Red Cavalry and Other Stories (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

This is a wonderful collection of Isaac Babel's stories. His writing is terse, image laden and thoroughly engaging. Recounting his experiences with Cossack cavalry in Poland, Babel's tales offer a unique and firsthand perspective into these Russian campaigns.
Babel's style and his short stories (many times as short as half a page) ask to be read with a level of engagement that many are incapable of. Luckily the stories are both easy and enjoyable to re-read and offer much to be considered and mulled over - though his stories are in prose they demand the attention and interaction of poetry.
Babel is a unique and interesting writer, and his stories are by no means light reading. Presenting moral questions of persecution, violence and conflicting identities (ethnic, religious, political - to name a few) Babel is a Russian writer to be savored.
One note on this Penguin edition: the notes are lacking compared to most Penguin Classics publications and the translation begs for these notes to have been better compiled and expanded. Many words are left untranslated and many times translations are made in an attempt to maintain a Polish or Russian sound - which though wonderful for those that have the knowledge or time to appreciate it is for anyone else an unnecessary distraction from Babel's writing.

This book is not to be read at one sitting, but many of these stories are powerful, well written and cause you to think. In today's world of politically correct stories with boring characters, this is a welcome change.

In Red Cavalry, Babel threads a plot through individual stories and, in so doing, brings a novelistic coherence in what would otherwise be simply a disparate collection. The stories are narrated by a sensitive, Jewish intellectual who serves as a war correspondent in the First Cavalry Division of S.M. Budyonny's Soviet army of Cossacks in 1920 during the Polish-Soviet War. Part of the Cossack Army though not a Cossack, a Jew yet a stranger to the Jewish shtetls of eastern Ukraine and Poland that populate the collection, the narrator is more writer than soldier as he relates his experiences during the war.

Babel uses a modernist approach in the manner in which he characterizes the narrator who frames the story. His identity emerges in a slow, fragmentary way. In the third story, "A Letter," we learn he is literate when he writes "a letter home to the motherland" (96) dictated to him by an illiterate Cossack. Several stories later in "Gedali" we learn he is Jewish, and in the immediately succeeding story, "My First Goose," we are informed he is educated, a law graduate from St. Petersburg University. Yet it is not until we are approximately two-thirds through the collection that we learn his name when a Cossack addresses him incongruously as "Lyutov" (184). Incongruous, because Lyutov means ferocious in Russian, and is a strange name for an intellectual with spectacles on his face and autumn in his heart. Throughout the collection the narrator's benign nature is juxtaposed with the ferocity of the other characters. Although he feigns toughness, " `One eats it with gunpowder,' I replied to the old man. `And seasons it with the finest blood ...' " (118), he is unable to execute when the situation demands it. When a dying Cossack asks Lyutov to kill him to put him out of his misery, Lyutov cannot pull the trigger, and the platoon commander must perform the unpleasant deed, admonishing Lyutov: "You four-eyed lot have as much pity for us as a cat has for a mouse" (135). In a similar vein, in "After the Battle," Lyutov refuses to return fire when a Pole shoots at him. As the skirmish ends, exhausted, he begs "fate for the simplest of abilities-the ability to kill a man" (222). Killing a goose induces anxiety: "I had dreams and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed" (123). Upset over killing an animal for food, he is unable to consummate sexual intercourse. The narrator is an anti-hero. He fails with women; he cannot kill the enemy in war; he can do nothing well but write.

Victor Erlich suggests that Babel's tendency to "juxtapose contraries"[1] is a shaping force in the author's art. One need go no further than the start of the first story, "Crossing the Zbrucz," to demonstrate the contrary styles of Babel's writing:

Nachdiv 6 has reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken at dawn today. The staff has moved out of Krapivno, and our transport is strung like a noisy rearguard along the high road, along the unfading high road that goes from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of muzhiks by Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the noonday wind is playing in the yellowing rye, the virginal buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn is curving. The Volyn is withdrawing from us into a pearly mist of birch groves, it is creeping away into flowery knolls and entangling itself with enfeebled arms in thickets of hops. An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, a gentle radiance glows in the ravines of the thunderclouds and the standards of the sunset float above our heads. The odour of yesterday's blood and of slain horses drips into the evening coolness. (91)

This passage is beautifully lyrical and at the same time barbaric, juxtaposing nature and violence. It begins as a military report, continues with a lyrical description of the countryside with its purple poppies, yellowing rye, flowery knolls, and pearly mist of birch groves, then abruptly moves into violence as the orange sun becomes a severed head and the odor of blood and slain horses permeates the evening coolness.

In a similar vein, the penultimate story, "The Rebbe's Son," demonstrates Ehrlich's view that incongruity forms a part of the structure of the collection. As the narrator begins to pack a dying Jewish soldier's belongings into a trunk, he notes:

Portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side. Lenin's nodulous skull and the tarnished silk of the portraits of Maimonides. A strand of female hair had been placed in a book of the resolutions of the Sixth Party Congress, and in the margins of communist leaflets swarmed crooked lines of Ancient Hebrew verse. In a sad and meager rain they fell on me-pages of the Song of Songs and revolver cartridges. (226-27).

A portrait of the father of the Russian Revolution lies beside a portrait of one of the great Jewish philosophers and Talmudic scholars of the Middle Ages. Hebrew verse appears in the margins of communist leaflets. Ammunition and pages of the Hebrew Bible are strewn together. Babel brings together the incongruous and is able to make shocking contrasts because he is writing about a revolution. Revolution is chaos. Chaos cannot be depicted in an orderly manner.

[1] Victor Erlich. Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994, p. 150.