Red Cavalry: Reading Resources
Red Cavalry: A 2022 Great Jewish Books Club Selection
Biographical Background
Isaac Babel was a journalist, translator, and playwright, but he is primarily celebrated as the author of two collections of short fiction: Odessa Stories, about the eponymous city immediately before and after the Russian Revolution, and Red Cavalry, about the Soviet Army’s disastrous invasion of the newly independent Poland in the aftermath of the First World War. Babel had intimate knowledge of both subjects. As a native of Odessa he grew up on the teeming streets of the Moldavanka district, and as a young journalist he accompanied Semyon Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army during the Polish campaign.
Babel was born in 1894 to a Russified Jewish family in Odessa. His family, who dealt in agricultural machinery, was solidly middle class, although he later presented his background as less privileged in order to ingratiate himself with the new Soviet regime. Babel began writing short stories while attending business school in Kyiv; his first published story, “Old Shloyme,” which appeared when he was eighteen, depicted an eighty-six-year-old Jew in the Russian Empire who commits suicide rather than submit to forced conversion. After moving to Petrograd Babel went to work for Maxim Gorky’s Menshevik newspaper and found a lifelong mentor in the older writer. It was at Gorky’s suggestion that he volunteered to join the Red Army as a war correspondent and propagandist, and in 1920 he joined the First Cavalry Army on its Polish campaign.
Babel later credited his journalistic experiences with providing the raw material for his fiction. “I struck up friendships with morgue attendants, criminal investigators, and government clerks,” he wrote. “Later, when I began writing fiction, I found myself always returning to these ‘subjects,’ which were so close to me, in order to put character types, situations, and everyday life into perspective.”
Red Cavalry
The stories of Red Cavalry take place against the backdrop of the Polish-Soviet War, which was fought between the Soviet Union and the newly independent country of Poland between 1918 and 1921. The pieces that compose the collection grew out of Babel’s diary entries, but the resulting stories were highly polished literary creations. Mixing historical fact with fiction, Babel created not only an enduring testament to the revolution and violence that engulfed the former Russian Empire but also some of the most artful short stories of the twentieth century.
Most of the collection is told from the perspective of narrator Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov, a Jewish political officer and correspondent for the regiment’s official newspaper, the Krasnyi Kavalerist. The stories offer a wide-ranging perspective on the war, encompassing the brutality of soldiers toward civilians under their control; the lives of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish villagers before and during the conflict; the backgrounds of various soldiers and their lives in the service; and the buffoonish, darkly comic behavior of the officer class while the campaign goes from initial success to humiliating defeat.
The violence depicted in the Red Cavalry stories is sometimes extreme. In the very first story, “Crossing the River Zbrucz,” a Jewish woman tells the narrator how her father was hacked to death by his Polish neighbors. “He kept begging them, ‘Kill me in the backyard so my daughter won’t see me die!’ But they wouldn’t inconvenience themselves.” Yet Babel presents such acts of violence in a matter-of-fact tone, expressing neither shock nor outrage, as if they were ordinary and unremarkable. As Lionel Trilling wrote in his appraisal of the stories, “They were about violence of the most extreme kind, yet they were composed with a striking elegance and precision of objectivity, and also with a kind of lyric joy, so that one could not at once know just how the author was responding to the brutality he recorded, whether he thought it good or bad, justified or not justified.”
The perpetrators of violence are similarly presented without moral judgment, thus allowing the complexity of their characters to emerge. Such is the case in the third story in the collection, “A Letter,” in which a naive and somewhat childish young soldier tells his mother how his father and brothers, on opposite sides of the war, wound up murdering each other without pity or remorse.
Jews and Anti-Semitism
The narrator of Red Cavalry is apparently Jewish, although, like much else in the collection, his attitude toward his own Jewishness remains inscrutable. At times he seems sentimental about his Jewish background; in the story “Gedali” he begins with a halcyon memory of his grandparents before going on a search through Zhitomir for Jews with whom he can celebrate the Sabbath. On other occasions he seems to be at pains to prove himself to the Cossack soldiers that surround him. In “My First Goose” he is shunned by his fellow soldiers until he kills a goose with his boot and demands that their peasant hostess cook it for him. On some occasions he seems to be indifferent to the suffering of his fellow Jews. In “Berestechko” he writes impassively of an old Jewish man whose throat is slit on suspicion of espionage. In typical fashion, Babel provides no emotional or moral reaction to the events he describes:
Right outside the house a couple of Cossacks were getting ready to shoot an old silver-bearded Jew for espionage. The old man was screeching, and tried to break free. Kudrya from the machine gun detachment grabbed his head and held it wedged under his arm. The Jew fell silent and spread his legs. Kudrya pulled his dagger with his right hand and carefully slit the old man’s throat without spattering himself.
Literary Celebrity
Despite his official role as a writer for government organs, Babel’s stories often carried a satiric and mocking edge, a tendency that earned him powerful enemies. These included Budyonny himself, who attempted to have Babel executed. Nonetheless, the publication of Odessa Stories in the early 1920s, and Red Cavalry shortly thereafter, made Babel a literary celebrity. For nearly a decade he enjoyed the life of a state-supported writer at the height of popularity and critical acclaim, and he conducted a number of high-profile affairs. In 1919 he married Evgeniia Borisovna Gronfein, but their relationship soured and she moved to Paris in 1925. Although he visited her several times and fathered a daughter with her in 1929, they ultimately remained estranged. At the same time he was in a relationship with Tamara Kashirina, with whom he had a son, and later with engineer Antonina Priozhkova, with whom he had another daughter, in 1932.
