SOURCE: Tucker, Janet. “Skaz and Oral Usage as Satirical Devices in Isaak Babel's Red Calvary.”¹Canadian-American Slavic Studies 34, no. 2 (summer 2000): 201-10.

[In the following essay, Tucker considers Babel's use of skaz and the oral tradition in Red Cavalry as parodic devices.]

Given the density and intricacy of his short story collection Red Cavalry, justifiably regarded as one of the great prose works of twentieth-century Russian literature, Isaak Babel' is notoriously difficult to pin down. Even the briefest of his tales masterfully develops the subject central to all of them: the violence inherent in the October Revolution and the civil war that followed it. No writer explores this theme more cogently than Babel'. There is no single element in his stories that more strikingly underscores the horror of this violence than Babel's use of skaz and images from the folktale.

Babel's employment of skaz, coupled with his references to oral literature, reminds us that he is writing about semi- or illiterate people who are still immersed in traditional culture. The very word skaz, from skazat' (“to say” or “to tell”) suggests oral usage, which itself can variously encompass oral folk narrative (typically, in folktales, in prose) or can appear as the speech of a semi- or uneducated narrator quoted by the actual author.² Oral usage incorporates the epithets, turns of phrase and images typically encountered in Russian oral literature, whether heroic tales or skazki (folk-tales or fairy tales); for reasons of space, only skazki will be considered here. Since no discussion of skazki would be complete without consulting Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, that work will also figure in my analysis. Propp considers the actions/functions of characters in the skazki to be the central element, the key to understanding these tales.³ The purpose of this essay is to pinpoint examples of skaz and oral motifs in Babel', to attempt to discover his reasons for incorporating these motifs, and to discuss them as parodic/satirical devices.⁴

Skaz figures prominently in two Red Cavalry stories: “Pis'mo” (“The Letter”) and “Sol'” (“Salt”).⁵ In the first, Babel's narrator Liutov reproduces for his readers a letter dictated by the youngest son of a family in which, in a microcosmic version of the Civil War, the father has killed one of three brothers and is in turned executed by another. Sub- or non-standard forms abound, emphasizing the oral or traditional orientation of this tale: “Ia est'” for “I am,” “zdesia” instead of “zdes'” for “here,” “prosiu” for “proshu” (“I ask, request”).⁶ So does the traditional discourse associated with the skaz-ka: “A takzhe nizhaiushche vam klaniaius' ot bela litsa do syroi zemli. …” (“And likewise do I bow down low to you from my white face to the damp earth,” with “matka syraia zemlia,” “mother damp earth,” understood here, “Pis'mo,” 12).

In “Sol',” the narrator Balmashev repeatedly says “Raseiu” (“Russia”) instead of the standard literary form “Rossiiu” (“Sol',” 97), “anteresnoe” (“interesting,” “odd,” a foreign word) rather than “interesnoe” (“Sol',” 97), “prosiut” for “prosiat” (“to request,” “ask for”) (“Sol',” 98). The skazka appears linguistically rather than situationally in the introduction of Balmashev's letter to the “comrade editor”: “za trideviat' zemel', v nekotorom gosudarstve, na nevedomon prostranstve” (“beyond the thrice ninth land, in a certain country, in an unknown place”). (“Sol',” 94).⁷ This pattern would be right at home in Afanas'ev's collection; in “Ivan Bykovich,” the formula is: “V nekotorom tsarstve, v nekotorom gosudarstve, zhil-byl tsar' s tsaritseiu” (“In a certain kingdom, in a certain country, there dwelled a tsar' with a tsaritsa”).⁸ Balmashev recites the story teller's typical formulaic hint at a reward for his/her efforts, but with a twist: in “ia tam byl, myod pil, usy obmochil, v rot ne zaskochil” (“I was there, drank mead, wet my mustache, didn't jump into my mouth”), the mead becomes “samogon-pivo,” home-brewed beer (“Sol',” 94). Such banal transformational lowering of the original folk pattern reappears throughout the story.⁹

