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Isaak Babel (1894-1941) - born on July 1; New Style: July 13, 1894 |
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Short story writer and playwright who was a correspondent of the Red Army forces of Semyon Budyonny during the Russian civil war. Isaak Babel's fame is based on his stories of the Jews in Odessa and his novel Red Cavalry (1926). He was the first major Russian Jewish writer to write in Russian. I trampled him for an hour or more than an hour, and during that time I got to know him and his life. Shooting-in my opinion-is just a way of getting rid of a fellow, to shoot him is to pardon him, and a vile compromise with yourself; with shooting you don't get to a man's soul, where it is in him and how it shows itself. But usually I don't spare myself, usually I trample my enemy for an hour or more than an hour, I want to find out about the life, what it's like with us . . . (from Red Cavalry, in Red Cavalry and Other Stories by Isaac Babel, edited with notes by Efraim Sicher, translated with an introduction bt David McDuff, Penguin Books, , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, p. 149) Isaak
Babel was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa, Ukraine.
Most of his early years he spent in the Black Sea port Nikolaev, 90
miles away. At a time when most Jews were forbidden to live in Moscow,
St. Petersburg, Kiev, and other localities, Odessa had many times more
Jews than any other city in the Russian part of the empire. Between
1881 and 1917 two million Jews left Russia, mostly for America, but it
was, as Babel later wrote, "the most charming city of the Russian
Empire. If you think about it, it is a town in which you can live free and
easy." ('Odessa', in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel, translated with notes by Peter Constable, introduction by Cynthia Ozick, W. W. Norton, 2002, p. 75) Babel's childhood was relatively comfortable, though he witnessed pogroms in Southern Russia in 1905. However, his family was untouched. His father was a successful businessman who installed his family in one of the best streets in Odessa. Babel studied violin, German, French, and Talmud at the Nicholas I Commercial Institute (1905-11) and wrote stories at the age of fifteen in imitation of Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert. In 1915 Babel graduated from Kiev University, which had been evacuated to Saratov on the Volga because of the war. After graduating Babel moved to St. Petersburg, where he
studied literature. In that capital city "traitors, malcontents,
whiners, and Jews" were banned and Babel had to use an apocryphal
passport. Two of Babel's stories were published in 1916 in Letopis,
a
monthly edited by Maksim Gorky, his literary
hero. One described an abortion, in the other an Odessa Jew spends the
night
with a prostitute to evade the police. These pieces were indicated as
obscene, but the courthouse was burned down by revolutionaries, and the
records were destroyed. Although Babel
himself had been untouched during the pogroms that spread throughout
Russia in 1905, he saw in rising revolutionary movements a promise of
freedom, and end of all persecution. Babel's satires attracted the
attention of the government. The short story 'V shchelochu' (The
Bathroom Window) got him charged with pornography in 1917 but due to
the political turmoil there never was a trial. The reworked version,
published in 1923 with the subtitle "From the Book Oforty", contained a
scene of voyerism. On Gorky's advice Babel decided to see the world and learn about life. He participated briefly in the war on the Romanian front. He was injured and after discharge Babel joined the staff of Gorky's newspaper Novaya Zhizn. During the Revolution he worked probably as a clerk for the Commissariat of Education and for the CheKa, the Soviet Secret Police. In 1919, Babel married Eugenia Gronfein and joined the
Ukrainian State Publishing House (1919-20). He was assigned then as a
journalist to Field Marshall Budyonny's First Cavalry army, witnessing
its unsuccessful Polish campaign to carry Communist revolution outside
Russia. The Reds penetrated almost to Warsaw but were driven back. "We pull out of Komarow," Babel wrote in Konarmeyskiy Dnevnik 1920 Goda (1920 Diary), from which he drew material for Red Cavalry.
"During the night our men looted, in the synagogue they threw away the
Torah scrolls and took the velvet coverings for their saddles. . . .