Arrest and Death
Following the publication of Red Cavalry Babel’s creative life began to suffer. While writers were allowed a large measure of creative freedom in the early 1920s, Stalin’s increasingly repressive regime soon brought that freedom to an end. Babel published little and was condemned for his lack of productivity. At the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, in 1934, he declared that he was “the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence.” His play Maria, which depicted corruption within Soviet society, was shut down by the NKVD during rehearsals. By the late 1930s it had become difficult for him to get published.
On May 15, 1939, Babel was arrested by the NKVD at his dacha outside of Moscow on suspicion of Trostkyism, terrorism, and spying for France and Austria. He was subsequently interrogated and tortured for eight months. Following a 20-minute trial that took place in Leverenti Berya’s private chambers, Babel was sentenced to death by firing squad. His last recorded words, before his death on January 27, 1940, were “I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others . . . I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.”
Resources From Our Website
- There are few people as expert on Babel as Stanford University professor Gregory (Grisha) Freidin. His books include Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings and the essay collection The Enigma of Isaac Babel, and he is currently at work on a definitive critical biography. Freidin will be the featured speaker on a special virtual program for this year’s Great Jewish Books Club, but you can preview that talk by listening to this lecture on Babel’s legacy that he gave at the Book Center in 2000.
- It’s sometimes easy to forget that when we’re reading Babel, we’re actually reading a translation of Babel. That’s the sign of a good translation: so seamless you forget it happened. But translation is an art, and there is no greater practitioner than Peter Constantine, Red Cavalry's translator. Listen to an interview with Peter on this episode of The Shmooze podcast and hear how he brought Babel to an English-reading audience.
- Andrei Malaev-Babel, a theater director and grandson of Isaac Babel, was interviewed by David Schlitt on May 15, 2011, at the Yiddish Book Center. In this oral history interview Andrei shares stories of the many visitors who came to his home to discuss the work of his grandfather, and he discusses his family's multifaceted identity, including their desire to hide their Jewishness under the guise of Russian-ness.
- Finally, if you suspected that Babel’s Russian writings must have been translated into Yiddish, you are right. This collection of Babel’s work, titled “The Story of my Dovecote and other Stories,” was translated by Gitl Mayzel and published in Vilna in 1927.
- Andrei-Malaev Babel was also the star of Finding Babel, a documentary that follows his journey retracing his grandfather’s steps through France, Ukraine, and Russia. In this episode of The Shmooze podcast, filmmaker David Novack talks about the process of making the film, including the intimate moments they shared while on the road in Europe.
Resources from Elsewhere on the Web
There are a number of great essays on Babel that are easy to access. Here are two that we recommend.
- In 1955 literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote an essay about his initial reaction to and subsequent reflections on Red Cavalry. It was, he wrote, “the most remarkable work of fiction that had yet come out of revolutionary Russia, the only work, indeed, that I knew of as having upon it the mark of exceptional talent, even of genius.”
- In 2001 W. W. Norton published The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, a comprehensive collection edited by Babel’s daughter, Nathalie Babel. The book occasioned an essay on Babel by John Updike in The New Yorker. Updike describes Babel as “a Jew who embraced the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 as a deliverance from the anti-Semitic restrictions and sanctioned pogroms of the tsarist regime; to an extent, he embraced the violence of the era in which he came to manhood.”
- Babel’s play Maria, about the sordid underbelly of the Russian Revolution, was written in the mid-1930s but was never performed in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless it has enjoyed a long performance history in Europe and the United States, as well as in Russia after the fall of Communism. Here you can watch the play in its entirety, performed at Stanford University in 2004.
- If you’ve ever wondered what Babel’s Odessa looks like today, there’s a walking tour with your name on it. Fortunately, you don’t have to travel to Ukraine to take it. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can go on a tour of Babel’s Odessa from the comfort of your own living room.
- It’s hard to find a short story writer alive who’s not a fan of Isaac Babel. Here George Saunders reads Babel’s story “You Must Know Everything” and discusses it with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.
Four Questions
Finally, to get you started while you crack open Red Cavalry, here are four questions to keep in mind while you read.
- What do we know about the narrator, or narrators, of these stories? Do we get a sense of who they are and how they feel about the events they’re describing, and are we meant to share that perspective?
- Violence is ever-present in these stories, yet it is described in a detached, almost clinical manner. How does this approach affect your experience of these scenes? Does it make them seem more horrifying, or less?
- Jewish characters and themes are prominent in many of the Red Cavalry stories. What do you make of Babel’s, and his narrator’s, view of Jewish life and suffering? How does this fit with his otherwise detached tone?
- Barely a paragraph goes by without some remarkable metaphor or simile. How does this element of Babel’s style contribute to the effect of these stories? What are some of your favorite images?
—Ezra Glinter