The Red Cavalry - Babel

By Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel was a Soviet journalist and writer of Jewish origin, known for his extraordinary short stories, comparable to the best works of Gogol and Maupassant, whom he admired as masters. "Red Cavalry," published in 1926, is his most famous collection of stories, based on Babel's experiences during the Russo-Polish campaign of 1920, where he served in the Budieni Cavalry. All the stories in "Red Cavalry" are imbued with the author's frankness, turbulence, unrestrained tone, anguish, and explosive voice, developing from events he experienced during the war. The author's own life met a tragic end, as despite being an idealistic advocate of Marxism and Leninism, he was arrested, tortured, and executed during Stalin's Great Purge. "Red Cavalry" is a work of vibrant rawness and reality, offering an emotionally gripping read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lebooks Editora
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9786558942870

Book preview

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Isaac Babel

THE RED CAVALRY

First Edition

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE RED CAVALRY

Crossing the River Zbrucz

The Church In Novograd

A Letter

The Reserve Cavalry Commander

Pan Apolek

Italian Sun

Gedali

My First Goose

The Rabbi

The Road To Brody

The Tachanka Theory

Dolgushov’s Death

The Commander of the Second Brigade

Sashka Christ

The Life of Matvey Rodionovich Pavlichenko

The Cemetery in Kozin

Prishchepa

The Story of a Horse

Konkin

Berestechko

Salt

Evening

Afonka Bida

At Saint Valentine’s

Squadron Commander Trunov

Ivan and Ivan

The Continuation of the Story of a Horse

The Widow

Zamosc

Treason

Czesniki

After the Battle

The Song

The Rabbi’s Son

INTRODUCTION

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Isaac Babel

1894 - 1940

Isaac Babel was born in Odessa, a city where Jews could enjoy certain freedom and security, the son of a family that had fled anti-Semitic pogroms in lands dominated by the Cossacks. Yet he, in his youth, would clandestinely fight alongside the Red Cossacks! 

In his adolescence, Babel entered Trade School. In addition to regular subjects, he studied theology and music. Later, he studied Business and Finance, where he met Eugenia Gronfein, his future wife. At that time, they were both Marxists."

In 1915, Babel moved to Russia's cultural center, Petrograd, where he met Maxim Gorky. They became friends, and Gorky published some of his stories in the magazine he directed; he also guided the aspiring writer to seek more real-life experience. And he sought it! Years later, Babel wrote in his autobiography: The person I love and admire the most is Gorky.

Although recognized as one of the brightest representatives of literary journalism of the generation born in the 1880s, Babel saw his fiction work greatly affected by the vicissitudes of life. His literary peak occurred in the 1920s, first with the publication in 1920 of the War Diaries, which later led to the classic Red Cavalry of 1926. M. Berman pointed out that one of the central themes of the book is the idea that, to be himself, the hero must learn not only to confront but somehow internalize his antithesis, since both the self and its antithesis revolve around violence. If the author's ego is a rational intellectual, with a natural tendency towards melancholy and introspection, his antithesis is that of an animalistic, primitive, and cruel man without reflection.

When Babel's character joins Budenny's Army in Red Cavalry, the bespectacled hero is despised by the Cossacks and must commit some cruelty to be accepted, preferably against a woman. He accepts the challenge in My First Goose. But when he fails in a fight because he forgot to load his pistol, a superior beats him, and he pleads to God for competence to kill his fellow man. Few artists knew how to treat fragments of reality as real and complete as Babel's genius did. Many of his stories in Red Cavalry are developments of events experienced in the war.

In all the stories, there is frankness, turbulence, an unstoppable tone, anguish, and explosiveness in the author's voice. Vladimir Mayakovsky, his admirer, published several of these stories in the Leftist Review. It is true that the brutal description of the reality of war earned him enemies, like Budenny from the party bureaucracy. However, Gorky's influence ensured its publication, and abroad, the book was a bestseller, translated into more than fifteen languages. A Marxist-Leninist from his youth, Babel served as a volunteer in the Great War and then participated in the 1917 battles to establish socialism. He led the Red resistance in the city of Petrograd when it was surrounded by White and Polish forces, and the Soviet Government had moved to Moscow."

