SOURCE: Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. “Isaak Babel and His Red Cavalry Cossacks.” In The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology, pp. 107-25. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Kornblatt finds a number of connections between Babel and Nikolai Gogol and analyzes Red Cavalry in light of the Cossack myth.]

In his A History of Russian Literature, D. S. Mirsky praises Taras Bul'ba with an enthusiasm rare among students of Gogol. The novel is “heroic, frankly and openly heroic,” he writes, and “its place in Russian literature is unique—it has had no imitators or followers (except, perhaps, Babel in his stories of the Red Army).”¹ Maksim Gor'kii also suggested the comparison of Gogol and Isaak Babel (1894-41), but with little elaboration. He defended Babel, who had recently been attacked in the press, by claiming that Babel's Cossacks were bolder even than Gogol's.²

A critical tradition similarly links Babel with Tolstoi. “Like Tolstoi,” writes Steven Marcus, “he [Babel] saw in the Cossacks a conjunction of beauty and fierceness, in which their athleticism gave grace to their aggressiveness.”³ In this reading, Babel's Red Cavalry is firmly planted within the Cossack tradition, but the myth is reduced to a unidimensional manifestation of the noble savage.

Babel's own approach was more complex. When asked in 1937 to name his favorite author, Babel expressed his increasing preference for the writings of Tolstoi, and particularly the epic story “Khadzhi Murat.”⁴ Babel explained his attraction to Tolstoi's work:

A current flows unobstructed from the earth, directly through his hands, straight to the paper, and completely and mercilessly tears down all veils with the sense of truth. Moreover, as this truth makes its appearance, it clothes itself in transparent and beautiful dress.⁵

In Babel's praise of Tolstoi, we cannot help but remember Gogol's aesthetic statements in “About Little Russian Songs” and “Sculpture, Painting, Music” from Arabesques. The art described is spontaneous, like the Cossack songs, and violent like the Cossacks themselves and like music, which Gogol considered the highest form of art. In the same interview, Babel cited Sholokhov, author of The Quiet Don, as his favorite contemporary writer, and praised him for writing “heatedly” (goriacho), the term Gogol applied to his own work on the Cossacks.

Babel's debt to Gogol, specifically to his early Cossack works, is made explicit in only one story, “Odessa”:⁶ “It seems to me that there must come—and soon—the productive and life-creating influence of the Russian South.” He continues: “Do you remember the fecund sun of Gogol, a writer from the Ukraine? But if such descriptions existed, they were only an episode. That episode was overtaken by ‘The Nose,’ ‘The Portrait,’ and ‘Notes of a Madman.’”⁷ Babel calls for a writer who can recreate the spirit of Gogol's early Ukrainian stories, a spirit absent in the later northern tales, and implicitly issues his challenge as contender for the title of successor to Gogol's “fecund sun.”

There can be no question that in creating his own Cossacks, Babel borrowed much of the baggage of Gogol's myth. The heroes of Red Cavalry resemble Taras Bul'ba and his Cossack comrades much more closely than they do General Budennyi and the real Cossack cavalry of Babel's own experience in the Red Army. Babel enlisted in the army in 1917 and served on the Romanian front before contracting malaria.⁸ He subsequently worked in various capacities for the new government during the early years of the Civil War, including propagandist for the newspaper the Red Cavalryman. During the war with Poland in 1920, Babel was assigned to Budennyi's First Cavalry, and spent several months living closely with Budennyi's Cossacks under the assumed name Kiril Vasilevich Liutov, the name he would give to the principal narrator in Red Cavalry.⁹ He wrote articles for the division's propaganda sheet, as well as drafts of stories (lost during the campaign), and a diary soon transformed into Red Cavalry. Claiming instructions from Gor'kii, Babel joined the army in an effort to “go to the people,” and to gather material for his craft.¹⁰ The names, places, and situations in which his Cossack characters interact indeed grew from this material, but realism was far from Babel's preferred mode. As Mirsky asserts, his Cossacks are as mythically heroic as Gogol's.

The biographies of Gogol and Babel are strikingly similar. Both writers were born and spent their youth outside Russia proper, in the southwestern region of the empire. Both were exposed to religious tradition and to literature at an early age, impressions that were to shape their future art, and both moved to Petersburg as young men, to integrate into the cultural, Europeanized capital of the Russian state. Neither achieved immediate success as a writer, but both were lucky enough to receive encouragement from the most established writers of the time, Pushkin and Gor'kii, respectively. Ultimately, their works were widely published and duly acclaimed, and they remain popular to this day.¹¹

Neither writer produced a large body of work, partly because of their untimely deaths,¹² but more centrally because of their perfectionism. Both were compulsive rewriters. In a letter to his friend Pogodin, Gogol calls his difficulty in writing “mental constipation.”¹³ And Babel's often quoted line from the story “Guy de Maupassant” (“No iron can enter into the human heart as chillingly as a period accurately placed”)¹⁴ suggests the attention that he lavished on the execution of his stories. Konstantin Paustovskii recalls his friend's perfectionism in “A Few Words about Babel”:

He hardly ever said “I am writing,” but rather, “I am composing.” … He wrote slowly and always put off handing in his manuscripts. He lived in a constant panic at the thought of words that could no longer be altered, and he was always trying to gain time—just a few more days, or even hours—so that he could sit over his manuscript a little longer and go on polishing, with no one pressing him or getting in his way.¹⁵

DVOEDUSHIE

The two writers share an even more salient trait, and one that most likely affected their choice of Cossack heroes. Both Babel and Gogol bore a dual national allegiance: Gogol to Ukraine and to Russia, Babel to Russia and the Jews. As a Ukrainian in Petersburg of the 1830s, Gogol rode the crest of Russia's romantic fascination with its neighbor. Dvoedushie (literally, two-souledness, but in some circles carrying the connotation of double-dealing) was extremely fashionable at the time, and Gogol could claim an exotic southern temperament while flaunting his northern sophistication. He asserted that the two sides of his heritage were fully integrated,¹⁶ although we have seen that his choice of Cossack characters would suggest otherwise. The mythic heroes served to reconcile that which is in fact disparate and contradictory.

As was the case with Gogol, Babel's own efforts to reconcile opposing heritages created difficulties in his writing. Although as a child Babel had learned Hebrew and some Yiddish, his parents' mother tongue, he decided to write his first stories in French. The ultimate choice of Russian as his literary language may then have been an attempt, as Renato Poggioli believes, “not merely to escape from the ghetto, but to turn, through Russia, to Europe and the West.”¹⁷ But Babel's choice of Russian was as much a matter of tone as theme. At the time he began writing, Yiddish literature was still closely tied to folk sources on the one hand, and to the European realist tradition on the other. But Babel was attracted to modern experimental prose, both Western European and Russian. (Although a modernist school of Yiddish literature did flourish in Kiev in the twenties, Babel was the model for, not student of, those writers.)¹⁸

Odessa, Babel's hometown, produced a circle of talented writers, some of them Jewish like Babel, who were to form the core of the new Soviet literature when they, and the century, reached their twenties. This group included Babel's friend Konstantin Paustovskii, Valentin Kataev, Iurii Olesha, and I'lf and Petrov, the early Soviet satirists. For all of them, the idiom was Russian. Like Gogol before him, Babel adopted the dominant cultural idiom of his time not as an escape from his unique experience, but as a mediating gesture that broadened both his readership and his cultural base.¹⁹ Very few of his stories fail to include Jewish references, transformed but not eliminated by his choice of style and language.

