9,59 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A new selection of Isaac Babel's most vital and beautiful stories, in acclaimed translations by Boris Dralyuk 'It is impossible to look at the world the same way after reading Babel... one of the enduring jewels of 20th-century Russian literature' Financial Times Isaac Babel honed one of the most distinctive styles in all Russian literature. Brashly conversational one moment, dreamily lyrical the next, his stories exult in the richness of everyday speech and sensual pleasure only to be shaken by brutal jolts of violence. These stories take us from the underworld of Babel's native Odessa, city of gangsters and lowlives, of drunken brawls and bleeding sunsets, to the terror and absurdity of life as a soldier in the Polish-Soviet War. Selected and translated by the prize-winning Boris Dralyuk, this collection captures the irreverence, passion and coarse beauty of Babel's singular voice.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Ähnliche
3
ISAAC BABEL
OF SUNSHINE AND BEDBUGS
Essential Stories
Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
CONTENTS
Translator’s Preface
This essential selection from my two previous volumes of Isaac Babel’s stories for Pushkin Press weaves together three strands that, at first blush, make for a motley braid. What do they have in common, these poignant reflections on a childhood marred by anti-Semitism, these gleefully garish evocations of a Jewish underworld that looms as large as Mount Olympus, these searing dispatches from the front lines of a war between Red Cossacks and revanchist Poles?
One answer is a mastery of style, for Babel was among the most agile, most energetic prose stylists of his or any other era. I’ve written about the pleasures and challenges of getting his prose across in my forewords to Red Cavalry, the cycle that draws on his experiences during the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–21, and to Odessa Stories, which gathers fiction inspired by his boyhood and rollicking tall tales about his home town’s gangsters and lowlifes. This time I’ll let the harmonies, discords and subtle modulations speak for themselves.
There is another thing binding these stories together: every one of them is wedded to reality, if only with a shotgun 8at its back. They are, unarguably, works of imagination, but an imagination lent weight and colour by life. Though he was raised in a middle-class household, Babel was born in Moldavanka, Odessa’s Jewish ghetto, and he could never shake his fascination with its perilous, flavourful existence, for which he was unsuited both by temperament and upbringing. As a child witness to the pogroms that swept the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the first decade of the twentieth century, how could he not revere the real-life prototypes of his mythic gangsters, who began as humbly as the biblical David, stood up to the Goliath of anti-Semitism and tsarist “law and order”, and ended up as kings? Yet how could he not recoil in disgust when contemplating their brutality? Much the same questions haunt every page of Babel’s fictionalized accounts of riding alongside the Cossacks, who are tasked with ensuring the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution—a revolution his narrator yearns to believe is just—by any means necessary. But what end could possibly justify those unthinkable means? And is he himself up to the task of defending that end, much less securing it? We feel the full force of these questions because they were real for Babel, not hypothetical.
Bringing these stories together under one cover allows us to view the larger-than-life figures of Benya the King, Froim the Rook and Lyubka the Cossack through the eyes of the child whose dream of doves is dashed by a pogromist’s blow, whose world is “small and terrible”, who shuts 9his “only unplastered eye” so that he doesn’t have to see what lies bare before him: “a jagged pebble, like the face of an old woman with a large jaw; and a piece of string; and a clump of feathers, still breathing”. When the narrator of “How It Was Done in Odessa” asks the old Reb on the cemetery wall, “Why did Benya Krik alone climb to the top of the rope ladder, leaving the rest of them dangling below on shaky steps?”, we think of the learned boy in “First Love” who imagines himself a lover and fighter, “gripped by the pride of imminent death […] because the measure of that day’s grief was too great for a person of ten”. And when Kirill Lyutov (Babel’s nom de plume from his days with the front-line newspaper The Red Cavalryman) first meets the Sixth Division commander and marvels “at the beauty of his gigantic body”, at his “long legs [that] looked like a pair of girls clad in shiny shoulder-length jackboots”, we think of Benya at the top of that rope ladder.
