The Red Cavalry stories are, stylistically speaking, just as varied. There is the “I” of Isaac Babel and the “I” of Kiril Lyutov, the very Russian war correspondent (who might go as far as admitting that his mother is Jewish). “Lyutov” was also the identity that Babel assumed in real life as a way of surviving among the fiercely anti-Semitic Cossacks of the Red Cavalry. There are also other narrators, such as the murderous Cossack Balmashov. When these characters are the narrators, the tone, style, and grammar in the stories begin to go awry. Babel is a master at re-creating the Cossacks’ wild, ungrammatical speech filled with skewed and half-understood Communist doctrine. In “Salt,” for instance, the entire story is narrated in the voice of a Cossack whose ranting jumble ranges from Communist jargon to folk verse:
I want to tell you of some ignorant women who are harmful to us. I set my hopes on you, that you who travel around our nations fronts have not overlooked the far-flung station of Fastov, lying afar beyond the mountains grand, in a distant province of a distant land, where many a jug of home-brewed beer we drank with merriment and cheer.
Babel is one of the few writers who goes out of his way never to repeat himself. Each of his many reports from Petersburg, Georgia, or France is original, almost as if more than one reporter were at work. The two plays sound and feel completely different from each other, and the screenplays are so different from one another in style and presentation—that it is hard to believe (even for the translator who has pored over every word and comma) that they were written by the same writer.
I have found in translating other authors, such as Anton Chekhov and Thomas Mann, that after a few stories I was steering toward a Chekhovian or Mannian style I felt worked in English. Not so with Babel. Each of the 147 texts in this volume, from the shortest story to the longest play, had to be treated on its own terms. Babel is not only one of the greatest storytellers of European literature, but also one of its greatest stylists.
Peter Constantine New York March 2001
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The purpose of this volume is to present in one edition everything known to have been written by Isaac Babel. In this light, we call the volume Complete Works, even though this term may not include all of Babels literary heritage, since his files of manuscripts were seized by the police upon his arrest. But as there is little hope that any of that material survives or can be recovered, we use the word “complete.”
The realization of this volume has been a long-term dream and struggle. The struggle has been made easier by my good fortune in working with Peter Constantine, who took it upon himself to translate anew all available original manuscripts and the first publications in Russian—a long and arduous task. As this is the first time that a single person has translated all of Babels work into English, this volume has a unique coherence and consistency that I believe is true to Babels voice in Russian. Peter was not only meticulous in his choice of words and phrasing, but also in his research in order to clarify the text and provide notes where necessary. He also was of great help to me in organizing and editing this large and unwieldy collection of materials, and in supporting me with frequent practical advice and unflagging enthusiasm.
I approached Gregory Freidin without warning to request that he prepare a biographical and literary chronology of Babels life and works. Gregory s exceptional knowledge allowed us to sort out many conflicting or incomplete items of information. I thank him for his graciousness in completing this task.
Special thanks are also due to Robert Weil, my editor at W. W. Norton, who embraced the challenge of giving new life to Babels work through what he knew would be a difficult project. His editorial advice and his steadfast guidance have earned my heartfelt gratitude. Without the professional perseverance and affectionate encouragement of my friend and literary agent, Jennifer Lyons, this work would not have been completed. I thank her warmly.
When it came to my own contribution, I chose to forego writing a traditional introduction in favor of speaking of the connections between Babel and myself, connections that have not been obvious despite his being my father. No research or scholar could help me there. I had only myself, the blank page, and the past. Enter my friend Christine Galitzine. I cannot hope to acquit my debt merely with thanks, or even the feelings of profound gratitude and affection that I feel for her. As she became more and more interested in this project, she also became more indispensable to my being able to advance it. Through her knowledge of English, French, and Russian, as well as her own literary and administrative gifts, she was able to understand my thoughts and sentiments deeply and to help me render them onto the printed page. Indeed, her involvement in this work led her to make a detour while traveling in France, to visit the town of Niort, which occupies a large place in my life and my recollections. Upon arrival there, she went immediately to the information office to ask whether the old jail still existed. Unfazed, the French lady in charge told her that the jail remained in the same location that it had been for the last three hundred years. Christine came back with photos, brochures, maps, and historic and geographic information—an act which moved me deeply and helped me to confront more peacefully these difficult episodes of my life.
This publication is also the realization of a dream of my husband, Richard Harvey Brown, who for over thirty years has hoped that I would be able to master my memories sufficiently to bring this volume to print. His benevolence and loving support throughout these struggles also should be publicly acknowledged.
I would like to thank Nathalie Babel for offering me this project, and for her constant support and encouragement. I owe particular thanks to my Russian editor, Anneta Greenlee, for her tireless checking of my translation against the Russian original for stylistic nuance. My translation owes much to her specialized knowledge of early-twen-tieth-century Russian language and literature. I am also grateful to Katya Ilina for her help in editing Isaac Babel's 1920 Diary, and for the weeks she spent studying the many editions of Babel works, checking for editorial variations and instances of Soviet censorship.