Babel never rejected his Jewishness, and the tension of his dual nationality permeates his fiction. Liutov in Red Cavalry constantly feels other than any group he confronts. He struggles with the awareness of his Jewishness in the eyes of the Cossacks, and Russianness in the eyes of the Polish Jews and Catholics he meets.²⁰ As did Gogol, Babel set as a major problem the possible reconciliation of these opposing characteristics, as synecdoche for all alienating oppositions. The Cossack works of both men express a synthetic ideal that contrasts sharply to the fragmented world around them, and the intensity of these two writers thus draws from the centrality of the mythic process in their works.

And yet Babel and his literary predecessor differed in a major way. Although certainly not unique, the Ukrainian Gogol was nonetheless an oddity in Petersburg, where he consciously exploited his otherness as an aesthetic category. Babel, however, was far from unusual. Many members of the revolutionary leadership and the new Soviet intelligentsia were Jews, among them Averbakh, Kamenev, and Zinov'ev. These political leaders were Bolsheviks first, Russians second, and Jews a distant third. Many revolutionaries, among them Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Trotskii), changed their obviously Jewish-sounding names, and rejected both their religious and their cultural heritage. To be pro-Bolshevik in the first years of the Revolution meant to be international, not parochial and ethnocentric. Later, when internationalism (or cosmopolitanism) became anathema, to be pro-Bolshevik came to mean insularly nationalistic, and largely Russian. It never meant being a Jew. Babel's Jewish heritage was thus far from exotic on the one hand, and allegedly discarded by the Revolution on the other. Yet his stories and letters indicate that he could not escape the contradictions of dual allegiance, and he suffered them in his life as well as his art.

Babel's dvoedushie, oscillating between Russian culture and Jewish background, did not encompass any claim to Cossack inheritance. Gogol's family myth included descent from a well-known Cossack, and his Ukrainian affiliation indirectly linked him to the glorious Cossack past. Babel, on the other hand, was a member of an ethnic group persecuted by the historical Cossacks, and ridiculed or condemned in the Cossack fiction that Gogol made famous. His glorification of the Cossack heroes in Red Cavalry clearly derives from the tradition of Trans Bul'ba; but Babel's Cossacks occupy a much different dimension because of his own cultural and historical situation. Babel went beyond the role of mythologizer, one who naturally accepts and promotes the reconciliation offered by myth, to that of mythologist, or myth analyst. He examined the myth from his Jewish distance, not necessarily rejecting it, but putting it to the test of contemporary reality.

Babel's distanced stance led to adaptations of the myth. Not only did he place a greater emphasis on the relationship between Cossack and creative artist, he also tested the mythic topoi by extending them onto characters other than Cossacks. Gogol wrote of heroes at odds with the manifest aspects of our mundane world; Babel of a heroic world that infuses the otherwise mundane individual. Although he did not spare descriptions of the often grotesque and arbitrary nature of that world, he refused to condemn it. Reality may be cruel, but it is marvelous as well.

THE COSSACK TOPOI DISPERSED

The setting of Red Cavalry is a world turned upside down, a liminal realm where all characters, though immersed in destruction, can experience renewal. The tone is set by the first story, “Crossing the Zbruch.” Nature itself exudes passion, largely marked by the multiplicity of colors: purple poppies (polia purpurnogo maka), yellowing rye (veter igraet v zhelteiushchei rzhi), pearly fog (zhemchuzhnyi tuman), flowery slopes (tsvetistye prigorki), orange sun (oranzhevoe solntse), blackening Zbruch (pochernevshii Zbruch). The vivid visual description gives way to an aural one, with a large number of musical references, the art form previously associated with Cossack vivacity: the sonorous torrents (zvuchnye potoki), someone's ringing defamation (Kto-to tonet i zvonko porochit bogoroditsu), the river full of humming, whistling, and song (Reka useiana chernymi kvadratami teleg, ona polna gula, svista i pesen, gremiashchikh poverkh lunnykh zmei i siiaiushchikh iam) (23).

The first page of the story describes the vibrant landscape at all stages of the day, but the introduction of a temporal element recalls Gogol's technique that destroys instead of establishes historicity. The story begins like a dispassionate military dispatch:

The commander of Division Six reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn. The staff left Krapivno and our transport stretched out like a noisy rearguard along the highway running from Brest to Warsaw, built on peasant bones by Nicholas the First.

(23)

The first line identifies the division in question and the place of its maneuvers, information that also locates the action in time, for Novograd-Volynsk was a major arena in the Russo-Polish war of 1920. The reference to Nicholas the First widens the historical perspective. The present invasion becomes only one in a repetitive cycle that began even before Nicholas, for the reference to peasant bones also recalls Peter the Great's sacrifice of native labor to the establishment of his westward-looking capital of Sankt Peterburg. This string of associations backward into history forces the reader to lose his grounding in a particular historical moment.

The second paragraph refers in sequence to dawn, noon, evening, and night, setting up for the reader a progression through the day. Yet Babel negates movement through the repetitive ornateness of the paragraph, and the final sense is one of stasis.²¹ The atmosphere of Babel's stories has often been compared to the paintings of Chagall:

The space of both artists is color without a boundary, none even between heaven and earth. In this continuum of color there float images—some beautiful, some sordid; some delicately ethereal, some coarsely naturalistic; images of the peasants and Jews of Red Russia, their little towns, their huts, their horses and their cattle; and the moon in the most incredible, yet so real shades of color.²²

As Victor Terras observes in this quotation, Babel creates a world that knows no barriers, a type of permanent liminality. Things and people transgress the restrictions normally imposed by gravity, the march of time, or the distinctions between discrete objects. Heaven is juxtaposed with earth, beautiful with sordid, incredible with real, and thus Babel creates a picture of a mythical realm.

Babel frustrates the readers' expectations of temporal progression in “Crossing the Zbruch” in order to indicate that the crossing referred to in the title is not from place to place, and certainly not simply from Russia into Poland as sometimes suggested (the title has been incorrectly translated as “Crossing into Poland”), but into a new realm altogether. The transgression of the spatial boundary represented by the river is the first of many in the cycle. That the actual crossing takes place at sunset, as does the action in so many of the stories,²³ suggests as well the temporal threshold between clear day and obscure night. On the other side, we find ourselves abandoned by normal referents, in a place where characters differ from our mundane world, and where all share in liminal aspects before associated only with the Cossacks.²⁴ The myth of the Cossacks, with its boundlessness, wholeness, and vitality, extends throughout the world of Red Cavalry.

