Red Cavalry, Isaak Babel - Gareth Williams (essay date April 1984)
Gareth Williams (essay date April 1984)
SOURCE: Williams, Gareth. “The Rhetoric of Revolution in Babel's Konarmija.” Russian Literature 15, no. 3 (April 1984): 279-98.
[In the following essay, Williams investigates the influence of revolutionary propaganda and language on the stories of Red Cavalry.]
The Konarmija stories are told against the background of the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-20.1 The military engagements described took place in the period from 3 June 1920 (“Konkin”), when the 1st Cavalry Army broke through the Polish lines at Belaja cerkov', to 31 August 1920 (“Zamost'e”), when the Konarmija were caught in the “Zamość ring”.2 However, “Konkin” and “Zamost'e” are not the first and last stories respectively. Babel' seems to have had no interest in describing the campaign of the 1st Cavalry Army as a sequence of historical events. Although the stories form a...
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