The Jews smile obsequiously. That is religion." ('August 29, 1920. Komarow, Labunye, Pnevsk', 1920 Diary, in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, p. 458) A full
edited version of the diary was published in 1990 in Babel's collected
works. When Merian Caldwell Cooper, the future producer of the motion picture King Kong, was captured by Cossacks behind the lines in Galicia, he was interrogated by Babel in July 1920. "A shot-down American pilot, barefoot but elegant, neck like a column, dazzlingly white teeth, his uniform covered with oil and dirt," Babel recorded. "He asks me worriedly: Did I maybe commit a crime by fighting against Soviet Russia? Our position is strong. O the scent of Europe, coffee, civilization, strength, ancient culture, many thoughts, I watch him, can't let him go." (Ibid., p. 393) Eventually Cooper escaped to Riga, without his boots, with which he bribed the guards at the border. The Collected Works of Isaac Babel fills only two small volumes. Comparing Tolstoy's Works to Babel's is like comparing a long road to a pocket watch. Babel's best-loved works all fit in the first volume: the Odessa, Childhood, and Petersburg cycles; Red Cavalry; and the 1920s diary, on which Red Cavalry is based. (in The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, p. 27) While in Odessa Babel began to write a series of stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka, where he was born. Tales of Odessa appeared in book form in 1931. It depicted with broad strokes and humor the Jewish underworld, the middlemen, small merchants, brokers, whores, tough Jewish gangsters, saloon keepers, rabbis, and entrepreneurs, on the eve of Revolution. In the center of the colourful caricature of the ghetto is Benia Krik, the king of gangsters. The stories are entitled 'The King', 'How It Was Done in Odessa', 'The Father', and 'Liuba the Cossack', where Benia Krik is absent. In the play Sunset (1928) Babel returned to the Odessa gangster world, but this time the protagonist was Benya's father, Mendel Krik. It did not gain success and also Mariya (1935) was withdrawn from a Moscow theatre. In 1923 Babel started to publish a cycle of tales called Red
Cavalry.
"But in the process of writing, my aim of keeping within the parameters
of historical truth began to shift, and I decided instead to express my
thoughts in literary form. All that remained from my initial outline
were a few authentic surnames." (from 'A Letter to the Editor', in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, p. 362) The basically
a pacifist narrator, who is a Jewish officer, is assigned to a
regiment of traditionally anti-Semitic Cossacs. The joke was, as Jorge
Luis Borges has stated, that "[t]he mere idea of a Jew on horseback
struck them as laughable, and the fact that Babel was a good horseman
only added to their disdain and spite. A couple of well-timed and
flashy exploits enabled Babel to make them leave him in peace." (Selected Non-fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger, Viking, 1999, p. 163) Like Maupassant, Babel often surprises the reader with twists in the plot. In one tale, 'Zamość', the narrator falls asleep and his horse drags him to the front line of the battle. He wakes looking up at a Russian peasant, armed with a rifle. "The Jew is guilty before all men,' he said, 'both our and yours. There will be very few of them left when the war is over. How many Jews are there in the world?'" (from Red Cavalry, in Red Cavalry and Other Storie, p. 206) Out of the chaos of battles, torture and murder Babel creates polyphonic tale of a nation gripped by revolutionary fervor. Some stories are narrated in a stylized form of the Cossacks' own language. Two tales appeared in Mayakovsky's magazine LEF. The work was translated into more than 20 languages, gaining Babel national fame, but it was also attacked by Commander Semyon Budyonny of the First Cavalry, who claimed that its emphasis on brutal acts insulted his troops. Babel was defended by Gorky. Budyonny rose in the Party system, becoming Hero of the Soviet Union and a powerful enemy. From 1923 Babel lived mostly in Moscow. Among his friends was Ilya Ehrenburg who called him "a wise rabbi". Babel often told him that the most important thing is the happiness of people. According to Ehrenburg, he understood the goals of the Revolution and saw it as a guarantee of future happiness. He had an affair with Evgeniya Gladun-Khayutina, the future wife of Nikolai Yezhov, a people's commissar and from 1936 to 1938 the head of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police). It was said, that he visited their home even in the 1930s. Before he was allocated an apartment in Moscow in a house occupied by foreigners, Babel served for a period as the secretary of the village soviet in Molodyonovo.Evgeniya committed suicide in November 1938, Yezhov fell from Stalin's favour and executed in 1940. Babel's first wife, Yevgenia Gronfein, went to Paris in 1925,