Provoked by mention of the Jewish holiday of Passover in the story (“shards of secret pottery used by Jews once a year, on the Passover,” 24), one critic suggests we compare the Zbruch to the biblical Red Sea: “The Zbruch is a symbolic boundary which relates the crossing to the Exodus from Egypt, with all the overtones of redemption in the Passover story.”²⁵ Although he does not draw the parallel, in light of the myth we must recall the Cossacks of Taras Bul'ba who cross the Dnestr, like the Red Sea, and exit out of history into myth.

At Passover, Jews remember the historical Exodus from Egypt, but relate the story as if it were in the present. The Passover narrative is told largely in the first person; each year the participants in the seder recite: “In every generation one must look upon himself as if he personally had come out of Egypt, as the Bible says: ‘And thou shalt tell thy son on that day, saying, it is because of that which the Eternal did to me when I went forth from Egypt.’”²⁶ Passover offers ritual renewal, when historical events are placed in an atemporal light. To have the Cossacks' transgression of their first boundary in Red Cavalry take place during this mythic time raises them as well to the level of myth. They cross over into a realm in which we confront reminders of at least ritual messianic reunion.²⁷

“Crossing the Zbruch” ends with a Jewish girl's rhetorical cry, spoken “with terrible strength” (24). We would expect both the rhetoric and the potency from a Cossack, not a Jew. Yet Cossack heroism in this particular story appears only in a dream, albeit one that contains a reference to the heroes of The Iliad in the eyes that fall out of the head of the warrior, a common epic wound: “I dream about the commander of the sixth division. He is chasing the brigade commander on a heavy stallion and plunges two bullets between his eyes. The bullets pierce the brigade commander's head and both eyes fall out onto the earth” (24). But the Cossacks all appear puppetlike in this story, including the narrator, whom ironically we assume at this point to be a Cossack like his fellow cavalrymen. He is fidgety and negative, and frightened by his own nightmare.

By conferring a heroic stance on the girl instead of on the Cossack, Babel blurs the boundaries between the characters. On the one hand each character seems chosen from a stock repertory, almost like eighteenth-century puppet plays in which Cossacks play a clearly defined brave and exotic role.²⁸ The Jews “jump about in silence like monkeys or Japanese at the circus” (24); the Cossack Savitskii pursues an enemy on a heavy stallion and “plunges two bullets into his eyes” (24). Yet already here in the first story Babel merges traits from one group onto another, a form of barrier crossing but one that could confuse the mythic image rather than clarify it. The girl is the one who embodies rebirth in the midst of destruction, for she carries a child in her womb as she cares for the corpse of her father. She is the one who calls out the challenge for heroism.

Babel's mythic motifs in Red Cavalry are wandering motifs. All the elements are present but they do not relate always to the Cossacks alone, as though his world as a whole is boundless and confers majesty on the heroes instead of the heroes on the world. In the second story, Babel presents us with a Polish Catholic who shares Cossack qualities: he moves “fiercely” (iarostno); his size is like a giant (ispolin); he acts “without pity” (bez sozhaleniia); he drinks and wears a “costume.” (The wearing of strange clothing in Red Cavalry is generally associated with the Cossacks.)²⁹ The narrator in this story is first called pan as though he were Polish, then tovarishch as though he were Bolshevik. And we still do not know in this story that he is not a Cossack and, as we will discover, in many ways is the antithesis of the Cossack heroes. Yet here he calls himself a “violent intruder” and goes off, ironically into a church, to rejoin his comrades.

We can best discover the diffusion of topoi into non-Cossack characters in a cycle of stories—“Gedali,” “The Rebbe,” “The Rebbe's Son”—that is embedded within Red Cavalry. These three stories present the Jews of Poland, ugly and pathetic, but inexplicably attractive to Liutov, and made so to the readers as well. Critics often claim that Babel uses the Jewish characters to demonstrate his true allegiance to the values of his own past. Or, conversely, they assert that the portrayal of dying Jewish culture proves Babel's effort to embrace the new secular world of the Revolution. On more careful examination, we find that Gedali and his friends share many traits with the Cossacks, including their essential spirit of life. They are not contrasted to but compared with the mythic Cossacks. Babel makes the connection between Jew and Cossack explicit elsewhere, for certainly the Jews of Babel's Odessa stories, written at about the same time as Red Cavalry, differ from the Cossacks in name only. Benia Krik, the Jewish gangster of “The King” and “How It Was Done in Odessa,” “was passionate, and passion rules the universe” (162).

The three stories of the mini-cycle describe the Hasidim of Eastern Europe. The title character of the central story is himself a Hasidic rebbe. A rebbe (rabbi, not ravvin or ravvi, in Russian) is the charismatic leader of a Hasidic community, not a traditional Jewish rabbi, as usually translated.³⁰ He represents the Hasidic movement that swept through Ukraine and Poland in the eighteenth century, still the heyday of Cossackdom, with its message of renewal and of the access of all human beings to the divine life-force. Hasidic Jews retained the practices of traditional observance, but claimed to reinfuse them with life, music, and joy. They rebelled against the ossified old order, as did the latter-day revolutionaries to whom they are here compared.

Liutov's attraction to these particular Jews stems from his general desire to participate in the paradoxical intensity of their world, just as he yearns to join the Cossacks in their immediate experience of life. “I roam around Zhitomir,” says the narrator in “Gedali,” “in search of the shy star [of Sabbath devotion]. Jews with beards like the prophets, with passionate rags (s borodami prorokov, so strastnymi lokhmot'iami) on their sunken chests sell chalk, blueing, and wicks by the yellow and indifferent walls of the ancient synagogue” (46). Here Liutov meets Gedali, the old Jew who proclaims a revolution that will be integrated with the Sabbath. As one critic notices, Babel finds a vital connection between the Cossacks of Red Cavalry and “elements of the Jewish tradition he could accept, elements of prophetic fervor and revolutionary awareness.”³¹

Like the Cossacks, the Hasidic Jews of Red Cavalry form an all-male community. Both Gedali and the rebbe's son refer to “Mother,” but only as an abstraction, a compelling force much like the fiancée-steppe of the Cossacks. Women play little role in the public or communal aspects of traditional Judaism. Babel stresses the Hasidic male's self-sufficiency when he presents a scenario in which life itself passes from male to male, as Il'ia Bratislavskii, the rebbe's son, dies practically in the arms of Liutov. In the process, however, the latter breathes in the breath of the former, adding strength to the “storm of imagination” already bursting out of his ancient body (147). The dying Jew reinvigorates Liutov; “I received the last breath of my brother” (147).

ADOPTION OR ADAPTATION OF THE COSSACK TOPOI?

To understand why Babel may have chosen Cossack characters only to disperse their traditional heroic topoi over the rest of his fictional world, and more important, to clarify the effects of the mythic dispersal, we need to take a closer look at Red Cavalry specifically in light of the Cossack myth.

