1924 General Semion Budenny attacks Babel, calls him an impostor who never saw any action in the First Cavalry. Budenny himself was one of the Revolution’s strangest characters. He was born into a family of peasants in Cossack country, near Rostov on the Don, in 1883. As Babel remembered him, he had dazzling white teeth. He was also famous for his mustache, which bloomed near his nose like a pair of horizontal trees. He served in one of the tsar’s Cossack regiments, joined the Revolution, and was made commander-in-chief of the Soviets’ mythical troopers, the Red Cavalry. Brash, arrogant, barely literate, he adored the Cossacks with their bowler hats and colorful blankets, and he despaired of Babel’s book about his cavalry. Babel, he believed, was a voyeur who had maligned the Cossacks, turned them into gargoyles and goats. Budenny was named a marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935, survived Stalin’s purges, and appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1941, with his glorious mustache. “An army as brave as its privates—but only as good as its general,” Time’s caption read.
———Lenin dies and the “Gensek,” Joseph Stalin, master of the Party, begins his incredible rise to power. When Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, complains about him, the “Gensek” tells her to shut up or he will find Lenin another widow.
———Babel moves to Moscow with his mother, sister, and wife. His stories bring him a sudden, immediate fame. He finds himself “swaggering with the generals.” People in Moscow begin talking like Benya Krik. At the end of the year, his sister, Maria, moves to Brussels to be with her fiancé, Grisha Shapochnikoff, a medical student. Her departure signals the breakup of his own little family (his mother will join Maria in 1926).
1925 Zhenya leaves for France at the end of the year to study art. Babel is ambivalent to say the least. He’d begun an affair in Moscow with a beautiful blond actress, Tamara Kashirina.
1926 First publication of Red Cavalry as a book. Babel now has a new career: screenwriter. He adapts his Odessa tales into a screenplay entitled Benya Krik. He will continue writing screenplays for the rest of his life.
———Mikhail, Babel’s child with Tamara, is born in July.
1927 Tamara soon tires of her nomad. She’s particularly annoyed when Babel abandons Moscow in July to visit his wife in France. “Leave me alone and never write me again,” she sang like a melancholic diva. Tamara was much too wily for Babel, much too tempestuous, and she would never have put up with his tricks. Babel liked to dissemble, Babel liked to hide. . . . She will marry another Soviet writer, Vsevolod Ivanov, and forbid Babel ever to see his own little boy again.
JULY 1927– OCTOBER 1928 Babel’s first trip abroad.
———Babel has a “fling” with Evgenia Gladun (later Yezhova). Little is known about her except that she liked to collect husbands as well as lovers. She met Babel in Berlin, while she was married to a minor diplomat, Alexander Gladun. Evgenia seemed to live for romance—she kept an apartment outside Moscow for her trysts—until she met Nikolai Yezhov (future chief of the Cheka), whom she married around 1931. She was intensely loyal to Babel, found jobs for him, and was foolish enough not to destroy his love letters to her. Yezhov was aware of these letters. He had her poisoned in 1938.
1928 Babel publishes his first play, Sunset.
———Stalin declares an end to NEP and begins an era of forced collectivization, the first Five-Year Plan. A creature of NEP, Babel flourished during Stalin’s little “flirtation” with the West. But the regime becomes more and more repressive. Stalin will call 1929 the “year of the great breaking point.” He’s prepared to kill all sense of adventure—in people and in the arts.
———Babel can’t seem to settle in France (he’s been gone fifteen months). Celebrated in Moscow, he’s utterly unknown in Paris, except among Russian émigrés. He’s often ill and can’t write. “I am living terribly,” he will tell a friend. But Zhenya continues to love him in spite of his blond bombshell in Moscow. She will become pregnant during his last days in Paris.
1929 Their daughter, Nathalie or Natasha, is born in Paris on July 17. Her birth will be Babel’s “undoing.” He longed to be with her, but the Soviet bureaucrats wouldn’t allow him to leave the country again: the author of Red Cavalry wasn’t productive enough. He couldn’t seem to paint much of a picture of the Soviet “pioneers.”
———Babel travels across the Ukraine and visits collective farms, searching for new material.
1932 Babel meets Antonina Pirozhkova (born in Siberia in 1909), a young construction engineer who will help build the Moscow metro.