And throughout we notice that Babel’s narrators, who do their best, as Lyutov promises the Sixth Division commander, to “get along” with the crew, remain perpetually off to the side, by turns marvelling and shrinking in horror. They may, like the boy in “The Story of My Dovecot”, recite Pushkin’s “verses in violent sobs” at an entrance exam to an elite secondary school, with its strict quotas for Jewish enrolment, but they soon learn that acceptance into the first form is no guarantee of happiness or safety. They may follow the exploits of daring gangsters, but they know 10Benya’s shoes are several sizes too big for them. They may kill an animal to prove their mettle and win the confidence of their comrades, as Lyutov does in “My First Goose”, but their hearts, “crimson with murder”, creak and bleed.
In many ways, the predicament in which these narrators find themselves is a Jewish one, but only insofar as the Jewish predicament is that of the outsider—and who among us has not been an outsider? The unspoken complement to Groucho Marx’s infamous refusal to join any club that would have him as a member is the aching desire to belong to the clubs that wouldn’t let him in. That desire, with its tangle of Eros and Thanatos, of passion and shame, of ludicrousness and deadly seriousness, is the living pulse of Babel’s prose. Yet there is, in the end, one club to which he was granted undisputed, irrevocable entry—the club of immortal storytellers. In a sketch from 1916, titled “Odessa”, Babel makes a prediction: “Petrograd is bound to receive—and quite soon, at that—the fruitful, life-giving influence of the Russian south, of Russian Odessa, of what may be (qui sait?) the only city in the Russian Empire that could give birth to our much-needed national Maupassant.” In the newly translated story that opens this volume—which first appeared in 1932, towards the close of his career as a published writer—Babel proves the prediction entirely accurate.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
In the winter of 1916 I found myself in Petersburg, flat broke, with forged papers. Alexey Kazantsev, a teacher of Russian literature, gave me shelter.
He lived on a frozen, yellow, foul-smelling street in Peski and augmented his meagre salary with translations from Spanish; Blasco Ibáñez was all the rage just then.1
Kazantsev had never so much as set foot in Spain, but the whole of his being was imbued with a love for that country—he knew each of its castles, its parks and its rivers by heart. Around him flocked a great many others who had, like me, been knocked off life’s proper course. Ours was a hand-to-mouth existence. Once in a while the cheap dailies would run, in tiny print, our accounts of local incidents.
I spent my mornings hanging around morgues and police stations.
When it came down to it, Kazantsev was luckier than the rest of us. He had his homeland—Spain.
In November I was offered a clerical job at the Obukhov Plant—a pretty good position, which would have exempted me from military service.212
I refused to become a clerk.
By that point (I was all of twenty) I had already sworn to myself that I would sooner starve, go to jail or hit the road than sit at a desk for ten hours a day. There’s nothing especially bold about this vow, but I haven’t broken it and will not break it. Firmly lodged in my head was the wisdom of my grandfathers: we are born to take pleasure in our work, our brawling, our lovemaking—born for this and nothing else.
As he heard out my rationale, Kazantsev kept rubbing the short yellow fluff on his head. The horror in his eyes was mingled with admiration.
At Christmastime fortune fell into our lap. Bendersky, a barrister and proprietor of the Halcyon Press, had decided to bring out a new edition of Maupassant. The work of translation was to be done by the barrister’s wife, Raisa. Their grand venture, however, had failed to bear fruit.
As a translator from Spanish, Kazantsev was asked whether he knew anyone who might lend Raisa Mikhailovna a hand. He suggested me.
The following day I donned another man’s jacket and made my way to the Benderskys’. They lived at the corner of Nevsky and the Moika, in a house of Finnish granite lined with rose-colored columns, pierced with loopholes, and embellished with stone coats of arms. Before the war, bankers of low birth who’d converted to Christianity and grown rich off government contracts 13had dotted Petersburg with scores of these vulgar, falsely majestic castles.