Babel's diary from his summer with Budennyi's Cossacks reveals his distance from the exotic but nonetheless flesh-and-blood soldiers. Babel was disgusted by war, deadened by the dull and destructive campaigns, and stricken by the insensitivity of the Cossack warriors to their environment. That Babel's association with the Cossacks occasionally tormented him is evidenced by an entry from July 24 when he describes being billeted with the Cossack Prishchepa in the home of some Polish Jews on the Sabbath. The Cossacks ordered their hosts to cook a meal, an activity forbidden to religious Jews on their day of rest. Babel writes that he was forced to remain silent for in that context he was a Russian like the Cossacks, not a Jew like his hosts. The following day would be Tisha b'Av, a holy fast day in the Jewish calendar commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Babel notes here the parallel between the Polish campaign and, as he writes, the “frightful words of the prophet—they eat manure, the girls are raped, the men slain, Israel destroyed, angry, wailing words. The lamp smokes, the old woman howls, outside is Demidovka, Cossacks, everything like the time when the Temple fell. …”³²

Babel modeled his heroes on men whom he actually knew in the early 1920s, and who participated in historical events well known to his reading public. We might be led to believe we are reading a war report. Reality and artifice, however, are inextricably tangled, as Babel uses the facts to create the impression of historicity only then to destroy it. He confuses chronology, as Gogol did, so we can no longer follow the march of the army as we might in his nonmythic diary.

Babel begins apparently objectively, but immediately introduces surreal descriptions into his war report.³³ And like Gogol, Babel makes veiled reference to the epics of Homer and The Lay of Igor's Campaign, as in the “standards of sunset” that “blow above our heads” in “Crossing the Zbruch.”³⁴ The struggle in Red Cavalry becomes a mock-epic battle, as the Russo-Polish war definitely was not.

Babel's frequent references to song in general and bards in particular further associate his cycle with epic. The Cossacks' song “hums like a stream running dry” (“Berestechko” 87), and an epic songster joins the Cossacks as they ride past Cossack burial mounds from the time of Khmel'nitskii. The reference to the famous Cossack leader reminds the reader of history, and the bard then transforms that history into myth. He plays a bandura and sings of ancient Cossack glory (slava/kleos).

Yet Red Cavalry is no more a true epic than Taras Bul'ba. Homer created literature as we know it by writing down a linear narrative told in time and existing throughout time, but the mythic consciousness from which it had evolved saw the world spatially, not temporally.³⁵ Myth knew only space; postmythic thought learned both time and space. According to Joseph Frank, modern literature has the distinction of recapturing that mythic imagination for which historical time does not exist.³⁶ The relationship of Babel's Red Cavalry to myth becomes much clearer in this light, for the destruction of time associated with epic in the stories grows directly from and leads directly back into myth.

Many critics have pointed to the spatial quality of Babel's stories. Victor Terras speaks of static space, filled with vivid, sensuous images. In this connection he compares Babel and Chagall. Patricia Carden remarks on Babel's interest in art as well as on the spatial aspect of his stories in Joseph Frank's special sense: “the Babel story is a carefully limited space, a canvas into which he paints the significant world-objects before our eyes.”³⁷ We must apprehend that space in an instant, not through time. Like Gogol's work, Babel's cycle uses epic elements to point beyond epic, to mythic consciousness.

The very form of a fragmented cycle emphasizes its timelessness. Babel first published many of the stories separately, destroying their development as a temporal narrative. They are infinitely reorderable. And Babel specifically broke up the two mini-cycles within the larger cycle: “Gedali”—“The Rebbe”—“The Rebbe's Son” and “Story of a Horse”—“Continuation of Story of a Horse.” In the cycle as a whole there is no progression, development, or maturity on the part of any of the characters. Red Cavalry does not take the reader through a narrative in which event follows event. Rather it forces the reader into a reading act that, in total, suspends linear time and causal expectations. The narrator himself must continuously refight his battle to be accepted by the Cossacks, only to lose the security of community he might have gained in the very next story. Only in “Argamak,” the last story as now published, are we, and the narrator, allowed the satisfaction born of progress for any length of time. Babel added this story, however, long after he had completed the rest of the cycle. It functions as a demythologizing force and did not grow from the same artistic impulse as the rest of Red Cavalry.

Babel put date and place markers at the end of many of his stories in the space one would expect to find the date of composition. Instead, the markers refer to the month in which the action of the story supposedly occurred.³⁸ This practice in itself mythologizes by destroying the distance between event and literary recreation. To this day, many scholars confuse the sequence of writing and publication of Babel's stories. Babel creates the illusion that the “true” stories were written down as they were actually experienced, producing the “juxtaposition of past and present” that makes “history become unhistorical.”³⁹

Babel no doubt learned from Gogol one of the important techniques for crossing temporal barriers: the establishment of fluctuating distances between the narrator, reader, and heroes. The rapid alternation of narrative styles (lyrical, bureaucratic, dramatic, terse, florid, skaz) works in a similar fashion to Gogol's narrative technique in Evenings. Eventually we lose our bearings and do not know whom to take as an authority.

The stories told in first person, presumably from the mouths (or pens) of Cossacks themselves, particularly cause us to question our position, moral as well as temporal. We are uncertain, for example, how to evaluate a character like Matvei Pavlichenko (“The Life Story of Pavlichenko, Matvei Rodionych”), who returns to his home to seek vengeance on Nikitinskii, the man who has stolen his wife. He tells his story with such ardor and conviction that we are drawn to him. Yet how can we condone murder, and particularly a murder so personal, so physical, and so graphic as that of his former landlord? The devoted husband and revolutionary Cossack stomps another human being into a pulverized mass. The narrator, with whom we can usually associate quite easily, yearns desperately for just this ability to destroy.

We do not know how to feel about war in general. Babel associates it often with the bright sun, as though its raw violence is itself the fecund power he sought in “Odessa.” The lyrical tone he uses to describe horrible acts of destruction disarms us of an immediate negative and moralistic response. Ultimately we must recognize that the world of Red Cavalry is mythic, and thus beyond the limits of our moral judgment. The characters play by different rules, rules which attract and repulse at the same time.

Most readers notice a lack of resolution in Red Cavalry. They feel ill at ease over Babel's apparent failure to choose between two opposing lifestyles, whether “Cossack ethos versus Jewish ethos,” “way of violence versus way of peace,” “sun versus moon,” or “outdoor world versus indoor world.”⁴⁰ Many critics make the choice for Babel, despite his ambivalent messages, claiming that the author favored nostalgia for his Jewish roots over the future-oriented revolutionary fervor of the Cossacks, or vice versa.

Some critics do recognize the continued ambiguity of Babel's portrayal by allowing for conflict not simply between two groups, Cossack and Jew, but within each group itself.⁴¹ The conflict between Jews is most apparent. Liutov, the Russian Jew, wanders through remnants of the dying Polish culture and yearns for the life of Odessa. Yet the Hasidim who confront him in the person of Gedali exude the life he associates only with the Jews of his youth. It is not necessary to determine which side of any opposition the author ultimately supports if we recognize that the combination of opposites itself is an aspect of the myth he evokes.

