The Year of Writing Dangerously

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SOURCE: Ozick, Cynthia. “The Year of Writing Dangerously.” New Republic (8 May 1995): 31-8.

[In the following essay, Ozick investigates autobiographical aspects of the stories in Red Cavalry and elucidates the relationship between the short story collection and his 1920 Diary.]

Identity, at least, is prepared to ask questions.

—Leon Wieseltier

A year or so before the Soviet Union imploded, S.'s mother, my first cousin, whose existence until then had been no more than a distant legend, telephoned from Moscow. “Save my child!” she cried, in immemorial tones. So when S. arrived in New York, I expected a terrified refugee on the run from the intolerable exactions of popular anti-Semitism; at that time the press was filled with such dire reports. For months, preparing for her rescue, I had been hurtling from one agency to another, in search of official information on political asylum.

But when S. finally turned up, in black tights, a miniskirt and the reddest lipstick, it was clear she was indifferent to all that. She didn't want to be saved. What she wanted was an American holiday, a fresh set of boyfriends and a leather coat. She had brought with her a sizable cosmetics case, amply stocked, and a vast, rattling plastic bag stuffed with hundreds of cheap tin Komsomol medals depicting Lenin as a boy. She was scornful of these; they were worthless, she said. She had paid pennies for the lot. Within two weeks S., a natural entrepreneur, had established romantic relations with the handsome young manager of the local sports store and had got him to set up a table at Christmas in his heaviest traffic location. She sold the tin Lenin medals for $3 each, made $300 in a day, and bought the leather coat.

Of course she was a great curiosity. Her English was acutely original, her green eyes gave out ravishing ironic lightnings, her voice was as dark as Garbo's in Ninotchka, and none of us had ever seen an actual Soviet citizen up close before. She thought the telephone was bugged. She thought the supermarket was a public exhibition. Any show of household shoddiness—a lamp, say, that came apart—would elicit from her a comical crow: “Like in Soviet!” She was, emphatically, no atheist: she had an affinity for the occult, believed that God could speak in dreams (she owned a dream book, through which Jesus often walked), adored the churches of old Russia and lamented their destruction by the Bolsheviks. On the subject of current anti-Semitism she was mute; that was her mother's territory. Back in Moscow, her boyfriend, Gennadi, had picked her up in the subway because she was Jewish. He was in a hurry to marry her. “He want get out of Soviet,” she explained.

At home she had been a Sportsdoktor: she traveled with the Soviet teams, roughneck country boys, and daily tested their urine for steroids. (Was this to make sure her athletes were properly dosed?) She announced that everybody hated Gorbachev, only the gullible Americans liked him, he was a joke like all the others. A historically minded friend approached S. with the earnest inquiry of an old-fashioned liberal idealist: “We all know, obviously, about the excesses of Stalinism,” she said, “but what of the beginning? Wasn't Communism a truly beautiful hope at the start?” S. laughed her cynical laugh; she judged my friend profoundly stupid. “Communism,” she scoffed, “what Communism? Naïve! Fairy tale, always! No Communism, never! Naïve!”

And leaving behind five devastated American-as-apple-pie boyfriends (and wearing her leather coat), S. returned to Moscow. She did not marry Gennadi. Her mother emigrated to Israel. The last I heard of S., she was in business in Sakhalin, buying and selling—and passing off as the real thing—ersatz paleolithic mammoth tusks.

Well, it is all over now—the Great Experiment, as the old brave voices used to call it—and S. is both symptom and proof of how thoroughly it is over. She represents the Soviet Union's final heave, its last generation. S. is the consummate New Soviet Man: the unfurled future of its seed. If there is an axiom here, it is that idealism squeezed into utopian channels will generate a cynicism so profound that no inch of human life—not youth, not art, not work, not romance, not introspection—is left untainted. The S. whom I briefly knew trusted nothing. In her world, there was nothing to trust. The primal Communist fairy tale had cast its spell: a baba yaga's birth-curse.

In college I read The Communist Manifesto, a rapture-bringing psalm. I ought to have read Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories, if only as a corrective companion text. Or antidote. “But what of the beginning?” my friend had asked. S. answered better than any historian, but no one will answer more terrifyingly than Isaac Babel. If S. is the last generation of New Soviet Man, Babel is the first, the Manifesto's primordial manifestation.