SEPTEMBER 1932– AUGUST 1933 Babel’s second trip abroad. He can’t really recover from meeting his little daughter, Natasha, who’d arrived at the age of three without him. He would escort her everywhere, a prisoner to her own sense of play. But not even Natasha can hold him in Paris. He’d received a mysterious summons from Moscow, he told a friend.
1934 Genrikh Yagoda (born in Poland in 1891) is appointed chief of the Cheka. It was Yagoda who helped build some of Stalin’s worst labor camps, Yagoda who had his own poison laboratory. Babel would visit him at the Lubyanka, the Cheka’s headquarters and prison, close to Red Square. Because of these visits, rumors began to spread that Babel was writing a novel about the Cheka. No page of this novel was ever found.
JUNE– AUGUST 1935 Babel’s third and final trip abroad. He attends an international anti-Fascist congress of writers in Paris. Red Cavalry has been translated into English, German, French . . . and he finds himself celebrated in France. But it’s the last time he will ever see Nathalie or Zhenya. After his return to Moscow, he began living with Antonina Pirozhkova. She wasn’t a diva, like Tamara Kashirina. She never badgered him, or intruded upon his privacy. She left him the space to have his own secret maneuvers, and he was always maneuvering. Even while he was living with Antonina, he dreamt of returning to France.
1936 Babel loses his one great protector when Gorky dies on June 18.
———Nikolai Yezhov (born in Lithuania in 1895) succeeds Yagoda as boss of the Cheka and becomes Stalin’s chief executioner.
1937 Antonina and Babel have a daughter, Lydia, born in January; though still married to Zhenya, Babel will welcome Antonina as his second “wife.”
1938 Yezhov is replaced by Lavrenti Beria, a thug from Stalin’s native Georgia, who would kidnap fourteen-year-old girls and keep them on his private train.
1939 Beria has Yezhov hurled into the Lubyanka, and it’s while being tortured that Yezhov implicates Babel in a plot to murder Stalin.
———Babel is arrested on May 15, a few days after Yezhov’s “confession.” The Cheka seizes all his manuscripts and seals them inside the Lubyanka.
1940 Stalin has him shot in the early morning of January 27, and thus begins one of the modern mysteries of Russian literature: Babel’s death. No one but Stalin and the Cheka knew the details.
1944 Stalin is a bit bewildered. He can’t be seen as the butcher of Isaac Babel, a zhid who might become a martyr in the West. After the war he sends his own spies to France, men and women who bump into Zhenya on the street, insist that Babel is still alive. Stalin didn’t have to be quite so tender with Antonina, who was stuck in Moscow. He simply had the Cheka send her reports that Babel was in a labor camp, playing chess with the commandant. . . .
1953 The Boss has forgotten about Babel. He’s becoming more and more paranoid. He keeps arresting Jews, and is planning to send them all to Siberia. But his madness wasn’t confined to Jews. He’d gotten rid of his favorite bodyguard, and prepared to pounce on the whole Politburo. And then his poisoners poisoned him. He lay in his own piss for thirteen hours and not a doctor was called. Members of the Politburo came and went: Comrade Stalin, the great dictator, died like a dog.
1954 Babel’s rehabilitation begins. He goes from being a nonperson to a possible person. A death certificate is produced, with a fanciful date—March 17, 1941— composed by the Cheka, without the slightest indication of how or where he had died. It was the usual Soviet dance: a little noise and a lot
of lies . . .
1957 Zhenya Gronfein, Babel’s “lost” wife, dies in Paris on May 17. She was, as her daughter suggests, a stateless person, a woman without a country who created her own little country of art. (Babel also lived in that little country—with and without his bride—and he would never recapture the creative fever he had with Zhenya in 1922, when they shared a mountain with bandits in Batum.)
1961 Babel’s daughter Nathalie arrives in New York with a single suitcase, a winter coat on her arm, “and twenty dollars in my purse.” She’s almost as much of a picaro as Babel himself. She will become his most loyal editor in America and write a pair of feisty essays about him that read like a fierce dialogue with the master. In some magical way, Babel remains with us while Nathalie is alive. (One of my greatest pleasures in writing this book was to meet Nathalie in Washington, D.C., to discover Babel’s own perplexities in his daughter’s face.)
