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| Isaac Babel by David Levine |
By John Updike
October 28, 2001
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."
This miserable end befell a writer whom Maxim Gorky had described to André Malraux in 1926 as "the best Russia has to offer." A quarter of a century later, Babel's contemporary Konstantin Paustovsky wrote in his reminiscences, "He was, for us, the first really Soviet writer." Babel was a Jew who embraced the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 as a deliverance from the anti-Semitic restrictions and sanctioned pogroms of the tsarist regime; to an extent, he embraced the violence of the era in which he came to manhood. His terse, polished short stories make heroes of the Moldavanka's murderous Jewish gangsters and of the brutal Cossacks with whom he rode as a war correspondent and Party propagandist during the Red Army's ill-fated invasion of Poland in the summer of 1920. His artistic star rose under the protection of Gorky, shone brightest with the collection "Red Cavalry," in 1926, and glimmered out as Stalin's rule, beginning in 1924, with Lenin's death, suffocated freedom of expression and imposed terror. Babel and the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in a concentration camp, were Stalin's most distinguished literary victims.
Ilya Ehrenburg, a fellow-Jew and a journalist with survival skills superior to the provocative Babel's, first mentions his old friend in his memoirs in a passage on games that writers play: "Isaak Babel used to hide from everybody, not because people would disturb his work but because he loved the game of hide-and-seek." Babel was, indeed, a man of many habitations, many styles, several pseudonyms, eight or so languages; he had three children by three different women, and for many years kept his common-law household in Moscow a secret from his legal wife, whom he married in 1919 and who lived in France from 1925 on. The daughter of that marriage, Nathalie, born in 1929, survived with her mother in Occupied France and eventually emigrated to the United States in 1961, four years after her mother died. A varied academic career brought Nathalie Babel around, through English and French and Latin-American literature, to Slavic studies and the work of her elusive father, whom she met as a small child during two visits he made to Paris in the nineteen-thirties. In the nineteen-sixties, she edited a book of his letters and a book of lesser-known short stories; early in that decade, she had met her Russian half sister, Lidya, and Lidya's mother, Antonina, an impressive woman who had been the first construction engineer of her sex to work on the Moscow subway system, and who at the age of eighty co-edited the most nearly complete edition, in two volumes, of Babel's works in Russian. Now Nathalie Babel, at the age of seventy-two, has edited a still fuller edition, translated into English by Peter Constantine: "The Complete Works of Isaac Babel" (Norton; $39.95). His oeuvre—stories, journals, journalistic reports, suppressed plays, film scripts produced and unproduced—can no longer play hide-and-seek; it is gathered here, a thousand pages strong.
The son of a dealer in agricultural machinery, Babel was well educated as a child, studying English, French, and German. The stories of Maupassant especially impressed him; his own first stories were written in literary French. His first published story, "Old Shloyme," written in Russian, appeared when he was eighteen and concerned the controversial matter of coerced Christian conversions under tsarist laws: its eighty-six-year-old hero commits suicide rather than change his religion to avoid eviction. Babel wrote about Jews with a brisk, at times scornful knowingness; he seemed prouder of being an Odessan, a child of this southerly Black Sea port equipped, the sketch "Odessa" tells us, with "sweet and oppressive spring evenings, the spicy aroma of acacias, and a moon filled with an unwavering, irresistible light shining over a dark sea." It is, he affirms, "the only Russian town where there is a good chance that our very own, sorely needed, homegrown Maupassant might be born." He asks, "If you think about it, doesn't it strike you that in Russian literature there haven't been so far any real, clear, cheerful descriptions of the sun?" His youthful stories supply this lack: "The sun hung from the sky like the pink tongue of a thirsty dog" ("Lyubka the Cossack"); "The sun . . . poured into the clouds like the blood of a gouged boar" and "The sun soared up into the sky and spun like a red bowl on the tip of a spear" ("Sunset"); "The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head" ("Crossing the River Zbrucz").
The violence of these metaphors owes something to the Russian Symbolists, Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Bely foremost, whose poetry and prose place Russian under a pressure of extravagance that English, since the age of Shakespeare, has rarely been asked (unless by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Hart Crane) to bear. Babel's far-fetched tropes, in Peter Constantine's hardworking translation, explode off the page: "The stars scattered in front of the window like urinating soldiers" and "The velvet tablecloths knocked his eyes right off their feet" ("Sunset"); "I sat to the side, dozed, dreams pouncing around me like kittens" ("Italian Sun"); "A sour odor rose from the ground, as from a soldier's wife at dawn" ("Sashka Christ"); "The skies above me open up like a many-buttoned concertina" ("The Life of Matvey Rodionovich Pavlichenko"); "The silence of the sunset turned the grass around the castle blue. The moon rose green as a lizard above the pond" ("Berestechko"). In the relatively few stories written after those of "Red Cavalry," many of them in a voice of boyhood reminiscence, the Symbolist skyrockets are fewer, though there are flares like "Caught between these two men, I watched the hoops of other people's happiness roll past me" ("Di Grasso") and this burst of imagery: "The night was lilac and heavy, like a bright mountain crystal. Veins of frozen rivulets lay across it. A star sank into a well of black clouds" ("Kolyvushka"). The solitary star is a frequent image in Babel, and his artistic pilgrimage feels like a lonely one, in an increasingly cold climate. The stories in "Red Cavalry"—so close to the journalism he was simultaneously producing—incautiously named a number of commanders, not always in a flattering context, and two of them, Semyon Budyonny and Kliment Voroshilov, rose in Stalin's hierarchy. In 1928, a Soviet critic chastised Babel for his low production, his "silence," but, travelling in 1929-30, "in search of new material," he witnessed the brutal collectivization and famine in the Ukraine; there was so little he dared say. "Revolution indeed! It's disappeared!" he is reported to have confided to Yuri Annenkov, a Russian artist and Paris expatriate. "It's the Central Committees that are pushing forward—they'll be more effective. They don't need wheels—they have machine guns instead. All the rest is clear and needs no further commentary, as they say in polite society." Yet he passed up opportunities to stay in Paris. Rather than be a French taxi-driver, he always returned to the straitened and perilous vocation of a writer in Russia.