That Babel favored the fall of the Czarist regime is no anomaly. He was a Jew from Odessa, the child of an enlightened family, hungry for a European education; he was subject to the numerus clausus, the Czarist quota that kept Jews as a class out of the universities, and Babel in particular out of the University of Odessa. As a very young writer, he put himself at risk when, to be near Maxim Gorky, his literary hero, he went to live illegally in St. Petersburg, a city outside the Pale of Settlement (the area to which Jews were restricted). What Jew would not have welcomed the demise of a hostile and obscurantist polity that, as late as 1911, tried Mendel Beiliss in a Russian court on a fantastic blood libel charge, and what Jew in a time of government-sanctioned pogroms would not have turned with relief to forces promising to topple the oppressors? In attaching himself to the Bolshevik cause, Babel may have been more zealous than many, but far from aberrant. If the choice were either Czar or Bolshevism, what Jew could choose Czar? (A third possibility, which scores of thousands sought, was escape to America.) But even if one were determined to throw one's lot in with the Revolution, what Jew would go riding with Cossacks?

In 1920 Isaac Babel went riding with Cossacks. It was the third year of the Civil War, revolutionary Reds versus Czarist Whites; he was 26. Babel was not new to the military. Two years earlier, during the First World War, he had been a volunteer—in the Czar's army—on the Romanian front, where he contracted malaria. In 1919 he fought with the Red Army to secure St. Petersburg against advancing government troops. And in 1920 he joined ROSTA, the Soviet wire service, as a war correspondent for the newspaper Red Cavalryman.

Poland, newly independent, was pressing eastward, hoping to recover its eighteenth-century borders, while the Bolsheviks, moving westward, were furiously promoting the Communist salvation of Polish peasants and workers. The Polish-Soviet War appeared to pit territory against ideology. In reality, territory—or, more precisely, the conquest of impoverished villages and towns and their wretched inhabitants—was all that was at stake for either side. Though the Great War was over, the Allies, motivated by fear of the spread of communism, went to the aid of Poland with equipment and volunteers. (Ultimately the Poles prevailed and the Bolsheviks retreated, between them despoiling whole populations.)

In an era of air battles, Babel was assigned to the First Cavalry Army, a Cossack division led by General Semyon Budyonny. The Cossack image—glinting sabers, pounding hooves—is indelibly fused with Czarist power, but the First Cavalry Army was, perversely, Bolshevik. Stalin was in command of the southern front, the region abutting Poland, and Budyonny was in league with Stalin. Ostensibly, then, Babel found himself among men sympathetic to Marxist doctrine. Yet Red Cossacks were no different from White Cossacks: untamed riders, generally illiterate, boorish and brutish, suspicious of ideas of any kind, attracted only to horseflesh, rabid looting and the quick satisfaction of hunger and lust. “This isn't a Marxist revolution,” Babel privately noted; “it's a rebellion of Cossack wild men.” Polish and Russian cavalrymen clashing in ditches while warplanes streaked overhead was no more incongruous than the raw sight of Isaac Babel—a writer who had already published short stories praised by Gorky—sleeping in mud with Cossacks.

Lionel Trilling, in a highly nuanced (though partially misinformed) landmark introduction to a 1955 edition of The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel (which included the Red Cavalry stories), speaks of “the joke of a Jew who is a member of a Cossack regiment.” A joke, Trilling explains, because

traditionally the Cossack was the feared and hated enemy of the Jew. The principle of his existence stood in total antithesis to the principle of the Jew's existence. The Jew conceived of his own ideal character as intellectual, pacific, humane. The Cossack was physical, violent, without mind or manners … the natural and appropriate instrument of ruthless oppression.

Yet Trilling supplies another, more glamorous, portrait of the Cossack, which he terms Tolstoyan: “He was the man as yet untrammeled by civilization, direct, immediate, fierce. He was the man of enviable simplicity, the man of the body—the man who moved with speed and grace.” In short, “our fantasy of the noble savage.” And he attributes this view to Babel.