In each story, sub-standard locution and—even more strikingly, the language of the folktale—are combined with the most appalling event of all: killing. Murder within the family context makes “The Letter” especially horrific. In “Salt,” the “stain” that Balmashev wipes out is a woman smuggling salt, crucial in the smelting of steel and hence for the war effort (“Sol',” 98). Her salt disguised in swaddling clothes is, of course, no infant, but because the reader sees her initially with a bundle disguised as a baby, she still bears the imprint of mother. She could be any mother, and mothers still command respect, which is why she has not been raped after a night of riding in a train car full of soldiers; hence, Balmashev seems to have committed matricide. The image of “mother,” which links “The Letter” with “Salt,” has folkloric as well as societal and familial overtones. In “Vasilisa prekrasnaia” (“Vasilisa the Beautiful”), for example, Vasilisa's dying mother gives her a doll, a magical agent, that saves Vasilisa in her moments of greatest need and even seems, in dispensing wisdom to Vasilisa (“the morning is wiser than the evening”), to take her mother's place.¹⁰

What sort of impression does this nexus of the language of traditional culture plus savagery produce in Babel's reader? We know that these people have not lost all their values. In “The Letter,” the young Kudriukov respectfully addresses his mother as Evdokiia Fedorovna and bows to the “damp earth” before her, conflating his own mother with the folk image of “Mother Damp Earth” (“Matka syraia zemlia”). One assumes that he is not merely taking advantage of their relationship to get her to care for his horse Styopa, whom he genuinely loves and worries about (“Pis'mo,” 13). Other familial relationships, after all, seem to count for very little in this story! In “Sol',” Balmashev still retains that regard for motherhood that is inherent in any culture. Yet something has clearly been lost, and that intangible “something” is the freshness, the innocence that the educated and jaded intellectual assumes should still exist in any traditional culture, especially Russian culture. If we consider the narod, the folk, in nineteenth-century works as disparate as Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Tolstoi's War and Peace, we can hear their voices functioning as counterweights to the limitations and dubious worth of a culture modeled on that of the West. That sense of traditional values is ruined by the violence of a revolution and war that the narod but dimly understand.¹¹Skaz, in which Babel's narrator Liutov stands to one side to let his readers hear the voice of the people directly, unadulterated by an outsider's views, underscores this loss.¹²

Because Babel' focuses on the cavalry from which the collection takes its name and on Cossack cavalry at that, the horse inevitably plays a central role. In all of these stories, the “heroes” have left home on horses (in Propp, the hero abandons home), and the narrator attempts to be a horseman like them, sometimes with disastrous results (“Argamak,” 172-76).¹³ Even where horses do not literally appear, as in the skaz masterpiece “The Letter,” they intrude into the text. In “The Letter,” young Kudriukov twice mentions his horse to his mother, thus underscoring the link between traditional family structure, oral usage, and the horse. That the soap for washing his horse is kept behind the icon elevates the horse still further, and the very act of washing here suggests baptism. Horses and riders form a nexus, with the Cossacks of the tales frequently exhibiting the swaggering bravado and confident nobility that links them with the “knights” or “heroes” of the heroic tales and skazki (folktales). Skaz and the horse operate in tandem as the “medium” and “message,” respectively, of Babel's Red Cavalry. The function of the horse is what Babel' stresses here and serves as a reminder of the fact that Propp considered function to be the basic unit of the folktale.¹⁴

Nowhere does the horse play a more dramatic role than in “Afon'ka Bida,” about a bullying cossack whose horse is shot from beneath him by the Poles, and who goes on a mad rampage to avenge the death of his mount and acquire a new one. His abduction of a “replacement” mount serves as a reminder that the horse is part of his identity, not merely property or a means of transportation. Clearly, the horse functions here as a sort of magical agent indispensable for the Cossack.¹⁵ Afon'ka Bida's later abduction of a replacement recalls the abductions perpetrated by villains—not heroes—in the skazki.¹⁶ After Maslak has put Afon'ka's critically wounded horse out of his misery, a chorus of Cossacks comments on Afon'ka's loss.¹⁷ “‘He brought his horse (literally “steed,” “kon',”) from home,’ said the long-mustached Bitsenko.” Note the word “steed,” “kon',” hinting at the heroic tale. “‘A steed—he's a friend (“drug,” suggesting “other,” “bosom buddy”),’ responded Orlov. A steed—he's a father,’ sighed Bitsenko” (“Afon'ka Bida,” 108), thus giving the horse the stature of an authority figure. As a mark of its great value, Afon'ka Bida pays for his new horse with his left eye (110). Clearly more than just a horse, it has acquired the characteristics of the talisman/magical agent noted by Propp.¹⁸ Afon'ka's theft of the horse, combined with his rapacious plundering of the church and surrounding countryside (“Afon'ka Bida,” 109-10) links him with the villains of the skazki¹⁹ and blurs the line between Cossack heroism and Cossack villainy. (Magical agents in Red Cavalry are not necessarily restricted to horses; the Hasid Gedali's shop is full of “dead” ones, wondrous objects that have now lost their magical power) (“Gedali,” 36-37).²⁰

