Collected Stories, by Isaac Bebel

[p026] Collected Stories, by Isaac Babel. often short short post-revolutionary Short stories, Russian author. All written in the first person and largely autobiographical, they deal mainly with Babel’s childhood in the Odessa ghetto and his experiences in the revolutionary wars. About half this book consists of _ the collection of stories ‘Red Cavalry’ first published in 1926, which deals with the exploits of the Cossacks in the Polish campaign of 1920. No revolutionary romanticism here. Instead realism, brilliant journalism, sharply-etched vignettes showing the savagery and brutality of war. Babel’s stories remind me of cinema stills. Each is self-contained but. static. Hence it is difficult to relate them to the main theme—the Revolution, all its upheaval and the possibilities for mankind which it opened up. (Compare with that other piece of brilliant journalism, Reed’s “Ten Days. . .’) The liberal and pacifist will there- fore see his belief justified. Reds and Whites were tarred with the same brush, all was merely violence and atrocities. However the Revolution does break through on occasion. See the story ‘Salt’. A group of soldiers. kill a woman black-marketeer and send a resolution to their army newspaper pledging ‘that we will deal merci- - lessly with all such traitors who are dragging us to the dogs’. . Here are no docile masses being driven blindly to the slaughter. Here instead are a group of men, not intellectuals, not leading Bolsheviks, but humble peasants and soldiers, inspired by revolutionary zeal. ‘First Love’, one of Babel’s ‘childhood stories’, describing an Odessa pogrom in 1905, brings home the horror of racial and religious persecution better than anything else I have ever read. *O.1.’ set in the period of the first Five-Year plan, shows us the rising bureaucracy, the factory manager with his ‘excellent connexions’, the fantastic production targets set by the bureaucrats. Babel could not bring himself to become a bureaucratic lickspittle. He - described himself in the ‘thirties as ‘master of the genre of silence’. This did not save him. Past associations with Trotsky, and no doubt also fear of his observant eye and sharp pen, led to his arrést in 1937 and death in a concentration camp in 1939 or 1940. AS. World Facts