Even more significant for his adaptation of the myth, Babel adopts many of the elements involving regeneration through violence. The Cossacks of “Crossing the Zbruch” not only traverse the river but actually submerge themselves in it. The horses march in up to their backs, and one Cossack sinks. The submersion suggests baptism, further supporting the view already discussed of the crossing as a transgression of barriers between two metaphysical or in this case even religious realms. On the other side the narrator confronts a pregnant woman, the first figure described in Novograd. Despite the death around her, including that of her own father, she represents new life. The remnants of Passover dishes, although broken, also suggest new life through the symbol of the spring celebration of liberation and hope.

The human feces included in the list of debris in “Crossing the Zburch” foreshadows the manure into which Liutov grinds the head of the goose in “My First Goose.” In this latter story his act of violence and murder, no matter how debased or ridiculous, marks a transition into a new state, into Cossackdom, if only temporarily. The juxtaposition of death (in the goose) and life (in the manure that provides fodder for new growth out of refuse) metaphorically parallels Liutov's rebirth as a member of the Cossack band.⁴²

The stomping to death of the goose in turn suggests the death of Nikitinskii by the hand, or literally the feet, of Matvei Rodionovych Pavlichenko in the story already cited. In this case also the physical destruction leads to a form of rebirth, for the Cossack experiences the essence of life through his act of murder: “But ya know, I don't pity myself. So, ya know, I stomp on my enemy for an hour or so. I want to know life, to know it as it really is” (76).

In the second story of the cycle, “The Catholic Church at Novograd,” the narrator dashes into the crypt of the church after having been frightened by two skulls. His action obviously deepens the morbid mood instead of annulling it. Once below, however, he notices a staircase leading up to the altar, and sees lights “running in the heights, in the very dome” (26). The lights, we learn, belong to candles held by the narrator's fellow Cossacks. The Cossacks then serve as metaphoric guides from darkness to light, from underground to high above ground, from death to new life.

Babel's portrayal of women in Red Cavalry, like the rebirth imagery, also derives from the Cossack myth. In his diary Babel expressed sympathetic interest in the women who traveled with the Cossack division.⁴³ In the stories, however, the question of sex and the Cossacks takes a different turn. Many critics have noted the strong sexuality of Babel's Cossacks. Like their violence, it lends intensity and urgency. The sexual tension attached specifically to women characters, however, always carries a sense of sickness or perversion, not life-giving force. Venereal disease is a recurrent motif (“The Ivans,” “Sashka the Christ,” “Continuation of Story of a Horse”), and any heterosexual union leads to grief. Irina's relations with Vasilii in “Evening” breathe corruption; in a scene of Gogolian fragmentation, we are told how her fat-heeled feet and his black crooked nail stick out from the kitchen door while the two make love. As cook, Vasilii deals with “the meat of dead animals and the greed of living ones” (95)—neither appetizing, much less life-engendering, images. Neither women's sexuality nor their particular nurturing aspects have any place in the real Cossack world.⁴⁴

The Cossacks' sexuality, and the intensity derived from it, thus do not come from their association with women. Even the goose murdered by Liutov in “My First Goose” as a substitute for “spoiling a dame” (50) is actually a gander. In the Cossack myth, it is a male-male union that characterizes the true Cossacks; men are their own source of life and nurture.

The very male Cossack hero Savitskii in “My First Goose” has “long legs like girls sheathed to the neck in shining riding boots,” and here we are not so far from Taras Bul'ba and the potent celibacy of the Cossack “monk.” The Cossack army invades a virginal field in the very first story, and repeatedly unites with and is embraced by nature. As an added twist, Matvei calls the Revolution “sweetheart,” suggesting a sexual union with the epic history of the cycle, and not only with its environment.

Much of the Cossacks' vitality in Red Cavalry takes the form of an immediate understanding of life itself. Matvei understands it through his involvement with death. On the other hand, the Cossack Afon'ka Bida condemns Liutov, the Jewish intellectual, for his misunderstanding of it (“The Death of Dolgushov”); Liutov cannot kill. Paradoxically, as in all of the Cossack myth, violence is a productive act.

THE VIOLENCE OF CREATION

By stressing the sexual and regenerating topoi of the Cossack myth, Babel further adapts the Cossack hero. The historical Cossacks were enemies of his people, and by the twentieth century had come to represent repression for all citizens, not only Jews. The small percentage of Cossacks who joined the Red Army did not change this reputation, for they excelled in anarchic behavior and merciless retribution. Babel turned to the traditional hero despite, or in fact on account of, the disparity between the Cossacks he knew and his own sensibilities.

Babel operated, and attempted to reconcile the polar experiences of his life, in the world of literature, or creative art as a whole. Although Gogol was no stranger to this world, his primary concern was the “Russian soul,” a category under which he subsumed vitality, productivity, and art itself. Babel's Cossacks are manifestations not so much of his Russianness as of his creative potential. They represent the energy necessary to write. That Babel believed energy is violent is suggested in the quote about Tolstoi's art cited at the beginning of this chapter, or in the famous simile from “Guy de Maupassant”: the placement of a period is like a sword thrust. The harmony of violence and life in the Cossack myth provided a metaphor for Babel's own creative impulse.

Babel's most obvious artist character in Red Cavalry is Pan Apolek, the errant Pole who drew from the citizens of Novograd to create religious paintings labeled sacrilegious by the official Church. His renditions of holy persons resemble too naturalistically the profane models that inspired them. When he paints, Apolek ignores the boundary between human and divine, doing violence to the letter of the ecclesiastic law. That the painter's transgression in fact demonstrates the spiritual quality of our own world does not impress the Church authorities, but it is Babel's major preoccupation. The artist reconciles the spirit and the flesh; he makes the physical holy and the holy physical.

Here is yet another character who unexpectedly resembles the Cossack hero; a violent creator, he too must be understood in light of the Cossack myth. Speaking of Pan Apolek, a Polish character exclaims: “O, this man! This man'll never die in his bed” (40). One would expect such words only in praise of a Cossack warrior like Taras Bul'ba. But the artist Pan Apolek shares the energy and contradictory destructive creativity of the Cossacks. His name itself suggests both Apollo, god of sun and order, and Apol'lyon, demon of destruction and the bottomless pit.⁴⁵ The name also recalls Apollinarius and the Church controversy that attempted to determine the relationship of the two opposing natures in the person of Christ, human and divine.⁴⁶

Yet, the difference between Gogol's creative destroyers and Babel's violent artist is one we have already seen. Gogol's Cossacks embody the ideal essence of the Russian soul that is hidden by mundane reality. Babel's characters, in that they all—Cossack, Jew, artist—resemble one another, show the ideal essence uncovered in the world around us.

To follow Apolek's example, as he vows to do at the beginning of the story, the narrator plays the role of his own bard. He is a wanderer, moving from Cossack to Cossack or hero to hero, collecting stories, like “Pan Apolek” itself, and eternalizing the glory of the events. His craft—storytelling—is his own creative act, juxtaposed with the physical violence of the Cossacks, the spiritual creativity of the Hasids, and Pan Apolek's heretical painting.

Babel must assume that the creative image of his mythic Cossacks is strong enough to prevent any confusion resulting from its presence among his other characters. He is mostly correct, for the non-Cossacks rise to the level of myth. The diffusion of topoi is, however, a profound adaptation of the myth. No longer are the Cossack heroes contrasted to mere mortals. Instead the world as a whole joins them in timeless grandeur.