Nor are horses and other magical agents the only folkloric components of these stories; other folkloric elements, typically related to the functions of the characters, figure as well. One of the most significant of these is the interdiction, sometimes in the form of the interdiction plus the proposal. In “My First Goose,” Liutov's traditional Jewish interdiction against gratuitous slaughter collides with the traditional Cossack dictum that in wartime (the Cossack milieu) one should or must kill. It is only after having accepted the suggestion to “ruin” a lady, which he does circuitously by killing her goose (specifically, a gander) and using boorish language, that is, by accepting a cossack proposal, that Liutov is able to gain a degree of acceptance—at a price (“Moi pervyi gus',” 41-44).²¹

Interdiction and the difficult task are central to “The Rabbi” and especially to “The Rabbi's Son,” where the last son of the “dynasty” forsakes his Hasidic heritage to serve the revolution. The young man desecrates the Sabbath by lighting a cigarette in “The Rabbi” (47), and the narrator encounters him in “The Rabbi's Son” near death, with his talismanic objects from the Jewish world and the world of the revolution clustered around him (“Syn rabbi,” 169-70).²²

Interdiction overlaps with the difficult task not only in “My First Goose,” “The Rabbi” and “The Rabbi's Son,” but in “The Death of Dolgushev” (58-60) as well, where Liutov, once again torn between Jewish and Cossack codes of behavior, turns down the dying Dolgushev's plea for a mercy killing and, almost shot by his friend Afon'ka Bida, suffers “banishment” (a traditional skazka form of punishment) as a consequence.²³ The request for mercy, a natural component of war stories, appears also in “Konkin” (86-89) and “The Ivans” (126-34).²⁴

Babel's stories reveal skazka roots not only in their characters and the events in which these characters are involved, but also in their imagery. Nowhere is this particular link between the skazki and Babel's stories more pronounced than in “Salt,” and even here we have the suggestion of horsemen, as can be seen below. The narrator/author has just intruded into the skaz narrator Balmashev's letter with the lines: “And the third bell having rung, the train started to move. And a glorious little night spread like a tent. And in that tent (note the repetition of three) were star-lanterns.” Then Balmashev reappears with the sentence: “After some time passed, when night changed its guard and the little red drummers played reveille on their red drums, then the Cossacks came over to me. …” (“Sol',” 96) The red drummers not only have the obvious political (Marxist) overtones but also echo figures from the skazki.²⁵

In the tale “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” her cruel stepmother has sent the heroine to the hut of the witch Baba Iaga ostensibly to get a light, but actually to get her killed off. Aided by her magic doll, the girl performs all the tasks assigned to her (“the difficult task”) and survives. As Vasilisa walks trembling to Baba Iaga's hut, she encounters three horsemen: the first one gallops past, a white man dressed in white, on a white horse with white reins, and it begins to get light. Then the second one comes and flashes by; he himself is red, wearing red and on a red horse, and the sun starts to rise. The third horseman is black, is clad all in black, and gallops by on a black horse. When he rides by, night falls. Babel's readers would surely have recalled this tale from childhood and would remember the additional scary details of the fence made of human bones, the skulls with eyes that light up the night darkness, and the witch who is a cannibal.²⁶

Babel' has transformed the horsemen of the tale to drummers, perhaps because the noise of the train wheels over the sleepers is more akin to the sound of a drum (these horsemen “ride” a train). The connection with the sun, however, still holds, even though the white and black figures, part of the triad of riders, are missing from “Salt.” In “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” we have a picture of innocent beauty, of goodness aided by the magic helper (the doll her late mother has left her) and persecuted by a cruel stepmother and stepsisters, maltreatment that becomes even more severe during her father's long absence. In “Salt” the “doll” proves the false mother's undoing. The contrast of goodness versus depravity climaxes when Vasilisa and Baba Iaga, eater of human flesh, are together.²⁷