Strips of red carpet ran down the flights of steps. On each landing a stuffed plush bear stood on its hind legs.
Globes of crystal glowed in their open maws.
The Benderskys lived on the third floor. The door was opened by a high-breasted maid in a cap. She ushered me into a drawing room done up in Old Slavonic style. On the walls hung Roerich’s blue canvases of prehistoric boulders and beasts.3 Ancient icons rested on stands in the corners. Slender, nearsighted and haughty, the high-breasted maid moved solemnly through the room. Lewdness had hardened in her wide grey eyes. Her movements were languid. It occurred to me that, in making love, she probably tossed and turned with fierce agility. The brocade curtain draping one of the doorways quivered. A black-haired woman with rose-colored eyes bore her large bosom into the drawing room. It didn’t take long for me to recognize Benderskaya as one of that delightful breed of Jewesses who come to us from Kiev and Poltava, from those sated cities of the steppe that are planted all over with chestnut and acacia trees. These women transmute their resourceful husbands’ money into the rosy plumpness of their bellies, napes and rounded shoulders. Their smiles, gentle and drowsy, drive garrison officers out of their minds.
“Maupassant is the sole passion of my life,” Raisa told me.14
Struggling to keep her large hips from swaying, she left the room and returned with a translation of ‘Miss Harriet’. Her version retained no trace of Maupassant’s free, fluent phrasing, with its long breath of passion. Benderskaya wrote in a tediously correct manner, lifeless and careless—the way Jews used to write in Russian.
I took the manuscript home to Kazantsev’s garret, and, while others slept all around me, spent the whole night cutting swathes through someone else’s translation. This kind of work isn’t as dreary as it sounds. A phrase comes into the world good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely perceptible turn. The lever sits in your hand, getting warm. You’ve got to turn it once, not twice.
The next morning I came back with the corrected manuscript. Raisa hadn’t lied when she spoke of her passion for Maupassant. She sat motionless during the reading, her hands clasped; these hands of satin flowed down to the ground, her forehead grew pale, and the lace between her slightly sagging breasts rose from her flesh and trembled.
“How did you do that?”
And so I began to talk of style, of the army of words, an army in which all sorts of weapons are always on the move. No iron penetrates the human heart as icily as a period placed at just the right moment. She listened with her head bowed, her painted lips slightly open. A black gleam shone in her lacquered hair, which was smoothed down and neatly 15parted. Her legs, with their strong, fleshy calves poured into stockings, were propped apart on the carpet.
The maid, averting her lewd, hardened eyes, brought in breakfast on a tray.
The glassy Petersburg sun fell on the faded, uneven carpet. Twenty-nine volumes of Maupassant stood on a shelf above the table. The sun ran its melting fingers across their morocco bindings—across this splendid tomb of the human heart.
We were served coffee in little blue cups and began to translate ‘Idyll’. Everyone recalls the story of the hungry young carpenter who suckles the fat wet-nurse, relieving her of her burden of milk. This took place on a train going from Nice to Marseille,4 on a sultry afternoon in the country of roses, the homeland of roses, where plantations of flowers descend to the shore of the sea…
I left the Benderskys’ with a twenty-five rouble advance. Our commune in Peski got drunk that evening, drunk as a flock of sozzled geese. We scooped grains of fine black caviar into our mouths with spoons, following them up with hunks of liverwurst. Properly soused, I lit into Tolstoy.
“He got scared, your Count, chickened out… That’s his religion—fear… Afraid of the cold, of old age, the Count knitted himself a pullover out of faith…”
“And then? Then what?” Kazantsev kept prodding, shaking his birdlike head.16
We fell asleep beside our own beds. I dreamt of Katya, the forty-year-old washerwoman who lived downstairs. We got boiling water from her in the mornings. I’d never even had a good look at her face, but God only knows what Katya and I got up to in that dream. We wore each other out with kisses. I couldn’t refrain from going down for boiling water the next morning.
