Four Books and a Calendar

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF

ISAAC BABEL

Edited by Nathalie Babel

Translated by Peter Constantine

W.W. Norton • 2001 • $39.95 (hardcover)

One struggles with a way to describe the marvelous writings of Isaac Babel. This book’s dustcover suggests that he combines “the compassion of Dostoyevsky with the mordant wit of Chekhov.” The Chekhov comparison works, for Babel’s stories have the same cutting truth and descriptive power. There is too a Chekhovian humor, or perhaps that of the early Gogol. Yet there is also the vivid imagery of Faulkner and the gritty realism of Hemingway.

Babel’s stories are real, almost tactile. In them, you can smell the streets of Odessa and the gunpowder of the Civil War, you can feel the loneliness of a homeless writer seeking shelter for the night:

Siberian salmon caviar and a pound of bread in my pocket. Nowhere to go. I am standing on Anichkov Bridge, huddling against Klodt’s horses. A heavy evening is descending from Morskaya. Orange lights wrapped in gauze roam along the Nevsky Prospekt. I need shelter. Hunger is plucking at me the way a clumsy brat plucks the strings of a violin ...

(“An Evening with the Empress”)

It is therefore something to celebrate that all of Isaac Babel’s works have recently be freshly translated and compiled (under the editorship of the author’s daughter) in this handsome hardbound (and boxed) edition (which also includes a fascinating memoir by his daughter and a quite useful chronology of the author’s life and times).

The sweep of Babel’s work from 1913 to 1940 provides a vivid, bloody, sensual, human, humorous, sad and, above all, real portrait of Russian life in this difficult era. The reason is surely that, not only was Babel a gifted artist, but because his life, tracing the threads of intrigue, infamy and betrayal that populated Soviet Russia in the 20s and 30s, provided rich grist for the mill.

After treading a line between sycophancy and silence for so many years, Babel was finally executed on trumped up espionage charges in 1940. His work, thankfully, has been given new life in this superb compendium.

VALERY GERGIEV AND THE KIROV:

A STORY OF SURVIVAL

By John Ardoin

Amadeus Press • 2001 • $34.95 (hardcover)

Valery Gergiev is one of those types of persons who seems to be either reviled or revered–his personality and work does not brook a neutral or middling response.

Clearly John Ardoin, the recently deceased and much-respected music critic who undertook to write this biography of Gergiev and the Kirov (nee Mariinsky), was in awe of Gergiev. Yet he also was wise enough to see the complex personality and oversized ego at work in the energetic young conductor.

Certainly no biography can be entirely “objective,” nor should it be. And it is easier to forgive an author’s love of a subject than stomach his envy or bile. Ardoin loved his subject, which was far more than Valery Gergiev. For this is a book about the history of a great theater, a theater in which Gergiev is merely the most recent lead player (Ardoin offers suberb portraits of Gergiev’s predecessors, both on stage and off). It is a book about the politics of the Kirov’s survival (through the anti-Leningrad era and again in the post-Soviet era), about the life and flavor of a great and unusual city. Ardoin executes his biography with relish and it makes for excellent reading.

The Kirov (now officially the Mariinsky, but the theater still tours under its old, better known name, taken from a too-popular lieutenant Stalin had murdered, then beatified) has long had to suffer as the quiet sibling, while the brazen and bold Bolshoi has taken top billing. But in recent years, as the Bolshoi has struggled through financial woes and political warfare, Gergiev has (by no means quietly) led the Mariinsky to new heights, crowned recently by a wildly generous grant from a foreign donor that makes it one of the richest arts organizations in the world.

This book is timed to coincide with Gergiev’s (and the Kirov Orchestra’s) tour of US cities this fall and winter (see Events Calendar, page 14), and the Kirov Ballet’s appearance at Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in February of 2002.

For those who cannot catch one of these performances, this new book offers a taste of the Kirov, and, more specifically, of a remarkable individual who is reshaping an important part of the arts in Russia today.

THE LOGIC OF ECONOMIC REFORM

IN RUSSIA

By Jerry Hough

Brookings Institution • 2001 • $18

There are those who argue that the path of Russian economic reform has gone wretchedly wrong, that the blat-endowed of the Soviet era have become the new-rich of the Russian era, that the average Russian has only become more impoverished through the nineties. Freer, yes, but less secure. This is no market economy, critics bellow, but an oligarchy, controlled by criminals and former communists.

Of course, these critics are right. Russia does not have a true market economy or a truly democratic state. That is decades off. But then only those who really believed the Yeltsinian bluster of the early 1990s could be expected to believe, as one Sovietologist put it back then, that Russia could create a democratic, capitalistic state in less time than it takes Detroit to create and produce a new model car.

So it is that Jerry Hough, a longtime observer of the Soviet and Russian scene (he was one of the first to recognize the reformist imperative in the “technocratic” generation represented by Gorbachev and others) concludes that such critiques are misplaced. No one “lost Russia” he argues. And what we see going on there should really not surprise anyone. As he writes, “the corruption, mafia, capital flight, lack of investment, and lack of economic growth were not the product of Russian culture or history, but the natural consequences of the response of rational people to the incentive system created by economic reform.”

Hough points his fingers at Yeltsin, at uneccesarily optimistic, idealistic and ill-educated Western advisors, and at general misunderstandings of economics and history. In short, there is blame for everyone. But that does not mean the ideas presented here (gleaned largely from some path-breaking polling) are not compelling. In fact, anyone interested in Russia’s future should pay attention to what Hough concludes must be done to make the reform wrongs right.

MARTIANOFF’S 2002 CALENDAR

38-08 Astoria Blvd, Astoria, NY 11103 • $12

This “otrivnoy” (tear-off) desk calendar is all in Russian and has been around for years. It features both modern and “old style” dates (now separated by 13 days) and all church holidays. But, for the Russian-learner, there is something even better: on the back of each tear-off page is a poem, short essay, digression on a proverb or the like. Which makes this a perfect daily tool to keep your Russian alive and kicking. Not a bad idea for a gift either.

WITHOUT VODKA

By Aleksander Topolski

Steerforth Press • 2001 • $16

Joining the Polish army just eight days before the German invasion, Aleksander Topolski was 16 when his amazing and fearsome life as an adult began. His country overrun, he sought to escape across the border into Romania, but was caught by Soviet border guards, beginning a three-year odyssey through Soviet labor camps and finally escape into Iran.

Two things are remarkable about Topolski, aside from his remarkable story-telling abilities. First is his seemingly indomitable optimism. Bounced from prison to prison, confined in malodorous cells and coffin-sized holding closets, he nonetheless retains a firm belief that everything will turn out right. Second, he has an amazing eye and memory for detail of events 60 years past. He recalls the cut of an interrogator’s hair, the names of all his cellmates, the contents of his rucksack while making an escape.

As a result, this is a rich and unusual addition to our sadly opulent body of Soviet labor camp memoirs. We need to keep reading books like this, to remember the horrors of what man is capable of. Topolski makes this difficult task easy with his moving and witty autobiography.

— The Editors