The Red Cavalry - Babel E-Book

Isaac Babel

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 220

Beschreibung

Isaac Babel was a Soviet journalist and writer of Jewish origin, known for his extraordinary short stories, comparable to the best works of Gogol and Maupassant, whom he admired as masters. "Red Cavalry," published in 1926, is his most famous collection of stories, based on Babel's experiences during the Russo-Polish campaign of 1920, where he served in the Budieni Cavalry. All the stories in "Red Cavalry" are imbued with the author's frankness, turbulence, unrestrained tone, anguish, and explosive voice, developing from events he experienced during the war. The author's own life met a tragic end, as despite being an idealistic advocate of Marxism and Leninism, he was arrested, tortured, and executed during Stalin's Great Purge. "Red Cavalry" is a work of vibrant rawness and reality, offering an emotionally gripping read.

Leseprobe

Isaac Babel

THE RED CAVALRY

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE RED CAVALRY

Crossing the River Zbrucz

The Church In Novograd

A Letter

The Reserve Cavalry Commander

Pan Apolek

Italian Sun

Gedali

My First Goose

The Rabbi

The Road To Brody

The Tachanka Theory

Dolgushov’s Death

The Commander of the Second Brigade

Sashka Christ

The Life of Matvey Rodionovich Pavlichenko

The Cemetery in Kozin

Prishchepa

The Story of a Horse

Konkin

Berestechko

Salt

Evening

Afonka Bida

At Saint Valentine’s

Squadron Commander Trunov

Ivan and Ivan

The Continuation of the Story of a Horse

The Widow

Zamosc

Treason

Czesniki

After the Battle

The Song

The Rabbi’s Son

INTRODUCTION

Isaac Babel

1894 - 1940

Isaac Babel was born in Odessa, a city where Jews could enjoy certain freedom and security, the son of a family that had fled anti-Semitic pogroms in lands dominated by the Cossacks. Yet he, in his youth, would clandestinely fight alongside the Red Cossacks! 

In his adolescence, Babel entered Trade School. In addition to regular subjects, he studied theology and music. Later, he studied Business and Finance, where he met Eugenia Gronfein, his future wife. At that time, they were both Marxists.”

In 1915, Babel moved to Russia's cultural center, Petrograd, where he met Maxim Gorky. They became friends, and Gorky published some of his stories in the magazine he directed; he also guided the aspiring writer to seek more real-life experience. And he sought it! Years later, Babel wrote in his autobiography: "The person I love and admire the most is Gorky."

Although recognized as one of the brightest representatives of literary journalism of the generation born in the 1880s, Babel saw his fiction work greatly affected by the vicissitudes of life. His literary peak occurred in the 1920s, first with the publication in 1920 of the "War Diaries," which later led to the classic "Red Cavalry" of 1926. M. Berman pointed out that one of the central themes of the book is the idea that, to be himself, the hero must learn not only to confront but somehow internalize his antithesis, since both the self and its antithesis revolve around violence. If the author's ego is a rational intellectual, with a natural tendency towards melancholy and introspection, his antithesis is that of an animalistic, primitive, and cruel man without reflection.

When Babel's character joins Budenny's Army in "Red Cavalry," the bespectacled hero is despised by the Cossacks and must commit some cruelty to be accepted, preferably against a woman. He accepts the challenge in "My First Goose." But when he fails in a fight because he forgot to load his pistol, a superior beats him, and he "pleads to God for competence to kill his fellow man." Few artists knew how to treat fragments of reality as real and complete as Babel's genius did. Many of his stories in "Red Cavalry" are developments of events experienced in the war.

In all the stories, there is frankness, turbulence, an unstoppable tone, anguish, and explosiveness in the author's voice. Vladimir Mayakovsky, his admirer, published several of these stories in the Leftist Review. It is true that the brutal description of the reality of war earned him enemies, like Budenny from the party bureaucracy. However, Gorky's influence ensured its publication, and abroad, the book was a bestseller, translated into more than fifteen languages. A Marxist-Leninist from his youth, Babel served as a volunteer in the Great War and then participated in the 1917 battles to establish socialism. He led the Red resistance in the city of Petrograd when it was surrounded by White and Polish forces, and the Soviet Government had moved to Moscow.”

He also participated in confiscation expeditions in the countryside to bring grain to the hungry populations of the cities. When he joined the only group of Cossacks that remained in the Red Army during the Civil War, Budenny's Red Cavalry, he did so under a false identity provided by the Communist Party to avoid being identified as a Jew and to avoid Cossack anti-Semitism. 