He also participated in confiscation expeditions in the countryside to bring grain to the hungry populations of the cities. When he joined the only group of Cossacks that remained in the Red Army during the Civil War, Budenny's Red Cavalry, he did so under a false identity provided by the Communist Party to avoid being identified as a Jew and to avoid Cossack anti-Semitism. 

The cavalry campaign passed through Galicia, one of the most educated Jewish communities in Europe at that time. In cities like Chernobyl, Kovel, Brody, and in Galicia itself, mass murders, intentional fires, rapes, torture, and the killing of more than one hundred thousand Jews occurred, mainly at the hands of the White and Polish Armies. However, atrocities were also committed by the Red Cossacks, narrated by Babel. One of Babel's characters says: This is not a Marxist revolution, it is a Cossack uprising.

And yet: I feel great sadness for the future of the Revolution... We are the vanguard, but of what? Why can't I overcome my sadness? Because I am far from my family, because we are destroyers, because we advance like a hurricane, like a tongue of lava, hated by all, life is crumbling, I am on an immense, endless campaign to revive the dead.

About the Work

In late May 1920 the First Cavalry of the Soviet Red Army, under the command of General Budyonny, rode into Volhynia, today the border region of western Ukraine and eastern Poland. The Russian-Polish campaign was under way, the new Soviet government’s first foreign offensive, which was viewed back in Moscow as the first step toward spreading the doctrines of World Revolution to Poland\ then to Europe; then to the world.

Babel chronicled this campaign in his Red Cavalry stories, later to become the most well-known and enduring of his literary legacy. These loosely linked stories take the reader from the initial triumphant assault against the Polish masters to the campaigns of the summer of 1920\ and the increasingly bitter defeats that led to the wild retreat of the cavalry in the autumn. Babel blends fiction and fact, creating a powerful effect that is particularly poignant in his rendering of the atrocities of war. The stories were published in magazines and newspapers between 1923 and 1926; the reading public was torn between delight at Babel’s potent new literary voice and horror at the brutality portrayed in the stories. In 1926, thirty-four of the stories were included in the book Konarmia (translated into English as Red Cavalry), which quickly went into eight editions and was translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. It immediately turned Babel into an international literary figure and made him into one of the Soviet Union’s foremost writers.

The stories, as Babel himself repeatedly stressed, were fiction set against a real backdrop. Literary effect was more important to Babel than historical fact. Babel might also have felt more comfortable reconfiguring military strategy that might still have been classified when the stories began appearing in newspapers and magazines in the first years after the war. Novograd-Volynsk for instance, the town in the first story, lies on the river Slucz, not on the Zbrucz as the story indicates. (The Zbrucz runs along the western frontier of Volhynia, along the former border between the kingdom of Poland and Russia.) Also, Novograd-Volynsk was not occupied by the Red Cavalry, but by the Soviet 14th Army. As the historian Norman Davies has pointed out, a high road from Warsaw to Brest had been built by serfs under Nicholas I, but it lay two hundred miles beyond the front at Novograd-Volynsk, and so could not have been cluttered by the rearguard.

One of Babel’s strategies for creating a sharper feeling of reality in his stories was to mix real people with fictional characters. This was to have serious repercussions. General Budyonny, for instance, the real-life commander of the cavalry, often comes across in the stories as brutal, awkward, and irresolute. Babel makes fun of his oafish and uneducated Cossack speech. In the story Czesniki, Budyonny is asked to give his men a speech before battle: Budyonny shuddered, and said in a quiet voice, ‘Men! Our situations . . . well, it’s . . . bad. A bit more liveliness, men!’

