Short Story Criticism | Red Cavalry, Isaak Babel - David A. Lowe (essay date spring 1982)

David A. Lowe (essay date spring 1982)

SOURCE: Lowe, David A. “A Generic Approach to Babel's Red Cavalry.” Modern Fiction Studies 28, no. 1 (spring 1982): 69-78.

[In the following essay, Lowe explores links between Red Cavalry and the Renaissance novella.]

One would have to search far and wide for a work more emblematic of twentieth-century literary concerns and techniques than Isaak Babel's Red Cavalry (Konarmija, 1926). The narrator, a revolutionary and an outsider, seeks meaning, purpose, and self-knowledge in a world torn apart by violent upheaval. Adrift in a primordial Darwinian maelstrom, Ljutov has only esthetic irony to rely on as an instrument of cognition. His metaphysics turn on cultural and ethical ambivalence. His insights are evanescent and do not accumulate to form a coherent pattern or system. Significantly, the genre through which Babel explores twentieth-century dilemmas is that of the...

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