The cavalry campaign passed through Galicia, one of the most educated Jewish communities in Europe at that time. In cities like Chernobyl, Kovel, Brody, and in Galicia itself, mass murders, intentional fires, rapes, torture, and the killing of more than one hundred thousand Jews occurred, mainly at the hands of the White and Polish Armies. However, atrocities were also committed by the Red Cossacks, narrated by Babel. One of Babel's characters says: "This is not a Marxist revolution, it is a Cossack uprising.”

And yet: "I feel great sadness for the future of the Revolution... We are the vanguard, but of what?" "Why can't I overcome my sadness? Because I am far from my family, because we are destroyers, because we advance like a hurricane, like a tongue of lava, hated by all, life is crumbling, I am on an immense, endless campaign to revive the dead.”

About the Work

In late May 1920 the First Cavalry of the Soviet Red Army, under the command of General Budyonny, rode into Volhynia, today the border region of western Ukraine and eastern Poland. The Russian-Polish campaign was under way, the new Soviet government’s first foreign offensive, which was viewed back in Moscow as the first step toward spreading the doctrines of World Revolution to Poland\ then to Europe; then to the world.

Babel chronicled this campaign in his Red Cavalry stories, later to become the most well-known and enduring of his literary legacy. These loosely linked stories take the reader from the initial triumphant assault against the “Polish masters” to the campaigns of the summer of 1920\ and the increasingly bitter defeats that led to the wild retreat of the cavalry in the autumn. Babel blends fiction and fact, creating a powerful effect that is particularly poignant in his rendering of the atrocities of war. The stories were published in magazines and newspapers between 1923 and 1926; the reading public was torn between delight at Babel’s potent new literary voice and horror at the brutality portrayed in the stories. In 1926, thirty-four of the stories were included in the book Konarmia (translated into English as Red Cavalry), which quickly went into eight editions and was translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. It immediately turned Babel into an international literary figure and made him into one of the Soviet Union’s foremost writers.

The stories, as Babel himself repeatedly stressed, were fiction set against a real backdrop. Literary effect was more important to Babel than historical fact. Babel might also have felt more comfortable reconfiguring military strategy that might still have been classified when the stories began appearing in newspapers and magazines in the first years after the war. Novograd-Volynsk for instance, the town in the first story, lies on the river Slucz, not on the Zbrucz as the story indicates. (The Zbrucz runs along the western frontier of Volhynia, along the former border between the kingdom of Poland and Russia.) Also, Novograd-Volynsk was not occupied by the Red Cavalry, but by the Soviet 14th Army. As the historian Norman Davies has pointed out, a high road from Warsaw to Brest had been built by serfs under Nicholas I, but it lay two hundred miles beyond the front at Novograd-Volynsk, and so could not have been cluttered by the rearguard.

One of Babel’s strategies for creating a sharper feeling of reality in his stories was to mix real people with fictional characters. This was to have serious repercussions. General Budyonny, for instance, the real-life commander of the cavalry, often comes across in the stories as brutal, awkward, and irresolute. Babel makes fun of his oafish and uneducated Cossack speech. In the story “Czesniki,” Budyonny is asked to give his men a speech before battle: “Budyonny shuddered, and said in a quiet voice, ‘Men! Our situations . . . well, it’s . . . bad. A bit more liveliness, men!’ ”

Babel had, of course, no way of knowing that General Budyonny was to become a Marshal of the Soviet Union, First Deputy Commissar for Defense, and later “Hero of the Soviet Union. “Another real character in the stories, Voroshilov, the military commissar, also does not always come across particularly well. The implication in “Czesniki” is that Voroshilov overrode the other commanders’ orders, resulting in an overhasty attack that led to defeat. Voroshilov happened to be a personal friend of Stalin; he had become the People’s Commissar of Defense by the time the Red Cavalry collection was in prints and was destined to become Head of State. These were dangerous men to cross.

In these stories Babel uses different narrators, such as Lyutov, the young intellectual journalist, hiding his Jewishness and struggling to fit in with the Cossacks, and Balmashov, the murderous, bloodthirsty Cossack.

The Soviet Union wanted to forget this disastrous campaign, its first venture at bringing Communism to the world. Babels Red Cavalry stories, however, kept the fiasco in the public eye, both in the Soviet Union and abroad, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and ever since.