Babel had, of course, no way of knowing that General Budyonny was to become a Marshal of the Soviet Union, First Deputy Commissar for Defense, and later Hero of the Soviet Union. Another real character in the stories, Voroshilov, the military commissar, also does not always come across particularly well. The implication in Czesniki is that Voroshilov overrode the other commanders’ orders, resulting in an overhasty attack that led to defeat. Voroshilov happened to be a personal friend of Stalin; he had become the People’s Commissar of Defense by the time the Red Cavalry collection was in prints and was destined to become Head of State. These were dangerous men to cross.

In these stories Babel uses different narrators, such as Lyutov, the young intellectual journalist, hiding his Jewishness and struggling to fit in with the Cossacks, and Balmashov, the murderous, bloodthirsty Cossack.

The Soviet Union wanted to forget this disastrous campaign, its first venture at bringing Communism to the world. Babels Red Cavalry stories, however, kept the fiasco in the public eye, both in the Soviet Union and abroad, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and ever since.

THE RED CAVALRY

Crossing the River Zbrucz

The commander of the Sixth Division reported that Novograd Volynsk was taken at dawn today. The staff is now withdrawing from Krapivno and our cavalry transport stretches in a noisy rear guard along the high road that goes from Brest to Warsaw, a high road built on the bones of muzhiks by Czar Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies are blossoming around us, a noon breeze is frolicking in the yellowing rye, virginal buckwheat is standing on the horizon like the wall of a faraway monastery. Silent Volhynia is turning away, Volhynia is leaving, heading into the pearly white fog of the birch groves, creeping through the flowery hillocks and with weakened arms entangling itself in the underbrush of hops. The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill. The blackened Zbrucz roars and twists the foaming knots of its rapids. The bridges are destroyed and we wade across the river. The majestic moon lies on the waves. The water comes up to the horses’ backs, purling streams trickle between hundreds of horses’ legs. Someone sinks and loudly curses the Mother of God. The river is littered with the black squares of the carts and filled with humming, whistling and singing that thunders above the glistening hollows and the snaking moon.

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. In the quarters to which I am assigned I find a pregnant woman and two red-haired Jews with thin necks and a third Jew who is sleeping with his face to the wall and a blanket pulled over his head. In my room I find ransacked closets, torn pieces of women’s fur coats on the floor, human excrement and fragments of the holy Seder plate that the Jews use once a year for Passover.

Clean up this mess! I tell the woman. How can you live like this?

The two Jews get up from their chairs. They hop around on their felt soles and pick up the broken pieces of porcelain from the floor. They hop around in silence, like monkeys, like Japanese acrobats in a circus, their necks swelling and twisting. They spread a ripped eiderdown on the floor for me and I lie down by the wall, next to the third, sleeping Jew. Timorous poverty descends over my bed.

Everything has been killed by the silence and only the moon, clasping its round, shining, carefree head in its blue hands, loiters beneath my window.

I rub my numb feet, lie back on the ripped eiderdown and fall asleep. I dream about the commander of the Sixth Division. He is chasing the brigade commander on his heavy stallion and shoots two bullets into his eyes. The bullets pierce the brigade commander s head and his eyes fall to the ground. Why did you turn back the brigade? Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, shouts at the wounded man and I wake up because the pregnant woman is tapping me on the face.

Pan* she says to me, you are shouting in your sleep and tossing and turning. HI put your bed in another corner, because you are kicking my papa.

She raises her thin legs and round belly from the floor and pulls the blanket off the sleeping man. An old man is lying there on his back, dead. His gullet has been ripped out, his face hacked in two and dark blood is clinging to his beard like a clump of lead.

Pan the Jewess says, shaking out the eiderdown, the Poles were hacking him to death and he kept begging them, ‘Kill me in the backyard so my daughter wont see me die!’ But they wouldn’t inconvenience themselves. He died in this room, thinking of me... And now I want you to tell me, the