I am also indebted to my editor at Norton, Robert Weil, for his insightful and knowledgeable editing and particularly for his expertise in American and European Jewish literature. I am also grateful to Jason Baskin and Nomi Victor, editors at Norton, and to David Cole for copyediting the manuscript.
I am indebted to Professor Gregory Freidin for his help and advice, and for his specialized knowledge of Isaac Babels life and works, and to Christine Galitzine for her knowledge of pre-Revolutionary Russia.
I am thankful to Peter Glassgold for his initial suggestion that I translate Isaac Babel, and for his helpful editorial advice. I am thankful also to my agent, Jessica Wainwright, for her encouragement and constant support as I worked on the translation. I also wish to thank Jennifer Lyons, the agent of the Babel estate, for her help and input.
I am deeply indebted to the resources of the New York Public Library, where I did all my research and annotation. I owe special gratitude to Edward Kasinec, curator of the Slavic and Baltic Division, for his erudite advice and for the many times he personally located materials for me that were hidden in obscure Soviet publications of the 1920s and 1930s. I am also grateful to Tanya Gizdavcic, librarian of the Slavic and Baltic Division, for her help in locating material, and to Serge Gleboff, Robert Davis, Lev Chaban, and Hee-Gwone Yoo for their help and advice.
I would like to thank Paul Glasser at YIVO for his helpful explanations of Yiddish expressions. I would also like to express my appreciation to Karina Vamling from the Linguistics Department of the University of Lund, Sweden, for her explanations of Georgian expressions in Isaac Babels texts and the information she provided on aspects of Georgian and Caucasian politics that Babel referred to, and to Peter Gasiorowski of the University of Poznan, Poland, for his linguistic advice on expressions used in the 1920 Diary. I am also grateful to Thomas Fiddick for his help—I benefited greatly from his books and articles on the Russian-Polish war of 1920. I am thankful as
well to Patricia Herlihy for her encouragement: I found her book Odessa: A History, 1794-1914 a great help in putting early-twentieth-century Odessa—the Odessa of Babels early years—into perspective. I found the extensive annotations in the German translation of the 1920 Diary by Peter Urban very helpful, as I did the scholarly and bibliographical work on Babel by Efraim Sicher.
My very special thanks to Burton Pike, who inspired, helped, and advised me throughout the project.
Peter Constantine
EARLY STORIES
When the twenty-one-year-old Isaac Babel arrived in St. Petersburg in 1916, he found the city in mid but stimulating upheaval It was still the capital of Russia and the center of Russian literature and art, where the foremost writers of the day lived and published. But the city was shaken by World War I. The Imperial government was losing control, and calls for change; which were to lead to the Revolution and Civil War, were in the air. Perhaps most important for a young writer was that the Czarist censorship was crumbling, which meant that daring new subjects could be treated in new ways, a characteristic that was to stay with Babel throughout his writing career. His first published story, “Old Shloyme” (1913), dealt with the subversive subject of Jews forced by officially sanctioned anti-Semitism to renounce their religion. In the story, a young Jew gives in to the pressure to Russianize himself, “to leave his people for a new God,” while the old Jew, though never interested in religion or tradition, cannot bring himself to give them up. In the subsequent stories, Babel touches on other taboo subjects: Jewish men mixing with Christian women, prostitution, teenage pregnancy, and abortion.
These early stories also reveal Babel’s growing interest in using language in new and unusual ways. He has a young woman offer herself to her lover; “and the lanky fellow wallowed in businesslike bliss.” Odessa matrons, “plump with idleness and naively corseted are passionately squeezed behind bushes by fervent students of medicine or law” Babel describes the Czarina as cca small woman with a tightly powdered face; a consummate schemer with an indefatigable passion for power” In a forest scene, “green leaves bent toward one another, caressed each other with their flat hands” We also see the recurring motifs of sun and sunset, which are to play an important role in Babel’s later writing.
Babel’s piquant brand of realism soon caught the eye of Maxim Gorky, who was to be the single most influential literary figure in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, and who was particularly instrumental in helping young Soviet writers. Gorky published BabeVs stories “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna”and “Mama, Rimma, and Alla”in 1916 in his literary magazine Letopis, which marked the beginning of Gorky’s mentoring of Babel’s career This mentoring was to last until Gorky’s death exactly twenty years later.
OLD SHLOYME
Although our town is small, its inhabitants few in number, and y [ although Shloyme had not left this town once in sixty years, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who was able to tell you exactly who Shloyme was or what he was all about. The reason for this, plain and simple, is that he was forgotten, the way you forget an unnecessary thing that doesn’t jump out and grab you. Old Shloyme was precisely that kind of thing. He was eighty-six years old. His eyes were watery. His face—his small, dirty, wrinkled face—was overgrown with a yellowish beard that had never been combed, and his head was covered with a thick, tangled mane. Shloyme almost never washed, seldom changed his clothes, and gave off a foul stench. His son and daughter-in-law, with whom he lived, had stopped bothering about him—they kept him in a warm corner and forgot about him. His warm corner and his food were all that Shloyme had left, and it seemed that this was all he needed. For him, warming his old broken bones and eating a nice, fat, juicy piece of meat were the purest bliss. He was the first to come to the table, and greedily watched every bite with unflinching eyes, convulsively cramming food into his mouth with his long bony fingers, and he ate, ate, ate till they refused to give him any more, even a tiny little piece. Watching Shloyme eat was disgusting: his whole puny body quivered, his fingers covered with grease, his face so pitiful, filled with the dread that someone might harm him, that he might be forgotten. Sometimes his daughter-in-law would play a little trick on Shloyme. She would serve the food, and then act as if she had overlooked him.