Babel risks loss of clarity and, in turn, the disintegration of the myth. By this point, however, the Cossacks have a fixed identity. By spilling over their characteristics onto other heroes, Babel need not fear for their integrity. Rather, he points to a profound identity vacuum in the rest of the world. Like the metaphysical emptiness of Gogol's Poles, the weakness in a character such as Liutov makes him vulnerable to attack. He might not survive the incursion of the Cossacks, or he might manage to imbibe their spirit. Although he does not become a Cossack (or a Hasid or a religious painter), he does befriend all, and ultimately expresses himself through a violently creative act—the stories he tells through the pen of Babel.

It would be misleading, however, to conclude on such an unambiguous note. A sense of distance, which some interpret as simple nostalgia but is more likely complex irony, pervades Red Cavalry. The reticence of the cycle as a whole to take a positive stand about its portrait of the ideal may well point back to Tolstoi more than Gogol. Red Cavalry, as does The Cossacks, balances precariously between mythic affirmation and ironic malaise, so that some readers are led to see Liutov's desire to join the Cossacks as not only vain but pathetic. Liutov says one thing, but Babel “means” the other.

The irony, as has been noted, however, is “double-edged”;⁴⁷ it is “a battle in which both sides win and lose.”⁴⁸ In a sense, all the characters in Red Cavalry are both unappealing and extremely attractive. Wavering between parody and myth, Babel suggests the possible affinity of destruction and progress, war and wonder. He adopts the Cossack myth not so much to glorify the heroes themselves as to emphasize the applicability to his own chaotic world of the creative power he recognizes they wield.⁴⁹

CONCLUSION: STORY OF A HORSE

Babel's adaptations attest to the continued power of the Cossack myth, but they reorder its priorities, placing an increased emphasis on the topoi of regeneration as it relates to the creative artist. Babel's understatement of the Cossacks' role as Russian national symbol is not necessarily typical of his contemporaries, but he does share with the poets to be discussed in the following chapter his association of Cossack and artist.

An analysis of the two-part story within Red Cavalry, “Story of a Horse” and “Continuation of Story of a Horse,” can best recapitulate the differences and common ground between Gogol's and Babel's Cossacks. The story presents Savitskii—the same Cossack who shoots out his adversary's eyes in the opening story and sends Liutov to his Cossack tormentors in “My First Goose”—in the role of renegade Cossack. Abusing his authority as division chief, he appropriates a white stallion from Khlebnikov, commander of the First Squadron. The horse in question “had a magnificent yet untamed form” (perhaps a little heavy, from the narrator's non-Cossack point of view) (80). Khlebnikov received in exchange “a smooth-gaited dark mare from a not-so-bad line,” that is, a domesticated, dull female for the brilliant male. Considering the emphasis placed on the horse as an extension of the Cossack in Red Cavalry and in all of the Cossack myth, it is clear that Khlebnikov felt deprived of that which symbolized his own masculine, Cossack essence.

Khlebnikov thirsts for revenge. He writes to the Army Staff for just retribution and receives back an order, written in dry official language, for the return of his horse. Meanwhile Savitskii has been replaced and sent to the reserves. He now lives in a Polish town with the horse and a Cossack woman previously found with a Jew. By this time he owns twenty other thorough-breds, looked on as his own property. The former division chief lives alone, separated from the other Cossacks. In fact, Savitskii seems to have abandoned Cossackdom altogether. By settling in Poland he defies the Cossacks' traditional rejection of fixed home and their antagonism toward the Polish enemy; his association with a woman—and one already defiled by a Jew—ignores the Cossack bachelor tradition in which the warriors take the “virgin field and the good steed” for their tenderness and the sabre for their mother.⁵⁰ His possession of an entire stable ridicules the Cossack disregard for material wealth; as Gogol has shown, a real Cossack will drink away any gold in his pockets or carelessly forget the spot in which he buried his booty. Babel spares no details. Savitskii's residence is a “ragged slut,” a “maimed little town,” thus both defiled and miniature in contrast to the vast virginal steppe. “Drenched in perfume and resembling Peter the Great [the historical character associated earlier with the bridling of southern, Cossack freedom], he lived in disgrace” (80).

The whole environment suggests anti-Cossack domesticity: foals greedily suck the teats of their mothers, and Savitskii's Cossack woman lazily cares for her physical appearance and walks “carrying her breasts on high heels, breasts that wriggled about like an animal in a sack” (81). Savitskii calls not for gorelka, the traditional Cossack vodka, and not even for a samovar, but for a “little samovar,” a diminutive that renders his request precious.

Savitskii turns a “deadened face” toward Khlebnikov when the latter comes to retrieve his horse, and utters a line of rhetoric that, albeit still Cossacklike, can only strike us as ironic given the description of his visage. “‘I still live,’ he said, embracing his woman. ‘Yet can my legs march, yet can my steeds gallop, yet can my arms reach you and does this cannon of mine burn near my body …’” (81). He reaches for the gun that lies across his naked stomach, a feeble effort to prove his male potency, but enough to frighten Khlebnikov.

The remainder of the first episode of the story concerns Khlebnikov's reaction to Savitskii's refusal to honor the order of the letter from Army Staff, and the narrator's reaction to Khlebnikov. Like other “creative” Cossacks in the collection, Khlebnikov lays down his revolver and takes up his pen, becoming consumed in the writing of a letter voicing his grievances.

Khlebnikov's recourse to letter writing cannot help but recall the turn taken by the two antiheroes in Gogol's “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” discussed in the conclusion of Chapter 3. In “The Tale,” the two Ivans, both descendents of Cossacks who renounced all heroic blood, argue over possession of a useless gun and the flinging of childish epithets. Babel's Khlebnikov chooses to solve his dispute through official channels rather than in battle with his fellow Cossack. Ivan Nikiforovich and Ivan Ivanovich similarly play out their quarrel with paper and pen instead of bullet and blood. And the outcome for each is equally unrewarding. Gogol informs us that the dispute stagnated in legal proceedings and stretched on interminably. Babel tells us that the chief of staff refused to listen to Khlebnikov's second plea since “your case has been decided. … Your stallion has been returned by me …” (81). Having fulfilled the letter of the law by writing the first order, the official feels that the matter is done. In both Gogol and Babel, action stops when writing begins.

“Continuation of Story of a Horse” is nothing more than a series of letters. Khlebnikov and Savitskii have apparently changed places, the former leaving the army, the latter returning. As in Gogol's story, the preliminary apparent difference between the two characters blurs as the story progresses.

Savitskii's letter that closes the episode ends on a curious note. The white stallion has died and the Cossack, too, will probably die soon in battle, he claims, but

We will see each other, to give it to you straight, in the kingdom of heaven. But, as rumor has it, the old man in heaven doesn't have a kingdom, but a regular brothel. … There's gonorrhea enough as it is on earth, so maybe we won't see each other. With that, comrade Khlebnikov, I'll take my leave.