THE RED CAVALRY

Crossing the River Zbrucz

The commander of the Sixth Division reported that Novograd Volynsk was taken at dawn today. The staff is now withdrawing from Krapivno and our cavalry transport stretches in a noisy rear guard along the high road that goes from Brest to Warsaw, a high road built on the bones of muzhiks by Czar Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies are blossoming around us, a noon breeze is frolicking in the yellowing rye, virginal buckwheat is standing on the horizon like the wall of a faraway monastery. Silent Volhynia is turning away, Volhynia is leaving, heading into the pearly white fog of the birch groves, creeping through the flowery hillocks and with weakened arms entangling itself in the underbrush of hops. The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill. The blackened Zbrucz roars and twists the foaming knots of its rapids. The bridges are destroyed and we wade across the river. The majestic moon lies on the waves. The water comes up to the horses’ backs, purling streams trickle between hundreds of horses’ legs. Someone sinks and loudly curses the Mother of God. The river is littered with the black squares of the carts and filled with humming, whistling and singing that thunders above the glistening hollows and the snaking moon.

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. In the quarters to which I am assigned I find a pregnant woman and two red-haired Jews with thin necks and a third Jew who is sleeping with his face to the wall and a blanket pulled over his head. In my room I find ransacked closets, torn pieces of women’s fur coats on the floor, human excrement and fragments of the holy Seder plate that the Jews use once a year for Passover.

“Clean up this mess!” I tell the woman. “How can you live like this?”

The two Jews get up from their chairs. They hop around on their felt soles and pick up the broken pieces of porcelain from the floor. They hop around in silence, like monkeys, like Japanese acrobats in a circus, their necks swelling and twisting. They spread a ripped eiderdown on the floor for me and I lie down by the wall, next to the third, sleeping Jew. Timorous poverty descends over my bed.

Everything has been killed by the silence and only the moon, clasping its round, shining, carefree head in its blue hands, loiters beneath my window.

I rub my numb feet, lie back on the ripped eiderdown and fall asleep. I dream about the commander of the Sixth Division. He is chasing the brigade commander on his heavy stallion and shoots two bullets into his eyes. The bullets pierce the brigade commander s head and his eyes fall to the ground. “Why did you turn back the brigade?” Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, shouts at the wounded man and I wake up because the pregnant woman is tapping me on the face.

“Pan”* she says to me, “you are shouting in your sleep and tossing and turning. HI put your bed in another corner, because you are kicking my papa.”

She raises her thin legs and round belly from the floor and pulls the blanket off the sleeping man. An old man is lying there on his back, dead. His gullet has been ripped out, his face hacked in two and dark blood is clinging to his beard like a clump of lead.

“Pan” the Jewess says, shaking out the eiderdown, “the Poles were hacking him to death and he kept begging them, ‘Kill me in the backyard so my daughter wont see me die!’ But they wouldn’t inconvenience themselves. He died in this room, thinking of me... And now I want you to tell me,” the woman suddenly said with terrible force, “I want you to tell me where one could find another father like my father in all the world!”

The Church In Novograd

Yesterday I took a report over to the military commissar who had been billeted to the house of a Catholic priest who had fled. In the kitchen I was met by Pani* Eliza, the Jesuit’s housekeeper. She gave me a cup of amber tea and some sponge cake. Her sponge cakes had the aroma of crucifixion. Within them was the sap of slyness and the fragrant frenzy of the Vatican.

In the church next to the house the bells were howling, tolled by the crazed bell ringer. It was an evening filled with the stars of July. Pant Eliza, shaking her attentive gray hair, kept on heaping cookies on my plate and I delighted in the Jesuitical fare.

The old Polish woman addressed me as “Pan? gray old men with ossified ears stood to attention near the door and somewhere in the serpentine darkness slithered a monks soutane. The Pater had fled but he had left behind his curate, Pan Romuald.

Romuald was a eunuch with a nasal voice and the body of a giant, who addressed us as “Comrade.” He ran his yellow finger along the map, circling the areas where the Poles had been defeated. He counted the wounds of his fatherland with rasping ecstasy. May gentle oblivion engulf the memory of Romuald, who betrayed us without pity and was then shot without so much as a second thought. But that evening his tight soutane rustled at all the portieres and swept through all the corridors in a frenzy, as he smiled at everyone who wanted a drink of vodka. That evening the monks shadow crept behind me wherever I went. Pan Romuald could have become a bishop if he had not been a spy.

I drank rum with him. The breath of an alien way of life flickered beneath the ruins of the priest s house and Pan Romualds ingratiating seduction debilitated me. O crucifixes, tiny as the talismans of a courtesan! O parchment of the Papal Bull and satin of women’s love letters moldering in blue silken waistcoats!

I can see you now, you deceptive monk with your purple habit, your puffy, swollen hands and your soul, tender and merciless like a cats! I can see the wounds of your God, oozing with the seed, the fragrant poison that intoxicates young maidens.