Paustovsky's memoir illuminates Babel's aesthetic: "Writers, he said, should write in Kipling's iron-clad prose; authors should have the clearest possible notion of what was to come out of their pens. A short story must have the precision of a military communiqué or a bank check." He describes him at work:
Babel would go up to his desk and stroke his manuscript cautiously as though it were a wild creature which had still not been properly domesticated. Often he would get up during the night and reread three or four pages by the light of an oil lamp. . . . He would always find a few unnecessary words and throw them out with malicious glee. He used to say, "Your language becomes clear and strong, not when you can no longer add a sentence, but when you can no longer take away from it."
One thinks of Hemingway in Paris, honing language to a fresh starkness, and Hemingway had read Babel, as he stated in a 1936 letter to Ivan Kashkin: "Babel I know ever since his first stories were translated in French and the Red Cavalry came out. I like his writing very much." But Hemingway included no Babel in his thousand-page anthology, "Men at War" (1942). "Red Cavalry" contains little war in the sense of clearly delineated military encounters; it is not even very clear that the Poles defeated the invasion of the Red Army, including the Cossack cavalry. One of Babel's political offenses with the book was, as an editorial headnote states, to give lasting publicity to this "disastrous campaign," the Bolshevik regime's rash "first venture at bringing Communism to the world." Another offense was to describe, with an inarguable terseness, the atrocities incidental to the military action—prisoners shot, women raped, children and elders slain and mutilated, churches and synagogues desecrated, even beehives torched.
Although the thirty-four stories in "Red Cavalry," some of them not much longer than the italic vignettes of war that Hemingway inserted in his collection "In Our Time," are told from several points of view, including that of a hardened soldier, the predominant impression is of a noncombatant's struggle to trail the military action while hungry, sleep-deprived, and billeted among Galician civilians as confused and helpless as he. Shtetls abounded in the border region of western Ukraine and eastern Poland, and the story cycle traces not only a bookish young Jew's attempt to learn war—to "fathom the soul of a fighter," to "understand life, to see what it actually is"—but Babel's homecoming, by way of witnessed Jewish suffering, to his own Jewishness. This progress, as well as the progress of the campaign, is more easily followed in a journal Babel kept in that summer of 1920 than in the stories, where the scattered viewpoints and the rigorous literary economy create a somewhat enigmatic and decontextualized effect, as of scenes lit by a fitful barrage. The journal has a constant, increasingly disillusioned hero, who gravitates toward the Jewish bystanders of this invasion: "Discussions with Jews, my people, they think I'm Russian, and my soul opens up to them." "An old Jew—I love talking with our people—they understand me." "I roam about the shtetl, there is pitiful, powerful, undying life inside the Jewish hovels." Of a synagogue: "Everything is white and plain to the point of asceticism, everything is incorporeal and bloodless to a monstrous degree, to grasp it fully you have to have the soul of a Jew. But what does this soul consist of? Is it not bound to be our century in which they will perish?" The Jews suffered looting and rapine alternately from Polish and Soviet armies. Babel takes note as he trots by: "A terrible, uncanny shtetl, Jews stand at their doors like corpses, I wonder about them: what more are you going to have to go through?" In the wake of a bloody Polish pogrom in the town of Komarow, Babel observes his own army "going around indifferently, looting where they can, ripping the clothes off the butchered people."
The so-called "Odessa stories," written and published in periodicals somewhat before the stories of "Red Cavalry," also trace disillusion with the Bolshevik revolution. Benya Krik, the dashingly ruthless crime boss at the center of the stories, in his confident heyday jests of the Jewish situation in Russia:
Didn't God Himself make a mistake when he settled the Jews in Russia so they could be tormented as if they were in hell? Wouldn't it have been better to have the Jews living in Switzerland, where they would've been surrounded by first-class lakes, mountain air, and Frenchmen galore?
