60 The New York Reviewbut, soft and scrupulous, the narrator
funks it. A comrade of the wounded
man does the job and then turns on
Lyutov- Babel in a fury: “You guys in
glasses have about as much pity for
chaps like us as a cat has for a mouse.”
The moral stress here is clearly in
favor of the Cossacks, who feel, with
some justice, that the sensibilities of
the intellectual keep him from doing
a terrible thing that is nonetheless the
humane and necessary thing. In an-
other five- page masterpiece, “After
the Battle,” a Cossack curses the nar-
rator for having ridden into battle with
an unloaded revolver (“You didn’t put
no cartridges in.... You worship God,
you traitor”), and Lyutov- Babel goes
off, “imploring fate to grant me the
simplest of proficiencies—the ability
to kill my fellow- men.” And at the end
of Red Cavalry another Cossack pro-
nounces upon the narrator a primitive
judgment—“You’re trying to live with-
out enemies. That’s all you think about,
not having enemies.” There is no haven
of assurance, no comforts of resolution.
As a counterforce to the Cossacks,
the Jews of Poland, with their “long
bony backs, their tragic yellow beards,”
pierce the taut objectivity of Babel’s
stories, stirring in him a riot of memo-
ries, as in the opening of “Gedali”:On Sabbath eve sad memories
hang heavy on me. On Sabbath eve
in days gone by my grandfather’s
yellow beard would be brushing
Ibn- Ezra’s heavy volumes. My
grandmother in a lace cap would
be making mysterious signs with
her gnarled fingers over the Sab-
bath candle and softly weeping. My
childish heart was rocked on such
evenings like a little boat on en-
chanted waves. Oh, the mouldering
Talmud of my childhood! Oh, the
heavy sadness of memories!Back and forth the narrator goes
from the Cossacks—strange, cruel, and
beautiful—to the Jews, “who moved
jerkily... but whose capacity for suf-
fering was full of a sombre greatness.”
If Red Cavalry is a paean, ardent but
ambiguous, to the force of revolution as
realized in the bravery of the Cossacks,
it is also an elegy for “the Sabbath
peace [that] rested upon the crazy roofs
of Zhitomer.” Nor is there any way to
tell—at least I cannot—which of these
conflicting responses is to be taken as
dominant.
Red Cavalry offers no resolved judg-
ment to be wrapped into a neat sen-
tence; its “meanings” reside not only
in the individual stories but in their
interrelations.The conflicts that course through
Babel’s stories prompt one to reflect
on the relation between literature and
history. The very historical action that
can lend urgency to a literary work can
also, after a time, cause it to sink into
a blur of the forgotten. In fictions with
strong historical content, images of
persons and places are vividly cast up
and then, as time passes, are cast away.
Such images are far removed from the
“eternal” motifs that some readers
like to regard as the true substance of
literature. Perhaps these readers are
right—finally, literature draws upon
a small number of recurrent stories
and motifs—but sometimes the writ-
er’s imagination is fired not by a wishto transcend history but by a need to
“capture” it, or by a wish to serve, at
whatever cost, as a witness to his time.
In a well- known essay on Babel, Lio-
nel Trilling elevated the problem of lit-
erature and history to a sort of timeless
dialectic. “In Babel’s heart,” he wrote,
“there was a kind of fighting—he was
captivated by the vision of two ways
of being, the way of violence and the
way of peace, and he was torn between
them.”
In the 1950s, when Trilling offered
that judgment, serious people still gave
credence to the high claims of the Rus-
sian Revolution, or could at least re-
member that they had once given such
credence. But with the collapse of com-
munism, it has become much harder to
enter fully into the positive association
Babel made with the revolution. A pro-
cess of historical erosion has occurred,
and in consequence it may be that Tril-ling’s ahistorical approach (“two ways
of being”) serves Red Cavalry more
persuasively than any insistence on
seeing the stories as utterly entangled
with the historical events and attitudes
of their moment. But if we now incline
to look with a cool eye on Babel’s re-
sponse to the Russian Revolution, can
we still share the intensity and excite-
ment animating Red Cavalry?
The structural unit in most of the sto-
ries is the anecdote, but the anecdote
wrenched out of traditional settings
and yanked into modernism. A Babel
story consists of a climax ripped out of
its narrative situation, which, it is as-
sumed, the reader can provide on his or
her own. And what counts most is the
writer’s voice—wry, stringent, now and
then flaring into eloquence.