We drank rum, waiting for the military commissar but he still hadn’t come back from headquarters. Romuald had collapsed in a corner and fallen asleep. He slept and quivered, while beyond the window an alley seeped into the garden beneath the black passion of the sky. Thirsting roses swayed in the darkness. Green lightning bolts blazed over the cupolas. A naked corpse lay on the embankment. And the rays of the moon streamed through the dead legs that are pointing upward.

So this is Poland, this is the arrogant grief of the Rzeczpospolita Polska!* A violent intruder, I unroll a louse-ridden straw mattress in this church abandoned by its clergymen, lay under my head a folio in which a Hosanna has been printed for Jozef Pilsudski, the illustrious leader of the Polish nobility.

Hordes of beggars are converging on your ancient towns, O Poland! The song of all the enslaved is thundering above them and woe unto you, Rzeczpospolita Polska and woe unto you, Prince Radziwill and you Prince Sapieha, who have risen for an hour.

My military commissar has still not returned. I go look for him at the headquarters, the garden, the church. The doors of the church are wide open, I enter and suddenly come face-to-face with two silver skulls flashing up from the lid of a shattered coffin. Aghast, I stumble back and fall down into the cellar. The oak staircase leads up to the altar from here and I see a large number of lights flitting high up, right under the cupola. I see the military commissar, the commander of the special unit and Cossacks carrying candles. They hear my weak cry and come down to haul me out from the basement.

The skulls turn out to have been carved into the church catafalque and no longer frighten me. I join the others on their search of the premises, because it turned out that that was what they were doing in the church, conducting a search, as a large pile of military uniforms had been found in the priests apartment.*

With wax dripping from our hands, the embroidered gold horse heads on our cuffs glittering, we whisper to one another as we circle with clinking spurs through the echoing building. Virgin Marys, covered with precious stones, watch us with their rosy, mouselike eyes, the flames flicker in our fingers and rectangular shadows twist over the statues of Saint Peter, Saint Francis, Saint Vincent and over their crimson cheeks and curly, carmine-painted beards.

We continue circling and searching. We run our fingers over ivory buttons and suddenly icons split open, revealing vaults and caverns blossoming with mold. This church is ancient and filled with secrets. Its lustrous walls hide clandestine passages, niches and noiseless trapdoors.

You foolish priest, hanging the brassieres of your female parishioners on the nails of the Savior s cross! Behind the holy gates we found a suitcase of gold coins, a morocco-leather sackful of banknotes and Parisian jewelers’ cases filled with emerald rings.

We went and counted the money in the military commissar s room. Columns of gold, carpets of paper money, wind gusts blowing on our candle flames, the raven madness in the eyes of Pant Eliza, the thundering laughter of Romuald and the endless roar of the bells tolled by Pan Robacki, the crazed bell ringer.

“I have to get away from here,” I said to myself, “away from these winking Madonnas conned by soldiers.”

A Letter

Here is a letter home dictated to me by Kurdyukov, a boy in our l regiment. This letter deserves to be remembered. I wrote it down without embellishing it and am recording it here word for word as he said it.

Dearest Mama, Evdokiya Fyodorovna,

I hasten in these first lines of my letter to set your mind at rest and to inform you that by the grace of the Lord I am alive and well and that I hope to hear the same from you. I bow most deepest before you, touching the moist earth with my white forehead. (There follows a list of relatives, godfathers and godmothers. I am omitting this. Let us proceed to the second paragraph.)

Dearest Mama, Evdokiya Fyodorovna Kurdyukova, I hasten to inform you that I am in Comrade Budyonny’s Red Cavalry Regiment and that my godfather Nikon Vasilich is also here and is at the present time a Red Hero. He took me and put me in his special detachment of the Polit-otdel in which we hand out books and newspapers to the various positions: the Moscow ZIK Izvestia the Moscow Pravday and our own merciless newspaper the Krasny Kavalerist, which every fighter on the front wants to read and then go and heroically hack the damn Poles to pieces and I am living real marvelous at Nikon Vasilich’s.

Dearest Mama, Evdokiya Fyodorovna, send me anything that you possibly in any way can. I beg you to butcher our speckled pig and make a food packet for me, to be sent to Comrade Budyonny’s Politotdel unit, addressed to Vasily Kurdyukov. All evenings I go to sleep hungry and bitterly cold without any clothes at all. Write to me a letter about my Stepan — is he alive or not, I beg you to look after him and to write to me about him, is he still scratching himself or has he stopped but also about the scabs on his forelegs, have you had him shod, or not? I beg you dearest Mama, Evdokiya Fyodorovna, to wash without fail his forelegs with the soap I hid behind the icons and if Papa has swiped it all then buy some in Krasnodar and the Lord will smile upon you. I must also describe that the country here is very poor, the muzhiks with their horses hide in the woods from our Red eagles, there’s hardly no wheat to be seen, it’s all scrawny and we laugh and laugh at it. The people sow rye and they sow oats too. Hops grow on sticks here so they come out very well. They brew home brew with them.

