Short Story Criticism | Red Cavalry, Isaak Babel - Zsuzsa Hetenyi (essay date 1990)

Zsuzsa Hetenyi (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: Hetenyi, Zsuzsa. “‘Up’ and ‘Down’, Madonna and Prostitute: The Role of Ambivalence in Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel.” Acta Litteraria Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 32, nos. 3-4 (1990): 309-26.

[In the following essay, Hetenyi investigates the role of ambivalence as well as the significance of Christian mythology and biblical allusions in the stories of Red Cavalry.]

The stories of Isaac Babel, which he combined into a whole in Red Cavalry, are united by the author's outlook, a coherent world view. The heroes, objects, landscapes and events become constituents of a system in the artistic method that I have called “the creation of a new myth”¹. The chief ingredient of this method is its constant allusions to the Christian myth, a parallelism reinforced at a variety of levels within the work. It is a less conspicuous but equally convincing fact that, in...

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