As it turns out, Babel's tenure with Budyonny's men was more tangled, and more intricately psychological, than Trilling—for whom the problem was tangled and psychological enough—could have known or surmised. For one thing, Trilling mistakenly believed that Babel's job was that of a supply officer—i.e., that he was actually a member of the regiment. But as a correspondent for a news agency (which meant grinding out propaganda), Babel's position among the troops was from the start defined as an outsider's, Jew or no. He was there as a writer. Worse, in the absence of other sources, Trilling fell into a crucial—and surprisingly naïve—second error: he supposed that the “autobiographical” tales were, in fact, autobiographical.

Babel, Trilling inferred from Babel's stories, “was a Jew of the ghetto” who “when he was 9 years old had seen his father kneeling before a Cossack captain.” He compares this (fictitious) event to Freud's contemplation of his father's “having accepted in a pacific way the insult of having his new fur cap knocked into the mud by a Gentile who shouted at him, ‘Jew, get off the pavement.’” “We might put it,” Trilling concludes, that Babel rode with Budyonny's troops because he had witnessed his father's humiliation by “a Cossack on a horse, who said, ‘At your service,’ and touched his fur cap with his yellow-gloved hand and politely paid no heed to the mob looting the Babel store.”

There was no Babel store. This scene—the captain with the yellow glove, the Jew pleading on his knees while the pogrom rages—is culled from Babel's story “First Love.” But it was reinforced for Trilling by a fragmentary memoir, published in 1924, wherein Babel calls himself “the son of a Jewish shopkeeper.” The truth was that Babel was the son of the class enemy: he came from a well-off family. His father sold agricultural machinery and owned a warehouse in a business section of Odessa where numerous import-export firms were located. In the same memoir Babel records that, since he had no permit allowing him residence in St. Petersburg, he hid out “in a cellar on Pushkin Street which was the home of a tormented, drunken waiter.” This was pure fabrication: in actuality Babel was taken in by a highly respectable engineer and his wife, with whom he was in correspondence. The first invention was to disavow a bourgeois background in order to satisfy Communist dogma. The second was a romantic imposture.

It did happen, nevertheless, that the young Babel was witness to a pogrom. He was in no way estranged from Jewish suffering or sensibility or, conversely, from the seductive winds of contemporary Europe. Odessa was modern, bustling, diverse, cosmopolitan; its very capaciousness stimulated a certain worldliness and freedom of outlook. Jewish children were required to study the traditional texts and commentaries, but they were also sent to learn the violin. Babel was early on infatuated with Maupassant and Flaubert, and wrote his first stories in fluent literary French. In his native Russian he lashed himself mercilessly to the discipline of an original style, the credo of which was burnished brevity. At the time of his arrest by the NKVD in 1939—he had failed to conform to Socialist Realism—he was said to be at work on a Russian translation of Sholem Aleichem.

Given these manifold intertwinings, it remains odd that Trilling's phrase for Babel was “a Jew of the ghetto.” Trilling himself had characterized Babel's Odessa as “an eastern Marseilles or Naples,” observing that “in such cities the transient, heterogeneous population dilutes the force of law and tradition, for good as well as for bad.” One may suspect that Trilling's cultural imagination (and perhaps his psyche as well) was circumscribed by a kind of either/or: either worldly sophistication or the ghetto; and that, in linking Jewish learning solely to the ghetto, he could not conceive of its association with a broad and complex civilization.

This partial darkening of mind, it seems to me, limits Trilling's understanding of Babel. An intellectual who had mastered the essentials of rabbinic literature, Babel was an educated Jew not “of the ghetto” but of the world. And not “of both worlds,” as the divisive expression has it, but of the great and variegated map of human thought and experience. Trilling, after all, in his own youth had judged the world to be rigorously divided. In 1933, coming upon one of Hemingway's letters, he wrote in his notebook:

[A] crazy letter, written when he was drunk—self-revealing, arrogant, scared, trivial, absurd; yet [I] felt from reading it how right such a man is compared to the “good minds” of my university life—how he will produce and mean something to the world … how his life which he could expose without dignity and which is anarchic and “childish” is a better life than anyone I know could live, and right for his job. And how far—far—far—I am going from being a writer.