What I saw was a withered woman with a shawl crossed over her chest, her ash-grey curls hanging loose, her hands damp.
From that time on I had breakfast at the Benderskys’ every morning. Our garret acquired a new stove, reserves of herring and chocolate. On two occasions Raisa had me accompany her to the Petersburg islands. I couldn’t hold back and told her of my childhood. To my own surprise, the story came out grim. Sparkling, fearful eyes peered out at me from under a moleskin hat. The reddish fur of her eyelashes fluttered sorrowfully.
I met Raisa’s husband, a sallow-faced, bald-headed Jew with a flat, powerful body obliquely angled for flight. There were rumours that he was close to Rasputin. The profits he had made supplying the military lent him the look of a man possessed. His eyes wandered—for him the fabric of reality had been torn. Raisa was embarrassed when introducing new people to her husband. Because of my youth, I noticed this a week later than I should have.
After the New Year two of Raisa’s sisters came up for 17a visit from Kiev. One morning I brought back the manuscript of ‘The Confession’ and, not finding Raisa at home, returned in the evening. The Benderskys and their guests were having dinner. Out of the dining room spilt the silvery neighing of mares and the unbridled jubilant boom of men’s voices. In wealthy homes devoid of tradition, dinners are noisy. This noise was Jewish, rumbling along towards sonorous endings. Raisa came out to me in a ball gown with a bare back. Her feet took awkward steps in teetering patent-leather pumps.
“I’m drunk, my dear…” And she held out her arms—arms dripping with platinum chains and emerald stars.
Her body swayed like the body of a snake tempted upwards by music. She shook her curly head, the rings on her fingers jangling, and suddenly fell into an armchair with ancient Russian carving. Scars smouldered on her powdered back.
Female laughter exploded once more on the other side of the wall. The sisters, with their little moustaches, emerged from the dining room, both as full-breasted and tall as Raisa. Their breasts were pushed forward and their black hair flowed free. Each was married to a Bendersky of her own. The room was flooded with incoherent feminine gaiety, the gaiety of mature women. The husbands wrapped the sisters up in sealskin coats and Orenburg shawls, encasing their feet in little black boots; all that showed from beneath the shawls’ snowy visors were rouged, glowing cheeks, marble 18noses, and eyes shimmering with Semitic nearsightedness. The noise died down as they left for the theatre, where Chaliapin was singing in Judith.5
“I want to work,” Raisa murmured, stretching out her bare arms. “We’ve let a whole week go by…”
She fetched a bottle and two wine glasses from the dining room. Her breasts lay loose in the silken sack of her gown; her nipples stiffened and the silk enfolded them.
“Sacred vintage,” said Raisa as she poured the wine. “An ’83 Muscat. When my husband finds out, he’ll kill me…”
I had never had any dealings with an ’83 Muscat before, and so I thought nothing of downing three glasses, one after the other. They instantly carried me off, leading me down lanes where an orange flame wavered and music filled the air.
“I’m drunk, my dear… What are we doing today?”
“Today we’re doing ‘L’Aveu’…”
“So, then, ‘The Confession’. The hero of the story is the sun, le soleil de France… Molten drops of the sun had fallen on red-haired Céleste and turned into freckles. With its vertical rays, its wine and its apple cider, the sun had buffed the face of the coachman Polyte. Twice a week Céleste would drive into town to sell cream, eggs and poultry. The fare she paid Polyte was ten sous for herself and four sous for the basket. And on each journey Polyte would ask red-haired Céleste, with a wink:
“‘When will we have a bit of fun, ma belle?’19
“‘What do you mean by that, Monsieur Polyte?’
“‘Hell, fun means fun,’ the coachman explained, bouncing up and down on the seat. ‘A lad and a girl—they don’t need no music…’
“‘I do not like such jokes, Monsieur Polyte,’ replied Céleste, moving her skirts away from the lad—skirts that hung over mighty calves in red stockings.”