In these second lines of this letter I hasten to write you about Papa, that he hacked my brother Fyodor Timofeyich Kurdyukov to pieces a year ago now. Our Comrade Pavlichenko’s Red Brigade attacked the town of Rostov, when there was a betrayal in our ranks. And Papa was with the Whites back then as commander of one of Denikin’s companies. All the folks that saw Papa says he was covered in medals like with the old regime. And as we were betrayed, the Whites captured us and threw us all in irons and Papa caught sight of my brother Fyodor Timofeyich. And Papa began hacking away at Fyodor, saying: you filth you, red dog, son of a bitch and other things and hacked away at him until sundown until my brother Fyodor Timofeyich died. I had started writing you a letter then, about how your Fyodor is lying buried without a cross but Papa caught me and said: you are your mother’s bastards, the roots of that whore, I’ve plowed your mother and I’ll keep on plowing her my whole damn life till I don’t have a drop of juice left in me and other things. I had to bear suffering like our Savior Jesus Christ. I managed to run away from Papa in the nick of time and join up with the Reds again, Comrade Pavlichenko’s company. And our brigade got the order to go to the town of Voronezh to get more men and we got more men and horses too, bags, revolvers and everything we needed.

About Voronezh, beloved Mama Evdokiya Fyodorovna, I can describe that it is indeed a marvelous town, a bit larger I think than Krasnodar, the people in it are very beautiful, the river is brilliant to the point of being able to swim. We were given two pounds of bread a day each, half a pound of meat and sugar enough so that when you got up you drank sweet tea and the same in the evenings, forgetting hunger and for dinner I went to my brother Semyon Timofeyich for blini or goose meat and then lay down to rest. At the time, the whole regiment wanted to have Semyon Timofeyich for a commander because he is a wild one and that order came from Comrade Budyonny and Semyon Timofeyich was given two horses, good clothes, a cart specially for rags he’s looted and a Red Flag Medal and they really looked up to me as I am his brother. Now when some neighbor offends you, then Semyon Timofeyich can completely slash him to pieces. Then we started chasing General Denikin, slashed them down by the thousand and chased them to the Black Sea but Papa was nowhere to be seen and Semyon Timofeyich looked for him in all the positions, because he mourned for our brother Fyodor. But only, dearest Mama, since you know Papa and his stubborn character, do you know what he did? He impudently painted his red beard black and was in the town of Maykop in civilian clothes, so that nobody there knew that he is he himself, that very same police constable in the old regime. But truth will always show its head — my godfather Nikon Vasilich saw him by .chance in the hut of a townsman and wrote my brother Semyon Timofeyich a letter. We got on horses and galloped two hundred versts — me, my brother Semyon and boys which wants to come along from the Cossack village.

And what is it we saw in the town of Maykop? We saw that people away from the front, they don’t give a damn about the front and it’s all full of betrayal and Yids like in the old regime. And my brother Semyon Timofeyich in the town of Maykop had a good row with the Yids who would not give Papa up and had thrown him in jail under lock and key, saying that a decree had come not to hack to pieces prisoners, we’ll try him ourselves, don’t be angry, he’ll get what he deserves. But then Semyon Timofeyich spoke and proved that he was the commander of a regiment and had been given all the medals of the Red Flag by Comrade Budyonny and threatened to hack to pieces everyone who argued over Papa’s person without handing him over and the boys from the Cossack villages threatened them too. But then, the moment Semyon got hold of Papa, Semyon began whipping him and lined up all the fighters in the yard as befits military order. And then Semyon splashed water all over Papa’s beard and the color flowed from the beard. And Semyon asked our Papa, Timofey Rodyonich, “So, Papa, are you feeling good now that you’re in my hands?”

“No,” Papa said, “I’m feeling bad.”

Then Semyon asked him, “And my brother Fyodor, when you were hacking him to pieces, did he feel good in your hands?”

“No,” Papa said, “Fyodor was feeling bad.”

Then Semyon asked him, “And did you think, Papa, that someday you might be feeling bad?”

“No,” Papa said, “I didn’t think that I might be feeling bad.”

Then Semyon turned to the people and said, “And I believe, Papa, that if I fell into your hands, I would find no mercy. So now, Papa, we will finish you off!”