Those of us who lack Russian must
be circumspect when talking about Ba-
bel’s style. Still, a few remarks may be
ventured: in his stories the turmoil of
violence can yield abruptly to a milky
quietness. Objectivity seems the domi-
nant mode, yet few prose writers would
dare indulge in such lyrical apostro-
phes as recur in Babel’s pages. It’s
commonly supposed that terseness and
understatement go together, but not in
Babel. Terse his stories are, but rarely
are they understated. One moves with
dizzying speed from abstraction to spe-
cific notation: surprise upon surprise.
In some stories there’s a surrender to
reflective sadness as complete as the
rush to violence in others. In still oth-
ers the crucial event is hidden, with the
surface of the prose nothing more than
a few ripples of talk. Speech inflicts
wounds.Babel composed frugally. Much of
what he wrote during the 1930s he did
not publish, composing, as they used to
say in Soviet Russia, “for the drawer.”
In 1934 Babel made one of his rare
public appearances, at a Soviet WritersCongress. He said that he practiced a
new literary genre: he was a “master
of the genre of silence.” In the midst
of routine praise for the party, he re-
marked as if in passing that it presumed
to deprive writers of only one right, the
right to write badly.
“Comrades, let us not fool ourselves;
this is a very important right and to take
it away is no small thing.” The right to
write badly—to write from one’s own
feelings, to make one’s own mistakes—
it would be hard to imagine a sadder or
more courageous word. Babel suffered
no immediate punishment, other than
the silence he imposed on himself, but
from a few passages that can be culled
from the letters he wrote to his wife,
mother, and sister, all of whom had em-
igrated to Western Europe, we can gain
some idea of what he thought and felt:1925 : Like everyone else in my
profession, I am oppressed by the
prevailing conditions of our work
in Moscow; that is, we are seething
in a sickening professional envi-
ronment devoid of art or creative
freedom. [In a few years he will not
dare to write so openly.]1928 (from Kiev): There’s poverty
here, much that is sad, but it is my
material, my language, something
that is of direct interest to me.... I
don’t mind going abroad on vaca-
tion but I must work here.1930 : As for the apparent misfor-
tune of my literary life, up till now
I have brilliantly allayed the fears
of my short- sighted admirers and it
will be the same in the future. I am
made of a dough that is a mixture
of stubbornness and patience and
it is only when these two elements
are strained to the utmost that la
joie de vivre comes over me.About Babel’s writings during the
last several years of his life it is all but
impossible to form a judgment. Manu-
scripts confiscated by the secret police
remain unavailable, perhaps destroyed.
How long could a writer continue to
live with the rending oppositions that
inform Babel’s work? I think that in
some of his stories there are signs of a
movement toward a plateau of moral
balance, calmer and more contem-
plative than one finds in most of his
work—though not necessarily making
for a greater achievement. These signs
of change, admittedly slight, suggest
that he may have begun distancing
himself from the pressures of his own
mind. One might suppose that the ma-
ture Babel, knowing he had done as
much as he could in the line of mod-
ernist brilliance, would have reached
a moral ground somewhat beyond the
brutal conflicts of his historical mo-
ment. But we don’t really know. The
Babel we know is impaled on the ag-
onies of our century, and perhaps that
is where he would have chosen to stay.
Ripeness was not to be his fate.
Babel was only forty- five when he
was murdered. Thinking of his end,
one feels again a helpless rage before
the destruction Stalinism wrought
upon a whole generation of gifted
writers. Maxim Gorky had warned
Babel: “A writer’s way is littered with
nails, mostly large ones, and he has to
walk on them barefoot. He will bleed
profusely, and more and more every
year.” QIsaac Babel; drawing by David LevineNew York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics, NYRB Poets,
The New York Review Children’s Collection,
NYRB Kids and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank
Executive Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae,
Lucas Adams
Associate Editor: Alex Andriesse
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During,
Publicity Director; Abigail Dunn, Senior
Marketing and Publicity Manager;
Alex Ransom, Assistant Marketing Manager;
Evan Johnston, Production Manager;
Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.Have you read this
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“[Hofmann’s] accomplishment is to
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Los Angeles Review of BooksBERLIN
ALEXANDERPLATZ
Alfred Döblin
Translated by Michael Hofmann
Paperback • 480 pages • $19.95
Also available as an e-bookhttp://www.nyrb.comHowe 58 60 .indd 60 11 / 17 / 21 4 : 37 PM