But that devil Polyte kept howling with laughter and coughing: “One day we’ll have our fun, ma belle.” Merry tears rolled down his face—a face the colour of brick-red blood and wine.
I downed another glass of the sacred Muscat. Raisa clinked hers with mine.
The maid with hardened eyes walked through the room and disappeared.
Ce diable de Polyte… In two years’ time, Céleste had paid him forty-eight francs—just two francs short of fifty. At the end of the second year, when they were alone in the coach together and Polyte, who’d knocked back a few ciders before setting out, posed his usual question—“Why don’t we have some fun today, Mademoiselle Celeste?”—she replied, lowering her eyes: “I’m at your service, Monsieur Polyte…”
Raisa collapsed onto the table in a fit of laughter. Ce diable de Polyte….
The coach was harnessed to a white nag. The white nag, its lips pink with age, moved off at a walk. The merry sun of France surrounded the carriage, which shut out the world 20with its faded red hood. A lad and a girl, and no need for music… Raisa handed me a glass—my fifth.
“Mon vieux, to Maupassant…”
“Why don’t we have some fun today, ma belle…?” I leant towards Raisa and kissed her lips. They trembled and swelled.
“You’re funny,” Raisa muttered through her teeth and staggered back.
She pressed herself against the wall with her bare arms outspread. Blotches flared up on her arms and shoulders. Of all the gods ever crucified, this was the most alluring.
“Please seat yourself, Monsieur Polyte…”
She pointed me to the sloping blue armchair made in the Slavonic style. Its interlaced back was carved of wood and decorated with painted feathery tails. I stumbled towards it.
Underneath my hungry youth the night had slipped a bottle of Muscat ’83 and twenty-nine books—twenty-nine petards loaded with pity, genius, passion… I leapt up, knocked over the armchair and bumped into the shelf. Twenty-nine volumes tumbled down to the carpet and landed on their sides, their pages flying… while the white nag of my fate moved off at a walk.
“You’re funny,” Raisa growled.
I left the granite house on the Moika at around eleven, before the husband and sisters returned from the theatre. I was sober and could have walked a straight line, but it felt better to stagger, and so I swayed from side to side, 21singing in a language I’d invented on the spot. Waves of fog rolled through the tunnels of streets ringed with a chain of lanterns. Monsters roared behind seething walls. The pavements lopped off the feet of everyone going past.
At home Kazantsev was asleep. He slept sitting up, stretching out his skinny, felt-booted legs. The canary-like fluff on his head was standing on end. He’d drifted off by the stove, bent over a 1624 edition of Don Quixote. Its title page bore a dedication to the Duc de Broglie. I got into bed without a sound so as not to wake Kazantsev, pulled the lamp close and began to read a book by Édouard de Maynial—On the Life and Work of Guy de Maupassant.6
Kazantsev kept moving his lips, his head slumping forward.
And that night I learnt from Édouard de Maynial that Maupassant was born in 1850 to a nobleman from Normandy and Laure Le Poittevin, a cousin of Flaubert’s. At the age of twenty-five he experienced his first attack of congenital syphilis. His creative force and intrinsic merriment resisted the disease. At first he suffered from headaches and bouts of hypochondria. Then the spectre of blindness rose before him. His eyes began to fail. He grew paranoid, unsociable, litigious. He struggled furiously, knocked around the Mediterranean in a yacht, ran off to Tunisia, to Morocco, to Central Africa—and never ceased to write. Having achieved fame, in the fortieth year of his life he slit his throat, lost a great deal of blood, but survived. He was 22locked up in an asylum for the insane. There he crawled about on all fours and ate his own faeces. The last entry on his medical record reads: “Monsieur de Maupassant va s’animaliser” (“Mr Maupassant has turned into an animal”). He died at forty-two. His mother outlived him.