The old man would begin to get agitated, look around helplessly, and try to smile with his twisted, toothless mouth. He wanted to show that food was not important to him, that he could perfectly well make do without it, but there was so much pleading in the depths of his eyes, in the crease of his mouth, in his outstretched, imploring arms, and his smile, wrenched with such difficulty, was so pitiful, that all jokes were dropped, and Shloyme received his portion.
And thus he lived in his corner—he ate and slept, and in the summer he also lay baking in the sun. It seemed that he had long ago lost all ability to comprehend anything. Neither his sons business nor household matters interested him. He looked blankly at everything that took place around him, and the only fear that would flutter up in him was that his grandson might catch on that he had hidden a dried-up piece of honey cake under his pillow. Nobody ever spoke to Shloyme, asked his advice about anything, or asked him for help. And Shloyme was quite happy, until one day his son came over to him after dinner and shouted loudly into his ear, “Papa, they re going to evict us from here! Are you listening? Evict us, kick us out!” His sons voice was shaking, his face twisted as if he were in pain. Shloyme slowly raised his faded eyes, looked around, vaguely comprehending something, wrapped himself tighter in his greasy frock coat, didn’t say a word, and shuffled off to sleep.
From that day on Shloyme began noticing that something strange was going on in the house. His son was crestfallen, wasn’t taking care of his business, and at times would burst into tears and look furtively at his chewing father. His grandson stopped going to high school. His daughter-in-law yelled shrilly, wrung her hands, pressed her son close to her, and cried bitterly and profusely.
Shloyme now had an occupation, he watched and tried to comprehend. Muffled thoughts stirred in his long-torpid brain. “They’re being kicked out of here!” Shloyme knew why they were being kicked out. “But Shloyme cant leave! He’s eighty-six years old! He wants to stay warm! Its cold outside, damp. ... No! Shloyme isn’t going anywhere! He has nowhere to go, nowhere!” Shloyme hid in his corner and wanted to clasp the rickety wooden bed in his arms, caress the stove, the sweet, warm stove that was as old as he was. “He grew up here, spent his poor, bleak life here, and wants his old bones to be buried in the small local cemetery!” At moments when such thoughts came to him, Shloyme became unnaturally animated, walked up to his son, wanted to talk to him with passion and at great length, to give him advice on a couple of things, but... it had been such a long time since he had spoken to anyone, or given anyone advice. And the words froze in his toothless mouth, his raised arm dropped weakly. Shloyme, all huddled up as if ashamed at his outburst, sullenly went back to his corner and listened to what his son was saying to his daughter-in-law. His hearing was bad, but with fear and dread he sensed something terrifying. At such moments his son felt the heavy crazed look of the old man, who was being driven insane, focused on him. The old mans two small eyes with their accursed probing, seemed incessantly to sense something, to question something. On one occasion words were said too loudly—it had slipped the daughter-in-laws mind that Shloyme was still alive. And right after her words were spoken, there was a quiet, almost smothered wail. It was old Shloyme. With tottering steps, dirty and disheveled, he slowly hobbled over to his son, grabbed his hands, caressed them, kissed them, and, not taking his inflamed eyes off his son, shook his head several times, and for the first time in many, many years, tears flowed from his eyes. He didn’t say anything. With difficulty he got up from his knees, his bony hand wiping away the tears; for some reason he shook the dust off his frock coat and shuffled back to his corner, to where the warm stove stood. Shloyme wanted to warm himself. He felt cold.
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From that time on, Shloyme thought of nothing else. He knew one thing for certain: his son wanted to leave his people for a new God. The old, forgotten faith was kindled within him. Shloyme had never been religious, had rarely ever prayed, and in his younger days had even had the reputation of being godless. But to leave, to leave ones God completely and forever, the God of an oppressed and suffering people—that he could not understand. Thoughts rolled heavily inside his head, he comprehended things with difficulty, but these words remained unchanged, hard, and terrible before him: “This mustn’t happen, it mustn’t!” And when Shloyme realized that disaster was inevitable, that his son couldn’t hold out, he said to himself, “Shloyme, old Shloyme! What are you going to do now?” The old man looked around helplessly, mournfully puckered his lips like a child, and wanted to burst into the bitter tears of an old man. But there were no relieving tears. And then, at the moment his heart began aching, when his mind grasped the boundlessness of the disaster, it was then that Shloyme looked at his warm corner one last time and decided that no one was going to kick him out of here, they would never kick him out. “They will not let old Shloyme eat the dried-up piece of honey cake lying under his pillow! So what! Shloyme will tell God how he was wronged! After all, there is a God, God will take him in!” Shloyme was sure of this.
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Page 3