for a "temporary" separation; his daughter Natalie was raised in
France. From 1926 on,
his mother and sister lived in Brussels, but
unwilling to abandon his literary home in the Russian language, the
author himself did not leave the Soviet Union, despite numerous
opportunities. Babel visited his wife in Paris and travelled on
journalistic assignments in Ukraine and the Caucasus. He also served as
a secretary of a village soviet in Molodenovo. Between the years 1925
and 1930 he wrote a series of fictionalized accounts of his childhood
and young manhood. In the loosely autobiographical 'Story of My
Dovecote' (1925) he described the fate of a murdered grandfather Shoyl
during the 1905 pogrom in Odessa (at least the hundred of the city's
Jewish residents were killed). The narrator and his parents were saved
by gentile neighbors. Another story, 'Pervaya lyubov' (1925) takes
place in the same day; the narrator wittnesses how his father grovels
before a Cossack officer. Babel's literary reputation was high in the Soviet Union and
abroad in the beginning of the 1930s. He revised his stories for his
collected works that appeared in 1932 and 1936. From the mid-1930s,
Babel avoided publicity under increasing Stalinist persecution. "Today,
a man talks frankly only with his wiife – at night, with the blanked
pulled over his head," he said privately. (A History Of Russia Volume II: Since 1855
by Walter G. Moss, 2005, p. 261) However, Antonina Nikolaevna
Pirozhkova, an young engineer with whom Babel
spent his last years in Moscow, states that he was prolific during that
period. He worked on a new book and film scripts, including Dzhimmi Khiggins (1928), adapted
from Upton Sinclair's novel about an imagined Socialist all-around
activist, and Eisenstein's banned Bezhin
lug (1937, Bezhin
Meadow). Many
of the productions in which Babel
was involved, gained popular success, but were not in line with the
Party's views. Taking a look at the character of Menakhem Mendl
created by Sholem Aleichem, he co-wrote the screenplay for Alexis
Granowsky's film, Evreyskoe schaste
(1925). It was based on the novel The
Adventures of Menachem-Mendl, first published in Warsaw's
Yiddish daily Haynt
(Today) in 1913. Babel also translated some of the Aleichem's works,
but was not very fond of Tevye stories. Antonina Pirozhkova said that
he undertook the work "to feed his soul." ('Imagine
You Are a Tiger: A New Folk Hero in Babel's Odessa Tales', in Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature
by Rachel Rubin, 2000, pp. 36-37) One
of Babel's rare public appearances was his speech in June 1935
at the International Congress for the Defence of Culture (also referred
as the Anti-Fascist Congress) in
Paris. It was organized by anti-Fascist and leftist writers' circles in
France, among them Henri Barbusse, André Gide and André Malraux. Babel
traveled there by train with Boris Pasternak, who was too ill to fly on
a passenger plane. The congress was held at the Palais de la Mutualité. The autobiographical
short story 'Di Grasso' (1937) was the last work to be published in
Babel's lifetime. It depicted his enthusiasm about theatre in his youth
– he has pawned his father's watch with Kolya Schwartz to visit Theatre
Street but Kolya does not return it before his wife gets angry about
it. When Osip Mandelstam
returned from exile to Moscow, Babel prophesied of his own future:
"Silence won't save me. Mark my words—they will come for me soon." (The Stalin Epigram: A Novel by Robert Littell, Simon & Schuster, 2009, p. 311) Stalin's
dislike of Babel's work hung above his head like a sword: ". . . "our"
frivolous Babel . . . keeps writing about things of which he knows
nothing (for example, The Cavalry)," Stalin wrote in a letter to Lazar Kaganovich from Sochi in summer 1932. (The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-36,
compiled and edited by R. W. Davies, Oleg Khlevniuk, E. A. Rees,
Liudmila P. Kosheleva, and Larisa A. Rogovaya, Yale University Press,
2003, p. 124) Babel
was arrested by the NKVD, a precursor of the KGB,
in May 1939, at his cottage in Peredelkino, the writers' colony. It was
Nikolai Yezhov, imprisoned at the Sukhanovka prison, who named Babel as
a spy.