Trilling envied but could not so much as dream himself into becoming a version of Hemingway—rifle in one hand and pen in the other, intellectual Jew taking on the strenuous life; how much less, then, could he fathom Babel as Cossack. Looking only to Jewish constriction, what Trilling vitally missed was this: coiled in the bottom-most pit of every driven writer is an impersonator, protean, volatile, restless, relentless. Trilling saw only stasis, or, rather, an unalterable consistency of identity: either lucubration or daring, never both. But Babel imagined for himself an identity so fluid that, having lodged with his civilized friend, the St. Petersburg engineer, it pleased him to invent a tougher Babel consorting underground with a “tormented, drunken waiter.” A drunken waiter would have been adventure enough—but ah, that Dostoyevskian “tormented”!

“He loved to confuse and mystify people,” his daughter Nathalie wrote of him, after decades spent in search of his character. Born in 1929, she lived with her mother in Paris, where her father was a frequent, if raffish, visitor. In 1935 Babel was barred from leaving the Soviet Union, and never again saw his wife and child. Nathalie Babel was 10 when Babel was arrested. In 1961 she went to look for traces of her father in Moscow,

where one can still meet people who loved him and continue to speak of him with nostalgia. There, thousands of miles from my own home in Paris, sitting in his living room, in his own chair, drinking from his glass, I felt utterly baffled. Though in a sense I had tracked him down, he still eluded me. The void remained.

In a laudatory reminiscence published in a Soviet literary magazine in 1964—a time when Babel's reputation was undergoing a modicum of “rehabilitation”—Georgy Munblit, a writer who had known Babel as well as anyone, spoke of “this sly, unfaithful, eternally evasive and mysterious Babel”; and though much of this elusiveness was caution in the face of Soviet restriction, a good part of it nevertheless had to do with the thrill of dissimulation and concealment. In a speech in Moscow in the mid-1960s at a meeting championing Babel's work, Ilya Ehrenburg, the literary Houdini who managed to survive every shift of Stalinist whim, described Babel as liking to “play the fool and put on romantic airs. He liked to create an atmosphere of mystery about himself; he was secretive and never told anybody where he was going.”

Other writers (all of whom had themselves escaped the purges) came forward with recollections of Babel's eccentricities in risky times: Babel as intrepid wanderer; as trickster, rapscallion, ironist; penniless, slippery, living on the edge, off the beaten track, down and out; seduced by the underlife of Paris, bars, whores, cabdrivers, jockeys. All this suggests Orwellian experiment and audacity. Babel relished Villon and Kipling, and was delighted to discover that Rimbaud, too, was an “adventurer.” Amusing and mercurial, “he loved to play tricks on people,” according to Lev Nikulin, who was at school with Babel and remembered him “as a bespectacled boy in a rather shabby school coat and a battered cap with a green band and badge depicting Mercury's staff.”

Trilling, writing in 1955, had of course no access to observations such as these; and we are as much in need now as Trilling was of a valid biography of Babel. Still, it is clear even from such small evidences and quicksilver portraits that Babel's connection with the Cossacks was, if not inevitable, more natural than not; and that Trilling's Freudian notion of the humiliated ghetto child could not have been more off the mark. For Babel, lamp oil and fearlessness were not antithetical. He was a man with the bit of recklessness between his teeth. One might almost ask how a writer so given to disguises and role-playing could not have put on a Cossack uniform.

“The Rebbe's Son,” one of the Red Cavalry tales, is explicit about this fusion of contemplative intellect and physical danger. Ilya, the son of the Zhitomir Rebbe, “the last prince of the dynasty,” is a Red Army soldier killed in battle. The remnants of his possessions are laid out before the narrator:

Here everything was dumped together—the warrants of the agitator and the commemorative booklets of the Jewish poet. Portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side. Lenin's nodulous skull and the tarnished silk of the portraits of Maimonides. A strand of female hair had been placed in a book of the resolutions of the Sixth Party Congress, and in the margins of Communist leaflets swarmed crooked lines of ancient Hebrew verse. In a sad and meager rain they fell on me—pages of the Song of Songs and revolver cartridges.