ISAAC BABEL AT HIS HORSE FARM IN MOLDONEVO, 1930
Chapter One
THE HEADLESS MAN
1.
KONSTANTIN PAUSTOVSKY (1892–1968), one of the rare Soviet writers who survived Stalin’s purges, Stalin’s Red Death, met Babel in 1921, right after the publication of “Korol” (“The King”) in The Sailor, an Odessa magazine. It was the first of Babel’s Benya Krik stories, devoted to the Jewish gangsters of the Moldavanka, with their “Breughel-like bulk and brawn.” “The King” created quite a stir in Odessa. Paustovsky, who lived there at the time, found himself among the Babel worshipers: “Ever since my schooldays the work of certain writers had seemed to me a form of magic. When I read ‘The King’ I realized that a new magician had joined the ranks.”
Paustovsky knew nothing of Babel’s ambience, or the aromas of Benya Krik. “The characters, their motives, their circumstances and their vivid, forceful talk—all were strange to us.” Yet suddenly he was an expert on the Moldavanka, with its “population of two thousand bandits and thieves,” as if Odessa were another Baghdad, with its own Ali Baba. Paustovsky wasn’t even conscious of how Babel had reinvented Odessa for him, fabulated a world of banditry. He’d fallen under the magician’s spell.
Babel’s reputation had arrived in Odessa even before “The King.” He was Gorky’s protégé, just back from the Red Cavalry campaigns, “and shared in their legend,” like some wild horseman of the imagination who rode with the Cossacks. But “The King” had given him local color, fixed him forever as the native son who was himself some kind of king, a king with acolytes. “Swarming round him like midges were the ‘Odessa literary boys’ [literaturnye malchiki]. They caught his jokes in midair, flew around the town with them, and ran his countless errands without complaining.”
Meanwhile Babel talked and talked to Paustovsky—about love, art, his life among gangsters in the Moldavanka; about Guy de Maupassant. “He went on to tell us of his visit to Maupassant’s last flat in Paris—the sun-warmed frilly pink lampshades, like the underclothes of expensive courtesans, the smell of brilliantine and coffee, and the vast rooms which frightened the sick author, who for years had schooled himself” on Maupassant.
“Babel recalled with delight the Paris he had known. He had an excellent French accent.” But the accent hadn’t come from any visit to Maupassant’s rooms. It had come from a certain Monsieur Vadon, Babel’s French teacher at the Nicholas I Commercial School, who instilled in a dreamy, nervous, nearsighted boy a lifelong love of France. And perhaps the image of lampshades like a courtesan’s underpants had come from Vadon himself. Babel may have cavorted with the Red Cavalry, but he’d never been to Paris. . . .
2.
HE SUFFERED FROM mytholepsy, the maddening need to narratize oneself. It would plague him continually, so that it was impossible to tell where the myth of Babel ended and where Babel began. Like many Odessans, he loved to tell a tall tale. In 1924, as his fame grew and grew—the local hero was now the lion of Moscow—he published a terse, two-page Avtobiographiya peppered with half-truths, mystifications, and outright lies.
“I was born in 1894 in Odessa in the Moldavanka district,” Babel begins, neglecting to remind us that his family moved to Nikolaev, a little seaport eighty miles from Odessa, when he was still an infant, and that he didn’t grow up in the Moldavanka, among gangsters and horse carters who could split a man’s skull with their hands. Babel’s childhood was decidedly middle-class. He wasn’t the son of a shopkeeper, as he would have us believe. His father sold agricultural machinery and was rich enough to afford a garden, a dovecote for young Isaac, and a yard that could double during winters as an ice-skating rink.
Next he describes his own Herculean tasks as a student. “My father insisted that I study Hebrew, the Bible, and the Talmud until I was sixteen. My life at home was hard because from morning to night they forced me to study a great many subjects. I rested at school,” he says in marvelous hyperbole, a sign of his best fiction. Who else but Isaac Babel could have rested at school?
He describes his stay at the commercial school, which he entered in 1906, when his family moved back to Odessa, settling on “one of the prettiest” streets in town. “Between classes we used to go off to the jetty at the port, to Greek coffee houses to play billiards, or to the Moldavanka to drink cheap Bessarabian wine in the taverns,” like some young Benya Krik preparing for adventure and a life of crime. But Lev Nikulin, his classmate at Nicholas I, who would become a lifelong friend, remembers a much different Babel, a shy, bespectacled boy in a battered cap.