“Salt” contains a similar juxtaposition. When Balmashev notes the essential innocence of his young soldiers, their ruined lives, and the ruined lives of their wives and the girls they have raped (97), the reader who remembers the skazka can supply the missing component: like Baba Iaga, the war “eats” human flesh and human souls. As with Babel's use of skaz, traditional culture as embodied in the skazki encounters is ultimately corrupted by the forces of revolution and war. It is this very use of contrast, of the combination of opposites that runs through virtually all of his stories, the Odessa tales as well as Red Cavalry, that may well be Babel's most striking and significant stylistic characteristic.²⁸ “The world of man,” notes Karen Luplow in her essay on Red Cavalry, “consists of antithetical and irreconcilable ways of life based on conflicting, incompatible value systems.”²⁹

What effect does Babel's incorporation of skaz and of skazka motifs or situations have on Red Cavalry? On the most basic level, of course, the use of skaz directly relates the revolution and civil war to the immediate experience of the narod and demonstrates that on at least one level—the level of gratuitous violence—the revolution can be defined as “popular revolution.” Revolution certainly is manifested most savagely in those tales of familial (and symbolically familial) violence, “The Letter” and “Salt,” in which skaz is central. The use of skaz and of skazka motifs and images, combined with Babel's employment of striking color combinations, endows Red Cavalry with the sort of vitality identified with the world of Russian popular culture, so readily apparent in the painter Filipp Andreevich Maliavin's red-clad, exuberant, dancing peasant women.³⁰ This is the same sort of vigor that characterized the popular Cossack revolts that rocked Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.³¹

The combination of the violence of revolution and war with the energy and innocence of traditional culture, when associated with an incomplete or unclear comprehension of the aims of that revolution for those very men who are fighting for it (see “My First Goose,” mentioned above) creates the impression of a cause that somehow, for all the dynamism of its appeal, has gone horribly wrong. The brutality of the civil war shreds families (“The Letter”) or surrogate families (“Salt”), turns a “hero” into a villain (“Afon'ka Bida”), and defiles magical objects (“Gedali”) and “magic people” (“The Rabbi,” “The Rabbi's Son”). Violation of the interdiction and acceptance of the proposal leads to loss instead of the expected redemption, as in the last sentence of “My First Goose” when the narrator, having killed the goose, records how his “heart … crimsoned with murdered, creaked and flowed out” (like the brains of the murdered goose, 44). An attempt to fulfill the difficult task, which typically leads to success in the skazki—marrying a princess, acquiring wealth, merely staying alive³²—leads instead to failure and death (“The Rabbi's Son”). The narrator's inability to accept the plea of a dying man, an acceptance which typically results in some sort of reward for the hero of the skazka, instead nearly causes Liutov's death at the hands of Afon'ka Bida (“The Death of Dolgushev”). The traditional values of the skazki are violated or overturned countless times in Red Cavalry and, always, the revolution and civil war are depicted as the cause.

How do skaz and elements of the skazki, which enable Babel' to analyze and castigate the revolution and the civil war that followed in its wake, function as satirical devices? Satire is a mode rather than a genre, a means of making a form of art out of the examination and criticism of, to cite Karen Ryan, “the social, political or moral life of the culture it treats.” She comments further that the parody of genre conventions is a significant component of contemporary Russian satire.³³ There is also a precedent for such parody in nineteenth-century Russian literature, as in Dostoevskii's parodies of Gogol', described by the Formalist critic Iurii Tynianov.³⁴

Babel' provides a prime example of such parody during the 1920s, but are skaz narrators parodies of the traditional story tellers and his stories, in turn, mere parodies of the skazki? Since, as Karen Ryan notes, satire attacks such external targets as politics, societal codes of behavior and “cultural institutions,”³⁵ then Babel's Red Cavalry tales manage at once to function as both parody and satire.

First of all, Babel' uses skaz to mock the figure of the narrator himself. If the conventional narrator of the skazki recounts his/her tales to uphold the traditional values of the Russian oral tradition, then Babel's skaz narrators instead find themselves in the midst of a bewildering world in which these traditional values are perilously close to being lost forever. Nor are narrators always reliable in Red Cavalry; even the non-skaz “frame” narrator of “The Letter,” who swears that he is recounting young Kudriukov's message to his mother in its entirely, makes a parenthetical aside to the reader about leaving out the young man's enumeration of his various relations and godparents (12) and, hence, undermines his own position. Most significantly for our purposes, skaz, which typically functions as a droll mode of discourse (as in the stories of Nikolai Leskov or Mikhail Zoshchenko), is completely stripped of any humorous aspects in the grim world of Red Cavalry. Skazki that figure in Babel's stories are similarly undermined and lampooned (although once again, without any humorous overtones), devoid of the ingenuous charm that distinguished the original models of Afanas'ev's collection.

