Collected Stories, by Isaac Babel

[p034] The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel. Edited by W. Morison. Methuen, 1957 (18/-). Isaac Babel, in one of his youthful reminiscences, has left us a vivid passage which is quite unintentionally prophetic. The curtain rises on a daily performance. We hear Uncle Simon’s brazen voice cursing the young Babel and his erst- while aunt promising them that they’d be unable to give one another “a decent burial” and that they “would be dragged by the hair to a mass grave”. Little did the author of these lines, writing in 1930, realise that he was describing the fate not only of himself, Isaac Babel, but also of a whole generation of revolutionaries, scientists, poets, writers, and artists, the generation of the revolution and of the civil war. Some years later, in 1934, speaking at the Writers’ . Congress of the Soviet Union after he had made the obli- gatory obeisances before the literary cult of the Kremlin’s negus, Babel passed on to make what was considered to be a strange speech. The discerning may grasp the implications. He said: “Comrades, let us not fool ourselves: this is a very important right [referring to the “right to write badly”] and to take it away from us is no small thing.” He had previously declared that he was now practising a new literary genre— “the genre of silence”. “I have so much respect for the reader that Iam dumb.” The implications of these words will be clear to anyone who has the slightest respect for the integrity of the

[p035] artist. The 1934 edition of his stories (Razkazi) had been censored of all references to Leon Trotsky. But this silence, tantamount to a refusal to write to bureau- cratic order,. was.more.than.the. Thermidorian regime, then on the eve of the great purges, would tolerate. It was tantamount to harbouring secret thoughts of opposition, to being a “Trotskyite two-facer”, to being “an enemy of the people”. Babel was arrested in 1937 (apparently he let slip an “objec- tionable” political opinion) on a charge of Trotskyism. He died in a concentration camp either in 1939 or 1940. It is now clear to all why it was necessary for the Soviet bureaucracy to crush every vestige of independent thought, even in the more abstract realms of the arts, and especially in literature, the traditional refuge of social criticism in Russia. Babel does not fall into the same category as the fawning and somersaulting court jesters, the Alexei Tolstoys, and Ilya Ehrenburgs and other “external” and “internal” emigres who were only punctual when rallying to Thermidor in the Soviet Union. For the new bureaucracy, consisting as it did of the most conservative elements of Soviet society, the arts were doubly suspect by reason of the simple fact that the philistine mind fears and hates most what it understands least. We are all conversant with the essays of Stalin in the realms of linguistics, of the excursions of Zdhanov into the field of musicology, and we are, most of us, still laughing at this lighter side to the terror of the Stalinist regime. Appropriately following on the revelations of the Twentieth Congress, there has been published for the first time, in one volume, the works of Babel. Fifty-seven short stories go to make the whole of this book, and they are very short stories indeed. But every one of them is a many faceted gem. Each one possesses not only the external lustre of a polished work, the hallmark of consummate craftsmanship, but also exhibits the rare and almost unfathomable depths of emotion, a sympa- thetic feeling for his subject that is born of an understanding and an ability to penetrate to the very essence of things, a very, very rare quality at any time, anywhere. Babel’s method is that of the seemingly detached observer. The form that this detached objectivity assumes is that of a gentle play of irony. This irony springs from the ability to penetrate to the contradictions of a situation and to an appre- ciation of all. the subtle nuances of relations between humans, or for that matter of that between them and their beasts of burden. Many of these stories have appeared in English before, the main bulk of them in Red Cavalry and Benia Krik and fragments in two symposiums of Russian short stories en- titled Short Stories out of Russia and Azure Cities. The Sin of Jesus and Guy de Maupassant appeared in the journal Partisan Review and First Love in the periodical Commen- tary. The present version whilst containing all these, reproduces a number of others, for the first time in English. The volume follows the text of the Russian edition of 1934, but with the contraband references, chiefly to Trotsky, restored. In addition there are a further five stories obtained from other sources. Chronologically speaking, all these writings fall into the immediate post-revolutionary period, although many, especi- ally the later ones hark back to pre-revolutionary times, to the pogroms of childhood memory, poignant in their expression of injured feelings; to the Jewish citizenry of the Odessa Ghetto, the “stout and jovial Jews” of the Moldavanka Quar- ter. Over all these latter there towers the magnificant and chivalrous Benia Krik, king of the Odessa underworld. Student days are represented by just one tale, Guy de Maupassant. The heart and core of the book