The
secret police confiscated nine folders from his dacha, and fifteen from
the Moscow apatment. Under interrogation and probable torture at
Lubyanka, Babel stated that he had had anti-Soviet conversations with
Yury Olesha and Valentin Katarev, the artist Solomon Mikhoels and the
film directors Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei Eisenstein. He had set
up, according to the interrogator's record, intelligence contacts with
the French writer André Malraux, and passed on information a number of
subjects: "These were: the state of the Air Force; the equipment and
command structure of the Red Army; the Soviet economy; the current
arrests; and the mood of the intelligentsia." ('Babel: lies, confessions and denials' by Vitaly Shentalinsky, Index on Censorship, Volume 20, Issue 8, 1991) Babel's trial was held in Buturka
Prison and on January
27, 1940, he was shot on Stalin's orders for espionage. His body was
dumped in a communal grave. The Soviet officials informed Babel's widow
that her husband died on March 17, 1941, in a prison camp in Siberia. Following Stalin's death and the beginning of the "Thaw" era, Babel's charges were posthumously cleared in 1954. His seized manuscripts have not been recovered. Babel's collected works, based on the 1936 edition but including new materials, were republished in 1957 and 1966. The film version of Babel's play Sakat (1928, Sunset) was made by Alexander Zeldovich in 1990. Leonid Desyatnikov wrote its music; it was his first soundtrack. Desyatnikov's Sketches to Sakat was performed in Berlin in 1996. Antonina Pirozhkova, who devoted her life to his literary legacy, wrote a memoir of the last years of his life; she died in September 2010, at the age of 101. For further reading: The Art of Isaac Babel by Patricia Carden (1972); Isaac Babel by J.E. Falen (1974); Isaac Babel, Russian Master of Short Story by James E. Falen (1974); 'Fat Tuesday in Odessa: Isaac Babel's 'Di Grasso' as Testament and Manifesto' by Gregory Freidin, in The Russian Review 40, no. 2 (April 1981, Reprinted in Isaac Babel, edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom, 1987); Isaac Babel by Milton Ehre (1984); Isaac Babel by Richaed William Hallett (1982); Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry by Carol Luplow (1982); The Field of Honour by Christopher Luck (1987); Procedures of Montage in Isaak Babel's Red Cavalry by Marc Schreurs (1989); 'Isaak Babel' by Gregory Freidin, in European Writers: The Twentieth Century (1990); 'Between the Stalin Revolution and the West: Isaac Babel's Career in the late 1920s and Early 1930s' (in Russian) by Gregory Freidin, in Stanford Slavic Studies 4-2, (1991); '"La 'grande svolta'. L'Occidente e l'Italia nella biografia di I.E. Babel all'inizio degli anni '30' by Gregory Freidin, in Special issue of Storia contemporanea 6 (1991); 'Babel': Revoliutsiia kak esteticheskii fenomen' by Gregory Freidin, in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 4 (1993); 'Justifying the Revolution As an Aesthetic Phenomenon: Nietzschean Motifs in the Reception of Isaac Babel (1923-1932)' by Gregory Freidin, in Nietzsche In Soviet Culture (1994, Russian version: 'Babel': Revoliutsiia kak esteticheskii fenomen'); Red Cavalry: A Critical Companion, edited by Charles Rougle (1996); 'Imagine You Are a Tiger: A New Folk Hero in Babel's Odessa Tales', in Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature by Rachel Rubin (2000); 'Introduction' by Cynthia Ozick, in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel (2001); 'Odessa Stories: Isaac Babel and His City' by Boris Dralyuk, in Odessa Stories, translated by Boris Dralyuk (2016) Selected works:
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