(121)

Savitskii's discussion of divine venereal disease raises the suggestion that death may be nothing more than a continuation of life on earth. Thus, if Gogol ended “The Tale” with the narrator's declaration that “It is boring in this world, gentlemen” (Skuchno na etom svete, gospoda), Babel could have his narrator retort, “And in that one, too, I'm afraid.” “Story of a Horse” can be read as an amplification of Gogol's travesty of the Cossack myth: two Cossacks exhibit non-Cossack behavior; one desires an object, a symbol of masculine Cossack power, that belongs to the other; they turn to documents instead of weapons to resolve their differences; and the dispute remains unresolved. Boredom reigns. This minicycle in Red Cavalry seems, on the surface, to deny the vibrancy of the Cossack myth. To be reborn means nothing, for life has no spirit anywhere, and no mythic world is possible.

Yet Babel's version may be read in another way as well. Gogol's story, which ends the Mirgorod collection of his southern stories and points to his “northern” fiction, is an inversion of the Cossack myth. Red Cavalry, as we have seen, represents rather a dispersion. The cycle does not end on “Continuation of Story of a Horse.” Instead, the reader is sent back into the Cossacks' strange and wondrous world in the next story.

And Babel does not bring in his narrator for an ironic comment at the end of “Continuation of Story of a Horse,” although this device is not unknown in Red Cavalry. In Gogol's story, the narrator's comment reinforces a clear ironic distance between the readers and the two Ivans, closing the door forever on our erstwhile relationship to the inhabitants of Mirgorod. Babel will not allow even this reassurance about the disjunction of fiction and reality. Babel originally published the story as “Timashenko and Mel'nikov,” apparently having based it on an event he witnessed between those two members of the Sixth Division of the cavalry. Mel'nikov complained that the story misrepresented his case. Babel apologized in a letter to the editor of the journal October, and simply changed the names.⁵¹ That this story is grounded in experience—and that contemporaries often reacted as though Babel's works were meant as documentary evidence—seems only too appropriate. Babel gives us a clear proof that truth is stranger than fiction. Or myth is truer than reality.

So, parody is not ruled out, but neither is the possibility that the wonder of the Cossacks and their fellow characters in Red Cavalry is an antidote to the metaphysical boredom of the two Ivans. Such mythic energy is not found in particular characters, however, who could repudiate it as does Savitskii, but is rather diffused in the world around them. Pan Apolek recognizes this fact and needs no other inspiration for his representations of a higher reality than the motley Poles and Jews that he meets in towns and villages of his own homeland.

The energy of a mythic realm can therefore be exploited by those who enter it. The distance or nostalgia perceived by readers of Red Cavalry is but a product of the difficulty of Liutov's continued search for a door into what is, in fact, the very world around him.

Notes

1. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), 151. Babel's Red Army stories comprise the cycle Konarmiia, an abbreviation for Horse Army or Cavalry, but generally translated as Red Cavalry.

2. Maksim Gor'kii, “Rabselkoram i voenkoram o tom, kak uchilsia pisat',” Pravda, Sept. 30, 1928, 3. See also Patricia Carden, The Art of Isaac Babel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 59, 76, 127; James E. Falen, Isaac Babel, Russian Master of the Short Story (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), 52-54; Martin B. Klotz, “Poetry of the Present: Isaak Babel's Red Cavalry,” Slavic and East European Journal 18 (1974):160; Judith Stora-Sandor, Isaac Babel', 1894-1941, l'homme et l'oeuvre (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 77; I. A. Smirin, “Na puti k Konarmii,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo 74 (Moscow: Nauka, 1965):482.

3. Steven Marcus, “The Stories of Isaac Babel,” Partisan Review 22, no. 3 (Summer 1955):403. See also Lionel Trilling, Introduction to Isaac Babel: The Collected Stories, trans. and ed. Walter Morrison (Cleveland and New York: New American Library, 1955), 18, published also in Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking Press, 1965); Ragna Grøngaard, An Investigation of Composition and Theme in Isaak Babel's Literary Cycle Konarmija (Aarhus: Arkona, 1979), 87; R. W. Hallett, Isaac Babel (Letchworth, Hertfordshire: Bradda Books, 1972), 51.

4. Although Khadzhi Murat is not a Cossack, he can be understood as an extension of the highly ambivalent heroes portrayed in The Cossacks, as discussed in Chapter 6. Renato Poggioli claims that Red Cavalry resembles Khadzhi Murat much more than it does The Cossacks. “Isaak Babel in Retrospect,” The Phoenix and the Spider (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 234.

5. Interview during a celebratory evening at the Writers' Union, Sept. 28, 1937, first published in Nash Sovremennik 4(1964). Reprinted as “O tvorcheskom puti pisatelia,” in Zabytyi Babel', ed. Nikolai Stroud (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 267.

6. From “Moi Listki,” an early story published in Zhurnal zhurnalov, no. 51 (1917):4-5, under the transparent pseudonym Bab-El'. Republished in Zabytyi Babel' 48-51.

7. Zabytyi Babel' 48-49, 50.

8. The best available biography of Babel is by Judith Stora-Sandor, Isaac Babel', cited above. Babel's own autobiography is fascinating, but not necessarily accurate.

9. Babel thus concealed his obviously Jewish name from the traditionally anti-Semitic Cossacks. But he could not adopt a pseudo-character as well. If his stories are any indication of his experience, the Cossacks were painfully aware of “Liutov's” intellectualism, symbolized by his glasses and associated with the educated Jewish population.

10. Patricia Carden feels Gor'kii's advice may be apocryphal, or at least exaggerated by Babel as he developed a “self-created legend,” but that his search for material among the Cossacks was real (Art of Isaac Babel 11, 12-13).

11. Babel of course suffered a period of about twenty-five years when his works did not appear in the Soviet Union. He was “rehabilitated” after Stalin's death.

12. Gogol died at the age of forty-three, apparently from self-starvation. Babel, at the age of forty-seven, fell victim to the Stalinist purges.

13. Gogol', Letter of Feb. 1, 1833, PSS 10:257.

14. I. Babel', Konarmiia. Odesskie rasskazy. P'esy (Letchworth, Hertfordshire: Bradda Books, 1965), 262. Page numbers in the text will refer to this edition unless otherwise cited.

15. Konstantin Paustovskii, “Neskol'ko slov o Babele: Memuary,” first published in Nedelia, nos. 11-17 (Sept. 1966). Translated in Isaac Babel: You Must Know Everything, trans. Max Hayward, ed. Nathalie Babel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966):281.

16. See Gogol's December 24, 1844, letter to Smirnova quoted in Chapter 3, above.

17. Poggioli, Phoenix and the Spider 230. Cited in Carden, Art of Isaac Babel 8.

18. To this date, Soviet-Yiddish writers have been insufficiently studied. For some background, see Ashes out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet-Yiddish Writers, edited and introduction by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, 1977).

19. As Donald Fanger writes about Gogol: “Gogol capitalized on this appeal [the exoticism of Ukraine] as a mediator; by embracing his Ukrainian heritage, he became a Russian writer.” Creation of Nikolai Gogol 87-88.