is of course his civil war experi- ences in the cavalry army of Budyenny. Special mention must here be made of one _ story — Oil. This is a brief but scandalizing skit on the rising Soviet bureaucracy and its methods. It takes the form of a letter written by the wife of-a high Soviet Oil Trust official, to her friend. It describes therein, how lingerie might be obtained for those who could afford it,.and how amongst other things, schedules of the Five Year Plans are altered in mid-plan and targets inflated beyond possibility, of how the young Party bureaucrats are sent down from the centre to brow-beat the technicians. It describes the social aspirations of the parvenu bureaucrats who get swollen-headed on promotion or who aspire to marriages into families of aristocratic lineage. Babel, born in 1894 at Odessa, the Marseilles of the Black Sea, came of Jewish stock, traditionalist in outlook and ambitious for their son in whom_ they hoped to discover the genius of another Heifetz. Odessa’s. Ghetto was the hot bed of child prodigies, pale and “with an epileptic flush. on their cheeks”. They sprouted everywhere. But besides his nervous disorder, young Isaac’s talent lay else- where. He could reel off Pushkin at the tender age of ten (earn- ing highest possible marks in his examination) and Shakes- peare at thirteen. Playing truant from his music lessons, he chanced upon the friend of a lifetime, a proof reader, Yefim, who brought him face to face with nature, and who was the first to encourage him to write. Surviving all the discriminatory practices of the Czarist educational system (the quota system allotted only 5% of the total passes out of secondary schools to Jews) he steeped himself in the French masters, Flaubert and Maupassant. In 1914 he took his degree at Saratov. Smuggling himself into Petrograd in 1916 the penurious writer had to live with false papers because the city was out of bounds to Jews. Before long however he was indicted for pornography and inciting class hatred—stock remedy of Czarist censors for headstrong talent. Came the revolution, and taking a cue from Gorky, he took time out to learn life at first hand. Gorky published his writings in his journal Annals. After a period in the Tsarist army, he went into the Cheka, later, on a grain collecting expedition, fought in the Northern Army and finally wound up in Budyenny’s cavalry. Babel, Jewish, puny, bespectacled, and with a nervous dis- ability was by some strange quirk of destiny detailed to serve in the supply section of Cossack cavalry, notorious for its rough and ready manners and a streak of anti-semitism. But how Babel envied these cossacks! His breast is filled with a childlike admiration for the barbaric splendour of these giants, for the “masterful indifference” of Tartar Khans, for their hour-long ability to literally trample the life out of their class enemies, and to obtain from such an act a supreme sense of release, release from an age-old grievance. The Cossack cavalry was composed of perhaps the most backward of all the social strata attracted to the Revolution. Vestigial remains of their barbaric heritage, of their recent serfdom still linger on in many of Babel’s characters. But one thing distinguishes them all; an unswerving loyalty to the “common cause” as it is called in these pages. Their commander was Budyenny, the one-time N.C.O., even then a bosom companion of Stalin’s. Budyenny’s immediate superior was commander of the Southern Front, Voroshilov, another of Stalin’s early cronies. “Budyenny, in silver-striped red trousers”... “his long crooked legs”, and Voroshilov in an obvious hurry, urging on the cavalry into an obviously ill- considered action at Chesniki (saved only through the enemy’s stupidity), serve only to bring home the point of the inade- quacy of these two commanders. It was about that time that they, between them, helped to expose the flank of the Red Army to the thrust of the Poles who turned the Red Army advance to the gates of Warsaw into a rout of the first order. No wonder then that Budyenny was amongst the first of Babel’s “literary critics”, when with a loud flourish of literary pretension he assailed Red Cavalry when it was first published in the Soviet Union. Besides this aspect of the Red Cavalry stories, there are others which deal with the more mundane tasks of foraging, pre-civil war experiences narrated by one-time serfs, letters of soldiers, articles to Red Trooper, the army journal, written by men wrestling with the problems of literacy and self-expres- sion. There is a charming tale of the malingering deacon, Ivan, and several fascinating interludes with the Jews of Polish Galicia. Here is the old world of Hasidism and the rites of orthodox Jewry. There are many more themes dealt with in these stories. Babel brings to his work all the finesse of the masters of French realism, lyricism and conciseness of expression. His imagery is vivid, brief and sometimes overpowering. Here 1s a writer, a poet of the transition from the culture of the old world to that of Socialism. He has made an indelible contribution and today’s artists of the Soviet Union will certainly have to take serious note of his work if they are truly to rehabilitate the literature of the Revolution end proceed therefrom to continue its development. A.B.