Words of war
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
trans Peter Constantine
1,072pp, Picador, £30
Saturdady 11 May 2002
Reading The Complete Works of Isaac Babel is an experience at once horrifying and exhilarating. This large volume is a history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and a monument to the dead and the living. It is full of energy and poetry and slaughter. It smells of war and horses, of onions and herrings, of hunger and blood. It is also a testimony to the stubborn survival of literature.
Babel, born in Odessa in 1894, the son of a Jewish dealer in agricultural machinery, has long been recognised as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Some of his works, notably the "Red Cavalry" stories, have been available in translation in the west since the late 1920s, but others appear here for the first time. In the Soviet Union his publishing history was extremely patchy, and the labour of assembling a "complete works" can rarely have presented so many difficulties.
His early popular success, when he was hailed as a heroic recorder of the victorious Bolsheviks, was followed by years of precarious political balancing as Stalin's censorship closed in, and Babel became - or appeared to become - a silenced man. After the mysterious death of his champion, Gorky, in 1936, Babel was at high risk. In 1939 he vanished, as did so many, into the Soviet penal system. Rumours of his survival continued to reach his family in France and Belgium, and it was not until the early 1990s that the date of his death was established from the KGB records. He was, we now know, executed in 1940 in the Lubyanka prison.
His daughter, Nathalie Babel, provides a preface and an afterword of heartbreaking dignity. Her own story has an emblematic quality that sums up the tragic experience of a generation of exiled Russians. She writes without self-pity or melodrama, and with a deep sympathy for the father whom she hardly knew, and who had - or so she might well have thought - abandoned and betrayed her mother and herself. She describes him as elusive, contradictory, an enigma, from whose constant tensions sprang a style and an oeuvre that we see here in its fragmented entirety. Here are his stories, published and unpublished, his extraordinary 1920 diary covering his bloody months with the Cossacks in Ukraine, his journalism, his drafts of unfinished novels, his plays and his screenplays. It is one of the strangest collections ever assembled, bearing witness to a tragic yet triumphant life.
The tensions shout out at us, undisguised, from his violent and colourful prose, from the various personae of his narrators. He was a Jew, from a deeply Jewish background, who both loved and loathed the shtetl and all it represented. He was a Russian, who believed in the October Revolution and devoted years of his life to trying to sell it to the unbelieving, and who refused to leave his native land even when he knew the game was up. He was a bespectacled intellectual who admired criminals and men of action, and who wrote of violence with a hideous romantic realism. "You look at the world through your spectacles," says a platoon commander contemptuously, as Babel's alter ego, the Russian Lyutov, attempts to draw up a list of Polish prisoners of war - prisoners who are about to be executed out of hand.
Lyutov was Babel's pen name when he travelled as a war correspondent with the Red Cavalry on the Polish front, a name that disguised (though not always effectively) his Jewishness from the pogrom-happy Cossacks. We see Lyutov-Babel torn between horror at the brutality of his companions and admiration for their camaraderie, their style, their "foppish bloodthirstiness and loudmouthed simplicity", their military jackets and glittering embroidered trousers, and their magnificent beribboned horses. (Babel writes wonderfully about horses: in one of his tales of the first world war, "The Quaker", a man dies for a horse.) Amid the tale of rape, we see him celebrate the monstrous-breasted nurse and warrior Sahska, "the lady of all the squadrons", with her spurs and her boots and her lace stockings full of straw. There is as much relish as revulsion, and a sense that this prolonged bloodbath may be necessary. Is war "merely a stormy prelude to happiness, happiness, the core of our being"? The question reverberates.
In Babel's unfinished novel, The Jewess , Boris, a successful Bolshevik man of the future, observes the death of his native shtetl as he persuades his family to abandon it and come with him on a first-class train to an apartment with an ice box and a gas stove in Moscow. Boris wonders: "Is this the end, or is it a rebirth?" Babel did not live to hear the answer, but he went on asking it, perhaps to the end.
One cannot but wonder what kind of writer he might have been, had he not supped so full of politics and horrors. He was a great admirer of De Maupassant, whose brief life he celebrates in a late story set in 1916 in Petersburg, a story that gives a vivid satiric portrait of a nouveau-riche Jewish household in a "spuriously majestic vulgar castle" of Finnish granite. "Dining", remarks the impoverished translator-narrator, "is invariably boisterous in wealthy houses that lack pedigree." And there are several other peacetime stories in a French naturalist vein, praising the splendours and miseries of prostitutes and courtesans. These indicate a more European path that his talent could well have followed, had history permitted. Another quite different association that kept coming to mind was with the paintings of Chagall. Babel too sings of amazing skies and shooting stars, of fiddlers and angels.
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