Babel was himself drawn to the spaciousness and elasticity of these unexpected combinations. They held no enigma for him. But while the Rebbe's son was a kind of double patriot, loyal to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and loyal to a dream of the betterment of Russia, Babel tended toward both theological and (soon enough) political skepticism. His amor patriae was, passionately, for the Russian mother tongue. Before the Stalinist prison clanged shut in 1935, Babel might easily have gone to live permanently in France, with his wife and daughter. Yet much as he reveled in French literature and language, he would not suffer exile from his native Russian.

A family can be replaced, or duplicated; but who can replace or duplicate the syllables of Pushkin and Tolstoy? And in fact (though his wife in Paris survived until 1957, and there was no divorce) Babel did take another wife in the Soviet Union, who gave birth to another daughter. A second family was possible; a second language was not. (Only consider what must be the intimate sorrows—even in the shelter of America, even after the demise of Communism—of Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodksy, Norman Manea and countless other literary refugees.) By remaining in the Soviet Union, and refusing finally to bend his art to Soviet directives, Babel sacrificed his life to his language.

It was a language he did not allow to rest. He meant to put his spurs to it, and run it to unexampled leanness. He quoted Pushkin: “precision and brevity.” “Superior craftsmanship,” Babel told Munblit, “is the art of making your writing as unobtrusive as possible.” Ehrenburg recalled a conversation in Madrid with Hemingway, who had just discovered Babel. “I find that Babel's style is even more concise than mine. … It shows what can be done,” Hemingway marveled. “Even when you've got all the water out of them, you can still clot the curds a little more.” Such idiosyncratic experiments in style were hardly congruent with official pressure to honor the ascent of socialism through prescriptive prose about the beauty of collective farming. Babel did not dissent from party demands; instead he fell mainly into silence, writing in private and publishing almost nothing. His attempts at a play and a filmscript met convulsive party criticism; the director of the film—an adaptation of a story by Turgenev—was forced into a public apology.

The Red Cavalry stories saw print, individually, before 1924. Soviet cultural policies in those years were not yet consolidated; it was a period of post-revolutionary leniency and ferment. Russian modernism was sprouting in the shape of formalism, acmeism, imagism, symbolism; an intellectual and artistic avant-garde flourished. Censorship, which had been endemic to the Czarist regime, was reintroduced in 1922, but the restraints were loose. Despite a program condemning elitism, the early Soviet leadership, comprising a number of intellectuals—Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky—recognized that serious literature could not be wholly entrusted to the sensibilities of party bureaucrats.

By 1924, then, Babel found himself not only famous, but eligible eventually for Soviet rewards: an apartment in Moscow, a dacha in the country, a car and chauffeur. Yet he was increasingly called on to perform (and conform) by the blunter rulers of a darkening repression. Why was he not writing in praise of New Soviet Man? Little by little a perilous mist gathered around Babel's person: though his privileges were not revoked (he was at his dacha on the day of his arrest), he began to take on a certain pariah status. When a leftist Congress for the Defense of Culture and Peace met in Paris, for example, Babel was deliberately omitted from the Soviet delegation, and was grudgingly allowed to attend only after the French organizers brought their protests to the Soviet Embassy.

Certain manuscripts he was careful not to expose to anyone. Among these was the remarkable journal he had kept, from June to September 1920, of the actions of Budyonny's First Cavalry Army in eastern Poland. Because it was missing from the papers seized by the secret police at the dacha and in his Moscow flat, the manuscript escaped destruction, and came clandestinely into the possession of Babel's (second) wife only in the 1950s. Ehrenburg was apparently the journal's first influential reader, though very likely he did not see it until the 1960s, when he mentioned it publicly, and evidently spontaneously, in his rehabilitation speech:

I have been comparing the diary of the Red Cavalry with the stories. He scarcely changed any names, the events are all practically the same, but everything is illuminated with a kind of wisdom. He is saying: this is how it was. This is how the people were—they did terrible things and they suffered, they played tricks on others and they died. He made his stories out of the facts and phrases hastily jotted down in his notebook.