If satire can be understood as a means of exposing societal shortcomings or flaws, then the tales of Red Cavalry certainly qualify as satirical. Unlike Mikhail Zoshchenko, who satirized a more settled Soviet community of the NEP period of the 1920s, Babel' instead assailed a society that was undergoing the painful, horrific transition of revolution and civil strife, a world in which the accepted norms were in the process of being turned upside down or even destroyed. Hence, a Jew could ride with the Cossacks, nay, almost become a Cossack (as in “Argamak”). A family could devour itself, divided between the two sides in the revolution (“The Letter”). Most significantly, the common, traditional values of an entire civilization, as epitomized by the oral culture of its folk, its narod, could be fatally compromised by revolutionary upheaval, in which the civil war functions as a violent component. Babel' parodies the traditional teller of tales and the tales themselves in order to comment satirically on the wasteful violence of revolution and the Civil War. As in Olesha's 1927 novel Envy, Babel' employs imagery, motifs and narrators to express his doubts about the efficacy and legitimacy of the Soviet revolution.³⁶ It was a revolution that, however lofty its design, nonetheless managed to discredit its goals in the course of a violent genesis.

Notes

1. The present essay is based on a paper presented at a panel on satire and parody in Russian literature, at the annual meeting of the American Association of Slavic Studies, Boca Raton, Florida, in September 1998. I would like to thank Professor Karen Ryan for graciously inviting me to be on that panel. Dr. Joyce Story from Glendale Community College, Glendale, Arizona, provided many helpful comments. The insightful observations of Professor Anna Brodsky of Washington and Lee University improved this essay immeasurably.

2. Hugh McLean, “Skaz,” in Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), p. 420.

3. V. Ia. Propp, Morfologiia skazki, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), pp. 24-28.

4. Victor Erlich notes that Vladimir Propp's Morfologiia skazki was originally published in Leningrad in 1928. Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), p. 29n. That publication of Morfologiia skazki postdated the appearance of Babel's Konarmiia has no bearing on Babel''s own undoubted familiarity with the collection of A. N. Afanas'ev (1826-1871). For information on Afanas'ev's career and publications, see Yu. M. Sokolov, Russian Folklore, trans. Catherine Ruth Smith (Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1966), pp. 69, 70n., 71-74, passim.

5. There is even a story called “Salt” (#242) in Afanas'ev's collection. A. N. Afanas'ev, Narodnye russkie skazki v trekh tomakh (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1938), 2: 341-44.

6. “Pis'mo,” in Isaak Babel', Konarmiia, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1928; reprint London: Flegon Press, n.d.), pp. 12-13. Further references to Babel's stories will be in the text.

7. For an excellent examination of the Ukrainianisms, southern Russianisms, Oddessisms and Yiddishisms in Babel, see Efraim Sicher, Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaak Babel' (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1986), pp. 72-79. Maurice Friedberg's “Yiddish Folklore Motifs in Isaak Babel's Konarmija” (in Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views [New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987], pp. 191-98) contains a fine discussion of Babel''s treatment of the Hasidism.

8. “Ivan Bykovich,” in A. N. Afanas'ev, Narodnye russkie skazki v trekh tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1957), 1: 278.

9. Nor should we forget that the imperfective of “zaskochit'” (“to jump”) is “zaskakivat',” related to “skakat',” “to gallop.” Even where no horses appear physically, they are present etymologically.

10. A. N. Afanas'ev, Narodnye russkie skazki (Moscow: Akademiia, 1936), 1: 176-77, 179. In the skazka “Salt” from Afanas'ev's collection, Russian salt is a valuable commodity that makes a youngest son's fortune (as Joyce Story has reminded me). Significantly, the revolutionary train, with sometimes negative associations, is juxtaposed to the ship of the skazka.

11. See, for instance, Babel's “Moi pervyi gus',” from the same collection. Joyce Story has noted to me that, while the hero of the traditional tale is transformed (for the better), young Kudriukov from “The Letter” remains naive while, at the same time, causing his mother suffering with his letter.