20. See Stora-Sandor's comment in Isaac Babel' 85, 92.

21. Nils Åke Nilsson suggests that the passage appears as a temporal chain on a metonymic plane, but that when experienced metaphorically it is detached from either temporal or causal progression. “Isaak Babel's ‘Perechod čerez Zbruč,” Scando-Slavica 23 (1977):69-70.

22. Victor Terras, “Line and Color: The Structure of I. Babel's Short Stories in Red Cavalry,” Studies in Short Fiction 3, no. 2 (1966):153. See also Rochelle H. Ross, “The Unity of Babel's Konarmija,” South Central Bulletin 41, no. 4 (Winter 1981):116; Toby W. Clyman, “Babel' as Colorist,” Slavic and East European Journal 21 (1977):333.

23. See “The Road to Brody,” “My First Goose,” “Gedali,” “The Rebbe,” “The Death of Dolgushov,” “The Brigade Commander,” “Konkin,” and “Berestechko.” For the suggestion that sunset also refers to the traditional symbol of demarcation of temporal power and the beginning of the sacred Sabbath, see Efraim Sicher, “The Road to a Red Calvary: Myth and Mythology in the Works of Isaak Babel' of the 1920's,” Slavonic and East European Review 60, no. 4 (Oct. 1982):540.

24. Nilsson, “Perekhod” 65, and Falen, Isaac Babel 137, also read the crossing, as Nilsson states, as “a transition from one world to another.”

25. Sicher, “Road to a Red Calvary” 538.

26. From the traditional Passover Haggadah. Italics mine.

27. Passover falls in spring, not early summer, when the Polish campaign actually began. The dishes may be scattered because the invading soldiers removed them from storage, but Babel's choice to mention them specifically, and not other stored items, gives credence to this interpretation. Babel was not interested in temporal fidelity here.

28. See Elizabeth A. Warner, The Russian Folk Theater (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1977), 95-98, for a discussion of the Cossack in Russian and Ukrainian folk theater. For an early-nineteenth-century play strongly influenced by the eighteenth-century folk plays, see Kazak-stikhotvorets by A. A. Shakhovskoi (1812).

29. Carden, Art of Isaac Babel 49, 112-13.

30. For a discussion of the specific Hasidic references in these stories, see Maurice Friedberg, “Yiddish Folklore Motifs in Isaak Babel's Konarmija,” American Contributions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists, Vol. 2 (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1978), 192-203.

31. Herbert Marder, “The Revolutionary Art of Isaac Babel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 7(1973):56.

32. Babel, The Forgotten Prose, ed. and trans. Nicholas Stroud (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978), 129-30.

33. Or: “Hyperbolic, surrealistic elements,” according to Michael Falchikov, “Conflict and Contrast in Isaak Babel's Konarmiya,” Modern Language Review 72 (1977):128.

34. J. J. van Baak, “The Function of Nature and Space in Konarmija by I. E. Babel',” in Dutch Contributions to the Eighth International Congress on Slavists: Zagreb, Ljubljana, 1978 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1979), 44. Many critics have noticed Babel's use of epic. Terras's article “Line and Color” sees a travesty of epic (142), and Sicher claims Babel's use of myth gives the illusion of epic while mocking it (“Road to a Red Calvary” 531). See also Carol Luplow, Isaac Babel's “Red Cavalry” (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982), 40; Carden, Art of Isaac Babel 118, 126; Falen, Isaac Babel 80, 83-84, 119, 191-25; J. Catteau, “L'épopée dans la Cavalerie Rouge de I. Babel,” in VII Międzynarodowy Kongres Slawistów w Warszawie. 1973: Streszczenia referatów i komunikatów (Warsaw: PAN, 1973), 700-701; Milton Ehre, “Babel's Red Cavalry: Epic and Pathos, History and Culture,” Slavic Review 40, no. 2(1981):228-40; Martin B. Klotz, “Poetry of the Present: Isaak Babel's Red Cavalry,” Slavic and East European Journal 18(1974):160-69; A. B. Murphy, “The Style of Isaak Babel',” Slavonic and East European Review 44(1966):369.

35. John G. Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 11.

36. Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” 393.

37. Terras, “Line and Color” 152; Carden, Art of Isaac Babel 48.

38. L. Livshits, “Materialy k tvorcheskoi biografii I. Babelia,” Voprosy literatury 4(1964):122.

39. Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” 392.

40. Raymond Rosenthal, “The Fate of Isaak Babel,” Commentary 3, no. 2 (Feb. 1947); Trilling, Introduction to Collected Stories, and Falchikov, “Conflict and Contrast”; Gareth Williams, “Two Leitmotifs in Babel's Konarmija,” Die Welt der Slaven 17(1972):308-17; van Baak, “Function of Nature and Space” 37-55.

41. As Patricia Carden states, “the easy division between Cossack and Jew is inadequate” (Art of Isaac Babel 121). Louis Irabarne writes of the paradox of the “beautiful-bad Cossack” vs. “ugly-good Jew,” in “Babel's Red Cavalry as a Baroque Novel,” Contemporary Literature 14(1973):68; see also Stanley Edgar Hyman, “The Problem of Jewish Identity: Identities of Isaac Babel,” The Promised End (New York: World Publishing, 1963), 322; and Luplow, Isaac Babel's “Red Cavalry” 10.

42. See Falen, Isaac Babel 141, on the theme of rebirth, and Hyman, “Problem of Jewish Identity” 321, who sees changes of identity through rituals of rebirth as a major theme of Red Cavalry.

43. Livshits, “Materialy k tvorcheskoi biographii I. Babelia” 131.

44. Milk, a typically female symbol, is frequently associated with non-Cossack behavior in Red Cavalry. Matvei Pavlichenko describes himself in his young life as wasting away as a herdsman—not a warrior—surrounded by and infused with the smell of milk, for he has not yet entered true adult Cossackdom (73). The Polish enemy cries “white tears, real human milk” (“Konkin” 85) to express his fear of death. And the Cossack Akinfiev calls Liutov a molokan (a member of a pacifist sect named from the word moloko or milk) when he fails to act like a Cossack and cannot kill without regret (“After the Battle” 140).

45. My thanks to Robert A. Maguire for suggesting this allusion.

46. See Carden, Art of Isaac Babel 135-36.

47. Klotz, “Poetry of the Present” 161.

48. Terras, “Line and Color” 145.

49. In his autobiography, Babel describes his schoolboy world in just such chaotic and creative terms: “[At my school] studied the sons of foreign merchants, the children of Jewish brokers, imposing Poles, Old-Believers, and many overgrown billiard players. During breaks I would go out to the pier at the port or to the Greek coffee houses to play billiards, or to the Moldavanka to drink cheap Bessarabian wine in the cellars” (Konarmiia 19).

50. Cf. Gogol, Taras Bul'ba, PSS 2:43.

51. Oktiabr', no. 4(1924):224. See also Budennyi's outraged remarks in “Babizm Babelia,” Oktiabr', no. 3(1924):196-97 and “Otkrytoe pis'mo M. Gor'komu,” in Pravda, Oct. 26, 1928.