Red Cavalry, Isaak Babel - Stephen Brown (essay date 1996-1997)
Stephen Brown (essay date 1996-1997)
SOURCE: Brown, Stephen. “The Jew among the Cossacks: Isaac Babel and the Red Cavalry in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920.” Slavonica 3, no. 1 (1996-1997): 29-43.
[In the following essay, Brown discusses the autobiographical nature of the stories of Red Cavalry, asserting that “Babel's depiction of a Cossack Red Cavalry should be viewed not as a mere recounting of the facts of the writer's wartime experience but as an integral part of his pessimistic account of war and revolution.”]
For the historian, Isaac Babel's literary masterpiece, Konarmiia, represents an intriguing blend of historical fact, autobiography and literary fantasy. Konarmiia is set amid a strange and nightmarish world of brutal Cossack cavalrymen, plundered Jewish settlements and the failure of the Soviet government's first attempt to bring about the export of communism during the Soviet-Polish War of 1920....
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