It goes without saying that the flatness of this essentially evasive summary does almost no justice to an astonishing historical record set down with godlike prowess in a prose of frightening clarity. In Russia the complete text of the journal finally appeared in 1990. Yale University Press brings it to us now in an electrifying translation, accompanied by an indispensable introduction. (It ought to be added that an informative introduction can be found also in the new Penguin Collected Stories; but the reader's dependence on such piecemeal discussions only underscores the irritating absence of a formal biography.) In 1975 Ardis Publishers made available the first English translation of excerpts from the journal (Isaac Babel: Forgotten Prose). That such a manuscript existed had long been known in the Soviet Union, but there was plainly no chance of publication; Ehrenburg, in referring to it, was discreet about its contents.

The Diary may count, then, as a kind of secret document; certainly as a suppressed one. But it is “secret” in another sense as well. Though it served as raw material for the Red Cavalry stories, Babel himself, in transforming private notes into daring fiction, was less daring than he might have been. He was, in fact, circumspect and selective. One can move from the notes to the stories without surprise—or rather, the surprise is in the masterliness and shock of a ripe and radical style. Still, as Ehrenburg reported, “the events are all practically the same,” and what is in the Diary is in the stories.

But one cannot begin with the stories and then move to the journal without the most acute recognition of what has been, substantively and for the most part, shut out of the fiction. And what has been shut out is the calamity (to say it in the most general way) of Jewish fate in Eastern Europe. The Diary records how the First Cavalry Army, and Babel with it, went storming through the little Jewish towns of Galicia, in Poland, towns that had endured the Great War, with many of their young men serving in the Polish Army, only to be decimated by pogroms immediately afterward, at the hands of the Poles themselves. And immediately after that, the invasion of the Red Cossacks.

The Yale edition of the Diary supplies maps showing the route of Budyonny's troops; the resonant names of these places, rendered half-romantic through the mystical tales of their legendary hasidic saints, rise up with the nauseous familiarity of their deaths: Brody, Dubno, Zhitomir, Belz, Chelm, Zamosc and so on. Only two decades after the Red Cossacks stampeded through them, their Jewish populations fell prey to the Germans and were destroyed. Riding and writing, writing and riding, Babel saw it all: saw it like a seer. “Ill-fated Galicia, ill-fated Jews,” he wrote. “Can it be,” he wrote, “that ours is the century in which they perish?”

True: everything that is in the stories is in the Diary—priest, painter, widow, gun-cart, soldier, prisoner; but the heart of the Diary remains secreted in the Diary. When all is said and done—and much is said and done in these blistering pages: pillaged churches, ruined synagogues, wild Russians, beaten Poles, mud, horses, hunger, looting, shooting—Babel's journal is a Jewish lamentation: a thing the Soviet system could not tolerate, and Ehrenburg was too prudent to reveal. The merciless minds that snuffed the identities of the murdered at Babi Yar would hardly sanction Babel's whole and bloody truths.

Nor did Babel himself publicly sanction them. The Red Cavalry narratives include six stories (out of thirty-five) that touch on the suffering of Jews; the headlong Diary contains scores. An act of authorial self-censorship, and not only because Babel was determined to be guarded. Impersonation, or call it reckless play, propelled him at all points. The Diary can muse, “The Slavs—the manure of history?”—but Babel came to the Cossacks disguised as a Slav, having assumed the name K. L. Lyutov, the name he assigns also to his narrator. And in the Diary itself, encountering terrified Polish Jews, he again and again steers them away from the knowledge that rides in his marrow, and fabricates deliberate revolutionary fairy tales (his word): he tells his trembling listeners how

everything's changing for the better—my usual system—miraculous things are happening in Russia—express trains, free food for children, theaters, the International. They listen with delight and disbelief. I think—you'll have your diamond-studded sky, everything and everyone will be turned upside down and inside out for the umpteenth time, and [I] feel sorry for them.

“My usual system”: perhaps it is kind to scatter false consolations among the doomed. Or else it is not kindness at all, merely a writer's mischief or a rider's diversion: the tormented mice of Galicia entertained by a cat in Cossack dress. Sometimes he is recognized (once by a child) as a Jew, and then he half-lies and explains that he has a Jewish mother. But mainly he is steadfast in the pretense of being Lyutov. And nervy: the Diary begins on June 3, in Zhitomir, and on July 12, one day before Babel's twenty-sixth birthday, he notes: “My first ride on horseback.” In no time at all he is, at least on horseback, like all the others: a skilled and dauntless trooper. “The horse galloped well,” he says on that first day.