The attempt by these gangsters to make a congenial environment for themselves in Odessa, however, runs afoul of the new regime; when the Cheka arrests and executes the criminals, their patriarch, old one-eyed Froim Grach, goes to the chairman of the Cheka, a bureaucrat from Moscow named Vladislav Simen, and pleads, "You're killing off all the lions! And you know what you'll be left with if you keep it up? You'll be left with shit!" Simen offers Froim Grach cognac but arranges for him to be unceremoniously shot by two Red Army men, who afterward boast of how many bullets it took to kill him. When a native Odessan protests, telling Simen that he "can't understand what the old man represented," the out-of-towner asks, "What use would that man have been to the society we are building?" The answer reluctantly comes: "I suppose no use at all." Babel never published the story, "Froim Grach," in Russia; it first appeared in a New York Russian-language journal, in 1963.
The tale "How Things Were Done in Odessa" begins with an invitation: "Let's talk about Benya Krik. Let's talk about his lightning-quick beginning and his terrible end." But it was only in a screenplay for a silent movie entitled "Benya Krik" that Babel revealed the terrible end. The arch-criminal, who "got his way . . . because he was passionate, and passion holds sway over the universe," is double-crossed by the Red Army while hijacking a boxcar full of watermelons, and is shot from behind:
The back of Benya's shaved neck. A spot appears on it, a gaping wound with blood spurting in all directions.
FADEOUT
Babel's compressed, imagistic style and his taste for grotesquerie consort well with the genius of silent films. The five surviving scripts (three for silents, one for a talkie, and one a fragment of two scenes) conjure up a twitchy, fast-moving world of long shadows, raking lights, sinister freaks, and Eisensteinian closeups. The script for the silent "Roaming Stars" begins:
The edge of a double bed. Night. The broad back of old Ratkovich, the rich man of the shtetl. He is asleep. Somebody's bare arm slithers over his pillow. Old Ratkovich rolls over, and in his sleep traps the thief's hand, moves again, the hand frees itself, snatches a bundle of keys from under the pillow, and disappears.
Toward the end:
Rogdai's hand clutching Kalnischker's false teeth. The bullet pierces the dead man's hand and the fingers unclench, dropping the false teeth. The hanging man's body turns its back to the viewer. Cut.
The alleged comedy among the screenplays, "The Chinese Mill (An Attempted Mobilization)," is a fairly inscrutable joke on misplaced Komsomol—Young Communist League—zeal, and the talkie, "Number 4 Staraya Square," also gingerly undertakes political satire; its heroine, a stalwart aeronautical engineer, may derive from Babel's common-law wife, the pioneering Antonina. The scripts and his two plays—"Sunset," performed at the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1928 but criticized for its ambivalent attitude toward the bourgeoisie and dropped from the theatre's repertoire, and "Maria," published in 1935 but cancelled during rehearsals, causing Babel's patron Gorky to decry its "Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat"—suggest that after "Red Cavalry" Babel was seeking coöperative art forms in which to hide or mute his fatal honesty. "I have no imagination," he told Paustovsky. "I can't invent. I have to know everything, down to the last vein, otherwise I can't write a thing. My motto is authenticity." His late short stories retreated to the relatively safe area of his boyhood in tsarist times, in Odessa and the town of Nikolayev. Some of these, like "The Story of My Dovecote," describing his grandfather's death in a pogrom, and "The Awakening," about his failure to become the violin prodigy that Jewish parents in Odessa hoped for, are among his best known. They are more accessible and more anthologizable than his aggressively gaudy earlier stories. Even so, the frankly sexual "My First Fee," recounting how the young author traded a spoken tale for sex with a prostitute, went unpublished. (Prostitution is a favorite theme, and Babel's Communism is nowhere more enthusiastic than in this diary entry on the women in the Red Army: "They gallop ahead with hitched-up skirts, dust-covered, fat-breasted, all of them whores, but comrades too, and whores because they are comrades, that's the most important thing, they serve in every way they can, these heroines.") A passing utterance from the heroine of "My First Fee" might serve as the motto for much of this body of proclamatory fiction and reportage: " 'The things men do,' Vera whispered, without turning around. 'My God, the things men do!' "
Cynthia Ozick, in an elegant introduction—offered along with a preface by Nathalie Babel and a foreword by the translator—makes the case that the time has come "to set Babel beside Kafka." Each "was an acutely conscious Jew," she says. "Each invented a type of literary modernism." The two of them "can be said to be the twentieth century's European coordinates." Both, she need hardly point out, died in their forties and left behind a fragmentary, truncated oeuvre; they are wounded authors. But, for all Babel's unblinking witness and electric, heroically wrought prose, of which a final measure of music and slangy pungency must inevitably be left behind in the Russian, it is hard to feel him Kafka's equal. Kafka could invent, and the forces that oppressed him were enough interior to be converted into giant fables, comic representations of modern man's cosmic unease. Babel's oppressors were exterior—the philistine censors and paranoid enforcers of the increasingly totalitarian revolution he initially supported and, to the end, sought to accommodate. But no imaginative conversion, and not even silence, once his talent had announced itself, could evade or placate them. Babel's art flourished in Lenin's false dawn. As darkness fell, he became his talent's warder; his vitality became his enemy. ♦
Published in the print edition of the November 5, 2001, issue.
John Updike contributed fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism to The New Yorker for a half century. He died in 2009.
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