Isaac Babel

Plenty has been written about Isaac Babel. Some consider him to be a romantic writer, while others call him a realist. Still others see him to be an author of epics. To some he was a novelist of genius, while to others he was a master of the short story. Those disaffected by the October Revolution focused on Babel’s disappearance in the Gulag. Babel has been compared with Maxim Gorky, Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov and is considered to be one of the more enigmatic figures of Russian literature. Still, no matter the “micro” interpretations,  all critics agreed that, in the larger scheme of things, Babel was an extremely talented writer whose works have had a significant influence on the course of literary history.

Babel was born on July 13, 1894, in the bright and merry town of Odessa, the Ukrainian town distinguished by its spirit of enterprise and soon to be famous as a birthplace for Soviet satire. Several other “greats” of Soviet literature came from Odessa, including Konstantin Paustovsky,  Ilya Ilf and Valentin Katayev. Odessa, Babel’s cultural tradition, his background, the fact that he was a Jew and a member of intelligentsia, all greatly influenced his fiction.

A man of broad education, Babel graduated from an elite gymnasium and university. In his “Autobiography,” written in 1904, Babel describes his childhood and school years:

I was born in 1894 in Odessa, in the Moldavanka, the son of a tradesman Jew. On father’s insistence, I studied Hebrew, the Bible and the Talmud until the age of sixteen. Life at home was hard, because I was forced to study a multitude of subjects. Resting I did at school .... The school was gay, rowdy, noisy and multilingual. There, the sons of foreign merchants, the children of Jewish brokers, Poles from noble families, old Believers and many billiard-players of advanced years were taught. Between classes, we used to go off to the jetty at the port, to Greek coffee houses to play billiards, or to Moldavanka to drink cheap Bessarabian wine in the taverns. At the age of 15, I began writing stories in French. I wrote them for two years and then stopped: my paysants and all sorts of authorial meditations came out colorless; only the dialogue was a success.

Babel came to Petersburg in 1916 and, hoping for Maxim Gorky’s assistance, brought him samples of his work. After reading them, Gorky advised Babel to give up writing for a while, to undertake different professions and to get more life experience, as Gorky had himself done. The description of Gorky’s advice is also in “Autobiography”:

He taught me remarkably important things. ... and when it turned out that nothing was coming from my literary efforts and that I wrote remarkably badly, Alexei Maximovich told me to go into apprenticeship among the people. And for seven years – from 1917 to 1924 – I apprenticed among the people. During this time I served as a soldier at the Rumanian front, in the Cheka, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, in the food requisitioning teams of 1918, in the Northern Army against Yudenich, in the First Cavalry Army, in the Executive Committee of the Odessa Guberniya, in the 7th Soviet Printing House in Odessa, did reporting in Petrograd and Tiflis, etc. And only in 1923 did I learn to express my thoughts clearly and concisely. Then I once again began to compose fiction.   

In 1920, Babel was “embedded” as a reporter with Budyonny’s First Cavalry. There he wrote pieces for the Red Cavalryman, the Divisional newspaper. These pieces, rewritten several times, were later to be included in Babel’s famous Red Cavalry series. Soon, in poor health after all the ordeals of the campaign, Babel returned to Odessa. According to the writer Konstantin Paustovsky, by this time, Babel had become a famous literary figure in Odessa. There he was considered “the first real Soviet writer.” Yet, he was still not widely known.

In 1924, four of Babel’s stories were published in Mayakovsky’s LEF magazine. The stories created a sensation; even Pravda identified Babel as “a rising star in our literature.” Semyon Budyonny, Commander of the First Cavalry Army, was less enthusiastic about the stories. He called them “slander” and “the gossip of old women.”

Babel’s best-known works were composed and published between 1921 and 1931 and appeared in 35 Soviet editions. The full extent of his writing is still unknown; among his works are three major story cycles, two plays, short fiction, movie scripts and journalistic sketches.

Perhaps Babel’s greatest masterpiece is the cycle of short stories, Konarmiya (Red Cavalry, 1926), also his lengthiest work of fiction. Red Cavalry describes the experiences of the Russo-Polish war of 1920 as seen through the eyes of a Russian-Jewish intellectual wearing spectacles. Using his own experience as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters, describing the violence of the early Soviet era, with cossacks, colonels, commissars and peasants.

Odesskie rasskazy (Odessa Tales, 1931) is another story cycle, which included eight novellas describing the
pre-revolutionary Odessa underworld. Babel’s later play, “Benya Krik,” is based on this story cycle and named after the main protagonist.

“Istoriya moei golubyatni” (The Story of My Dovecote, 1926) is Babel’s other major tetraptych and can be described as an episodic, fictional chronicle of the author’s childhood. The main character is a Jewish boy who has finally been accepted by the state and has become a student at an elite school. But the boy falls victim to a pogrom; four long-coveted pigeons, the reward for his efforts, are taken from him, killed and smashed against his head by a legless man with leprosy. It is a not-so-subtle demonstration of how the protagonist is punished for playing successfully by the rules of the hated state.

Babel’s special narrative technique assimilated the hyperbole and contrasts of contemporary poetry while integrating his stories into a larger autobiographical narrative. The life of the author therefore had the potential of being at once real and symbolic; a biographical detail could function as a literary fact.

On May 16, 1939, Isaac Babel was arrested on unspecified charges at his Peredelkino dacha. Until recently, the circumstances of his arrest and death were shrouded in mystery. Today we know that the warrant for his arrest was issued more than a month after the fact and that he was charged with belonging to a secret Trotskyite organization and with spying for France and Austria. Babel’s celebrated Red Cavalry was called “a description of all the cruelties and inconsistencies of the civil war, emphasizing only the sensational and rough episodes.” After 72 hours of interrogation, Babel finally “confessed” to the alleged crimes, but in 1940 renounced the testimony that he was forced to give under torture and asked for an attorney and witnesses.  On January 27, 1940, Babel was shot.

After Babel was taken into custody, all of his papers (including two new novels) at his dacha were confiscated. These are presumed to have been destroyed along with a portion of the NKVD archive in 1941.

In 1954, Babel was cleared of all charges against him, “for lack of substantiation.”