Enchanted, proud, he looks around at his companions: “red flags, a powerful, well-knit body of men, confident commanders, calm and experienced eyes of topknotted Cossack fighting men, dust, silence, order, brass band.” But moments later the calm and experienced eyes are searching out plunder in the neat cottage of an immigrant Czech family, “all good people.” “I took nothing, although I could have,” the new horseman comments. “I'll never be a real Budyonny man.” The real Budyonny men are comely, striking, stalwart. Turning off a highway, Babel catches sight of “the brigades suddenly appear[ing], inexplicable beauty, an awesome force advancing.” Another glimpse:

Night … horses are quietly snorting, they're all Kuban Cossacks here, they eat together, sleep together, a splendid silent comradeship … they sing songs that sound like church music in lusty voices, their devotion to horses, beside each man a little heap—saddle, bridle, ornamental saber, greatcoat, I sleep in the midst of them.

Babel is small, his glasses are small and round, he sets down secret sentences. And meanwhile his dispatches, propaganda screeches regularly published in Red Cavalryman, have a different tone: “Soldiers of the Red Army, finish them off! Beat down harder on the opening covers of their stinking graves!” And: “That is what they are like, our heroic nurses! Caps off to the nurses! Soldiers and commanders, show respect to the nurses!” (In the Diary the dubious propagandist writes satirically, “Opening of the Second Congress of the Third International, unification of the peoples finally realized, now all is clear. … We shall advance into Europe and conquer the world:”)

And always there is cruelty, and always there are the Jews. “Most of the rabbis have been exterminated.” “The Jewish cemetery … hundreds of years old, gravestones have toppled over … overgrown with grass, it has seen Khmelnitsky, now Budyonny … everything repeats itself, now that whole story—Poles, Cossacks, Jews—is repeating itself with stunning exactitude, the only new element is Communism.” “They all say they're fighting for justice and they all loot.” “Life is loathsome, murderers, it's unbearable, baseness and crime.” “I ride along with them, begging the men not to massacre prisoners. … I couldn't look at their faces, they bayoneted some, shot others, bodies covered by corpses, they strip one man while they're shooting another, groans, screams, death rattles.” “We are destroyers … we move like a whirlwind, like a stream of lava, hated by everyone, life shatters, I am at a huge, never-ending service for the dead … the sad senselessness of my life.”

The Jews: “The Poles ransacked the place, then the Cossacks.” “Hatred for the Poles is unanimous. They have looted, tortured, branded the pharmacist with a red-hot iron, put needles under his nails, pulled out his hair, all because somebody shot at a Polish officer.” “The Jews ask me to use my influence to save them from ruin, they are being robbed of food and goods. … The cobbler had looked forward to Soviet rule—and what he sees are Jew-baiters and looters. … Organized looting of a stationer's shop, the proprietor in tears, they tear up everything. … When night comes the whole town will be looted—everybody knows it.”

The Jews at the hands of the Poles: “A pogrom … a naked, barely breathing prophet of an old man, an old woman butchered, a child with fingers chopped off, many people still breathing, stench of blood, everything turned upside down, chaos, a mother sitting over her sabered son, an old woman lying twisted up like a pretzel, four people in one hovel, filth, blood under a black beard, just lying there in the blood.”

The Jews at the hands of the Bolsheviks: “Our men nonchalantly walking around looting whenever possible, stripping mangled corpses. The hatred is the same, the Cossacks just the same, it's nonsense to think one army is different from another. The life of these little towns. There's no salvation. Everyone destroys them.” “Our men were looting last night, tossed out the Torah scrolls in the synagogue and took the velvet covers for saddlecloths. The military commissar's dispatch rider examines phylacteries, wants to take the straps.” The Diary mourns, “What a mighty and marvelous life of a nation existed here. The fate of Jewry.”

