these seemingly personal accounts is invented and fictive. In the story "Awakening" Babel describes a feature of life in the Odessa of his childhood that, almost against his will, left a deep mark on him. This was the remarkable proliferation in that city of performing musicians, in particular violinists, most of them from Russian-Jewish families. From Odessa came Mischa Elman and Jascha Heifetz, and the great violin teacher Stolyarsky, who later taught David Oistrakh. In the story Stolyarsky becomes "Mr. Zagursky," though "Auer" is of course the real, and famous, violin virtuoso and teacher Leopold Auer. Babel's father decided that his son should become a child prodigy, and the boy was sent for lessons with Stolyarsky at an early age. Babel describes his dislike of playing the violin in no uncertain terms: "the sounds crawled out of my violin like iron filings." And he tells us, "During my violin practice I placed on my music-stand books by Turgenev or Dumas and, scraping out heaven only knows what, devoured page after page."

Thus the vicarious musical ambition of his parents became supplanted by a genuine ambition of his own—to become a writer. Yet somehow the connection between writing and music as a performing art—a connection possibly unconscious, because instilled at an early age—seems to have lingered in Babel's psyche for most of his life. One has a sense that for Babel, his own writing career was really something akin to a career as a concert artist, to be pursued regardless of social change and outer circumstances, with stoicism and dedication to an art that demanded self-effacement, hard work, discipline, and love. From one point of view, his passionate advocacy of Maupassant and Dumas may be seen as equivalent to the commitment a classical instrumentalist brings to the works of the nineteenth-century concert repertoire: in his own writing he continued to interpret that European tradition and to sound its clear, distinctive note against the turbulence of history. Here, perhaps, we have a key to the apparent enigma of his situation. For in Babel we are presented with an extreme paradox: that of a practitioner of "art for art's sake" who tried to put himself and his writing at the service of a social and political revolution. Just what that revolution meant to him is not clear; yet at some level in his consciousness it seems to have been associated with his Jewish patrimony, and with the aspiration of generations of Jews for a better society and a better world. That the dream turned sour, threatening, and bloodily destructive was merely one more twist of history that must be faced with stoicism and courage. His adherence to the artist's moral duty to stay with his art to the end was what made Babel remain in the Soviet Union—for he had identified his art with the life and the destiny of his own people, and to uproot that art from its soil would be to desert them. And so, to the end, he continued to write of the Kriks and the Moldavanka, of the world that had died with the revolution and that the revolution was somehow, perhaps almost mystically, expected to transform and replace. Perhaps the most tragic and moving of all Babel's stories is "Froim Grach," which was written after the "great turning-point" of 1928 and describes the end of a Moldavanka gangster at the hands of the Cheka. Here, more clearly than almost anywhere else in Babel's writing, emerges a note of extreme anxiety and caution about the nature of the new world that is being built.

—David McDuff

See the essays on "Guy de Maupassant" and "My First Goose."