Babel paints a more “truthful” picture in one of his stories (“In the Basement”), where he says: “I was an untruthful little boy. It was because of my reading: my imagination was always working overtime. . . . My nose buried in a book, I let slide everything that really mattered, such as playing truant in the harbor, learning the art of billiards in the coffeehouses on Greek Street, going swimming at Lageron,” a beach in Odessa.
The Avtobiographiya also mentions Monsieur Vadon, who “like all Frenchmen, possessed a literary gift. . . . At the age of fifteen I began to write stories in French. I gave this up after two years; my peasant characters and my various reflections as an author turned out to be colorless.” He was trying to mimic Maupassant, whose phrases Monsieur Vadon must have lovingly drummed into his head. His obsession with Maupassant would remain with him for life. But why Maupassant, who had a simple, unadorned style that wasn’t the least bit Babelesque? Could it have been the romance of language itself? Babel had discovered French through Guy de Maupassant. And French was the language of Russia’s royal court, woven right into the fabric of War and Peace. How daring it must have seemed for a boy from the provinces, a Jewish boy in a battered cap, who couldn’t get into an official gymnasium despite all the Russian history and Russian verses he’d swallowed, and had to be satisfied with Nicholas I, the haven of halfwits, assorted black sheep, and pariahs like himself. And didn’t he find a language that was much more regal than Russian, a language he hoped to master, like a little Guy de Maupassant?
I suspect that his “stories” in French were pastiches of Maupassant, a kind of revenge on Russia and the gymnasium that would not have him. And finally, when he did start to write in Russian, wasn’t it almost like a “foreign” language for someone who’d heard his parents prattle in Yiddish at home, who would spend the last evenings at his dacha in Peredelkino before his arrest reading Sholom Aleichem in “our highly original tongue” and translating Aleichem’s stories “to feed his soul”? This is not to say that Babel was a Yiddish writer, or that he knew Yiddish more profoundly than Russian, but it was the language of his grandparents as well as the coded tongue of the Moldavanka, which would serve as a separate kingdom to the boy and the writer he became. While his mother and sister went to Belgium, his first wife to France—“Babel clung to Moscow, hotly wed to his truest bride, the Russian language,” says Cynthia Ozick. But an ambiguous bride, whom he would betray with his propaganda pieces for the Red Army and the Soviet Writers Union, and whom he would have to court in silence when
Stalin’s own mammoth propaganda machine began to betray him. But in his best work —Red Cavalry, Odessa Tales, and the stories of his childhood—Babel reaches toward a musical register we would never hear again.
The pyrotechnics that distinguish Babel are part of a metalanguage, the desire to create his own Russian, a lingua with a private glossary and stamp. And his swift, saberlike sentences seem prepared to destroy the very syntax and grammar of traditional Russian. He speaks to us in a voice that grows more and more modern, that ripples right off the edge of our new mad century, where languages can change and multiply overnight, and the ambiguous killing fields of Red Cavalry are suddenly as familiar as the slaughter we find on CNN.
Yet Babel wasn’t being subversive in his little autobiography, modeled on Maxim Gorky. Gorky was one of the barefoot boys— boryaki—who’d risen out of nowhere, without education or ancestors, whose “university” had been the railroad car, the river, and the open road, and who had the popularity of a movie star before there were movie stars, swaying readers with his rough riverman’s prose in which charismatic devils argue with God day after day. He was the number one citizen of the new Soviet state, even if he lived in self-imposed exile, a revolutionary who couldn’t leave his mansion in Sorrento without being mobbed. . . .
But Gorky was in Petersburg in 1916, editing a magazine called Letopis (“The Chronicle”), when Babel met him. “I didn’t have a residence permit, and had to avoid the police, living on Pushkin Street in a cellar rented from a bedraggled, drunken waiter.” But he was far from penniless—his father continued to support him—and he was still going to school (studying law at a psychoneurological institute), which means he had much more “legality” than he was willing to admit. But the neurological institute was just a ruse. He was in Petersburg to prepare himself as a writer and to “breathe” Pushkin and Dostoyevsky and Gogol.
Savage Shorthand Page 3