12. There is a precedent for the narrator as outsider among Cossacks in early nineteenth-century Russian literature. In “Kavalerist-devitsa,” Nadezhda Durova rides with the cavalry disguised as a man, her deception echoed later in Red Cavalry as Babel's narrator Liutov attempts to merge with the Cossacks, overcoming two significant stigmas: being a Jew and an intellectual in glasses. Horses, of course, play a significant role in Durova's work; see N. A. Durova, “Kavalerist-devitsa,” Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1983), pp. 31, 33, 46, 53, 55. Durova rides into battle with the Cossacks (46) and arouses the suspicions of a woman who sees through her disguise (48). Like Babel's descriptions of nature just over a century later, Durova's seem to mirror her narrator's mood: “Spring … was … sad, wet, cold, windy, dirty. …” (147). The Cossack Platov, who reappears in Nikolai Leskov's short story “The Steel Flea,” makes a cameo appearance in Durova's memoirs (47). I am grateful to Anna Brodsky for her valuable suggestion to consult Durova's “Kavalerist-devitsa.”

13. Propp, Morfologiia skazki, p. 40. For a discussion of the heroic in Red Cavalry, not only among the Cossacks but in the Jewish characters as well, see Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 113-14.

14. Propp, Morfologiia skazki, pp. 24-28; Erlich, Russian Formalism, pp. 249-50.

15. Propp, Morfologiia skazki, pp. 40-41.

16. Ibid., pp. 32-34.

17. Interestingly this horse, like the one in “Pis'mo,” is also named Stepan, although Babel' use the full name here rather than the nickname.

18. Ibid., pp. 43-44. Other stories with “magical” or special horses include “Istoriia odnoi loshadi,” “Nachal'nik konzapasa” and “Zamost'e.”

19. See ibid., p. 34.

20. Ibid., p. 42.

21. On the deceitful proposal, see ibid., pp. 32-33.

22. In his incisive discussion of both stories, Friedberg reminds us that Spinoza, whom this youth resembles, was a rebel who was excommunicated and that Maimonides, whose portrait the rabbi's son carries along with that of Lenin, was forbidden fruit for the Hasidism who followed Rebbe Nahman of Braclav. Friedberg, “Yiddish Folklore Motifs,” pp. 195-96.

23. Propp, Morfologiia skazki, pp. 30-31, 38-39, 41, 56-57. Interdiction also figures in “Sashka Khristos'.”

24. Ibid., p. 41.

25. The color red (“krasnyi”) here echoes the root for “prekrasnyi,” (“beautiful”).

26. Afanas'ev, Narodnye russkie skazki, 1: 178.

27. See Propp, Morfologiia skazki, p. 36. The villain of the folktale frequently threatens or even engages in cannibalism.

28. Kornblatt discusses the combination of opposites as an aspect of Babelian myth. Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero, p. 118.

29. Karen Luplow, “Paradox and the Search for Value in Babel's Red Cavalry,” in Charles Rougle, ed., Red Cavalry: A Critical Companion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1996), p. 70.

30. Babel' has been compared more than once with Chagall (see, for example, Victor Terras, “Line and Color: The Structure of I. Babel's Short Stories in Red Cavalry,” in Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views, p. 108; Toby W. Clyman, “Babel' as Colorist,” Slavic and East European Journal, 21 [Fall 1977], 333; Rochelle H. Ross, “The Unity of Babel's Konarmija,” South Central Bulletin, 41, no. 4 [Winter 1981], 116 (this last item cited in Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero, pp. 202, 22n). Clyman not only mentions Chagall (pp. 333-34) but also observes that “Babel' was aware of Kandinsky's theoretical stance” on color. Clyman, pp. 337-39).

31. The horses' names Styopa (from “The Letter”) and Stepan (from “Afon'ka Bida”) recall Stepan Razin, leader of a great Cossack revolt in the seventeenth century. For a discussion of Stepan Razin in oral literature, see Patricia Krafcik, “Stenka Razin in Russian Historical Folksongs: A Robin Hood of the Volga,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia Univ., 1980.

32. Propp, Morfologiia, pp. 58-60.

33. Karen Ryan-Hayes, Contemporary Russian Satire: A Genre Study (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 3-4.

34. Iurii Tynianov, “Dostoevskii i Gogol' (k teorii parodii),” in Iu. N. Tynianov, Poetika, istoriia literatury, kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 293.

35. Ryan-Hayes, Contemporary Russian Satire, p. 4.

36. See Janet Tucker, Revolution Betrayed: Jurij Olesa's Envy (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1996).