I read the book through to the end and got out of bed. The fog had come up to the window, concealing the universe. My heart sank. I had been touched by a presentiment of truth.
NOTES
1 Peski is a historical district of St Petersburg, along the Neva River, which was largely populated by the poor and the working class; Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928) was a bestselling Spanish novelist who achieved worldwide fame with his novels Sangre y arena (Blood and Sand, 1908) and Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1916), both of which were adapted for the screen several times, including two versions starring Rudolph Valentino.
2 The Obukhov Plant was founded in 1863 to produce artillery and is still active today.
3 Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) was a popular Russian painter, archaeologist and mystic who served as one of the designers for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where he was responsible for the costumes and set of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913).
4 In Maupassant’s story the train goes from Genoa to Marseille.
5 Judith (1861–1863) is an opera composed by Alexander Serov, in which the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938) first performed as Holofernes in 1898.240
6La vie et l’oeuvre de Guy de Maupassant, by Édouard Maynial (sic), was published in Paris by Société du Mercure de France in 1906. The summary Babel offers, especially the details concerning Laure Le Poittevin’s relationship to Gustave Flaubert and Maupassant’s behaviour in the asylum, is far from accurate.
PART I
Childhood and Youth
24
THE STORY OF MY DOVECOTE
For Maxim Gorky
When i was a child I really wanted a dovecote. I never felt a stronger desire in all my life. I was nine years old when my father promised to give me the money for some planks and three pairs of doves. That was back in 1904. I was studying for the entrance exams to the preparatory class at the Nikolayev Secondary School. My family lived in Nikolayev, in the Kherson Province. There’s no such province now: our city’s part of the Odessa District.
I was only nine years old, and the prospect of the exams terrified me. I couldn’t afford to get anything less than perfect marks on both—Russian language and mathematics. The Jewish quota at our school was tough: only five per cent. That meant that out of the forty boys admitted to the preparatory class, only two could be Jews. And the devilish questions the teachers would pose to us Jewish boys… No one got trickier questions. That’s why my father promised to buy me doves only on the condition that I score top marks: perfect fives—with pluses, no less.1 He put me through hell, 26and I fell into an endless waking dream—a child’s long dream of despair; and though I went off to the exams rapt in this dream, I still did better than the others.
I had a gift for learning. No matter how tricky the teachers got, they couldn’t deny that I had brains and a voracious memory. I had a gift for learning and scored two fives. But then everything changed. Khariton Ephrussi, the grain merchant who exported wheat to Marseilles, slipped the school a five-hundred-rouble bribe on behalf of his son, one of my fives acquired a minus, and my place at the school went to Ephrussi junior. My father nearly lost his mind. From the time I’d turned six he’d been cramming my head with every kind of learning imaginable. That “minus” business drove him to the brink of despair. He wanted to beat up Ephrussi, or to hire a couple of stevedores to do the job, but mother talked him out of it, and I started preparing for the following year’s exam, to get into the first form. Conspiring behind my back, my family goaded my tutor into covering both the prep and first-year courses in the same year, and since we were completely desperate, I memorized three books. These books were Smirnovsky’s grammar, Yevtushevsky’s mathematical problems and Putsykovich’s introduction to Russian history. Children aren’t taught from these books any longer, but I got them by heart, line by line, and the following year, taking the Russian language exam with schoolmaster Karavayev, I attained the unattainable five-plus.27
Karavayev was a ruddy, indignant fellow, who’d been a student in Moscow. He was barely thirty. A blush bloomed on his manly cheeks, like the blush on the faces of peasant lads, and he had a wart on one of those cheeks, from which sprang a tuft of ash-grey feline hair. The other person presiding over the exam was Deputy Warden Pyatnitsky, an important personage both at the school and in the province. The deputy warden asked me about Peter the Great and I experienced a sense of utter oblivion, a sense that the end was near, that an abyss had opened before me, a sun-baked abyss, lined with delight and despair.