And then: “I am an outsider.” And again: “I don't belong, I'm all alone, we ride on … five minutes after our arrival the looting starts, women struggling, weeping and wailing, it's unbearable, I can't stand these never-ending horrors. … [I] snatch a flatcake out of the hands of a peasant woman's little boy.” He does this mechanically, and without compunction. “How we eat,” he explains. “Red troops arrive in a village, ransack the place, cook, stoves crackling all night, the householders' daughters have a hard time” (a comment we will know how to interpret). Babel grabs the child's flatcake—a snack on the fly—on August 3.

On July 25, nine days earlier, he and a riding companion, Prishchepa, a loutish syphilitic illiterate, have burst into a pious Jewish house in a town called Demidovka. It is the Sabbath, when lighting a fire is forbidden; it is also the eve of the Ninth of Av, a somber fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Prishchepa demands fried potatoes. The dignified mother, a flock of daughters in white stockings, a scholarly son, are all petrified: on the Sabbath, they protest, they cannot dig potatoes, and besides, the fast begins at sundown. “Fucking Yids,” Prishchepa yells; so the potatoes are dug, the fire to cook them is lit.

Babel, a witness to this anguish, says nothing. “I keep quiet, because I'm a Russian.” Will Prishchepa discover that Lyutov is only another Yid? “We eat like oxen, fried potatoes and five tumblersful of coffee each. We sweat, they keep serving us, all this is terrible, I tell them fairy tales about Bolshevism.” Night comes, the mother sits on the floor and sobs, the son chants the liturgy for the Ninth of Av, Jeremiah's Lamentations: “they eat dung, their maidens are ravished, their menfolk killed, Israel subjugated.” Babel hears and understands every Hebrew word. “Demidovka, night, Cossacks,” he sums it up, “all just as it was when the Temple was destroyed. I go out to sleep in the yard, stinking and damp.”

And there he is, New Soviet Man: stinking, a sewer of fairy tales, an unbeliever—and all the same complicit. Nathalie Babel said of her father that nothing “could shatter his feeling that he belonged to Russia and that he had to share the fate of his countrymen. What in so many people would have produced only fear and terror, awakened in him a sense of duty and a kind of blind heroism.” In the brutal light of the Diary, violation upon violation, it is hard to yield to this point of view. Despair and an abyss of cynicism do not readily accord with a sense of duty; and whether or not Babel's travels with the Cossacks, and with Bolshevism altogether, deserve to be termed heroic, he was anything but blind. He saw, he saw, and he saw.

It may be that the habit of impersonation, the habit of deception, the habit of the mask, will in the end lead a man to become what he impersonates. Or it may be that the force of “I am an outsider” overwhelms the secret gratification of having got rid of a fixed identity. In any case, the Diary tells no lies. These scenes in a journal, linked by commas quicker than human breath, run like rapids through a gorge—on one side the unrestraint of violent men, on the other the bleaker freedom of unbelonging. Each side is subversive of the other; and still they embrace the selfsame river.

To venture yet another image, Babel's Diary stands as a tragic masterwork of breakneck cinematic “dailies,” those raw, unedited rushes that expose the director to himself. If Trilling, who admitted to envy of the milder wilderness that was Hemingway, had read Babel's Diary—what then? And who, in our generation, should read the Diary? Novelists and poets, of course; specialists in Russian literature, obviously; American innocents who define the world of the '20s by jazz, flappers and Fitzgerald. And also those who protested Claude Lanzmann's Shoah as unfair to the psyche of the Polish countryside; but, most of all, the cruelly ignorant children of the left who still believe that the Marxist utopia requires for its realization only a more favorable venue, and another go.

No one knows when or exactly how Babel perished. Some suppose he was shot immediately after the NKVD picked him up and brought him to Moscow's Lyubanka Prison, on May 15, 1939. Others place the date of his murder in 1941, following months of torture. More than fifty years later, as if the writer were sending forth phantoms of his first and last furies, Babel's youthful Diary emerges. What it attests to above all is not simply that fairy tales can kill—who doesn't understand this?—but that Bolshevism was lethal in its very cradle.

Which is just what S., my ironical Muscovite cousin, found so pathetically funny when, laughing at our American stupidity, she went home to Communism's graveyard.

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