| |
This collection of the works of Isaac Babel, edited by Babel's daughter
Nathalie and marvelously translated by Peter Constantine, is a cause for a kind
of melancholy celebration: a celebration of literary genius framed by
20th-century tragedy. Babel, the Odessa Jew who was executed in 1940 at age 46,
is probably not among the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is too
fragmentary, unsustained, too hampered by bureaucracy and murder, for him to
belong in the category of, say, Proust or Kafka.
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ISAAC BABEL
Edited by Nathalie Babel
Illustrated. 1,072 pages. W. W. Norton. $39.95 (slipcased), $24.94 (cloth).
Even the propaganda he wrote for the new Soviet government -- which reveals
him as either a not-yet-disillusioned believer in revolutionary promise or a
youthful opportunist -- has an impudent, poetic sting. In his short, eventful
life, Babel experienced the worst of human behavior in pogroms and war. He
portrayed a stricken and flagrant world but viewed it from a darkly comic,
modernist distance that intensified his power. He is a writer who stabs the mind
and the heart and the inner eye with short, savage strokes.
Babel also exemplified his historical epoch. Born near Odessa in 1894, the
city on the Black Sea that comes to life in a dozen or so of his best stories,
he owed to the Bolshevik Revolution a chance to break out of the ghetto into the
wide world. He began early and was noticed by Maxim Gorky, who published his
early work. He achieved global renown with ''The Red Cavalry Stories,'' which
were published in the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1926 and which were translated
into most of the European languages. He was then cut down by the revolution in
which he had invested his hopes.
It is a sadly common story. What is not common about Babel is the depth of
his implication in Soviet history and the quality of the writing he left behind.
''The Red Cavalry Stories'' are amazing not only as literature but also as
biography, showing Babel the Jew traveling with a detachment of Cossacks, the
Jews' eternal enemy, during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. This is conspicuously
a Jew -- described elsewhere by Babel as a man with ''glasses on your nose and
autumn in your heart'' -- playing an unaccustomed role, but staying within the
framework of Talmudic morality.
Babel's stories depict a Cossack world of brutality, drunkenness, syphilitic
disfigurement, cunning, valor and unintentional comedy. They also show the
writer, who used a fake name and kept his Jewishness a secret, as a double
agent, a secret sympathizer with the battered inhabitants of the shtetls, the
semi-rural ghettos he saw. ''Brody!'' Babel writes of a mostly Jewish town in
Volhynia, a territory in a stretch crisscrossed by the two armies. ''The mummies
of your trampled passions have breathed their irresistible poison upon me.''
Babel was a kind of magical naturalist. He wrote about the world as he really
experienced it, but he experienced it with an eye that anthropomorphized objects
and concepts while exaggerating the misshapenness of humans. ''The Odessa
Stories,'' centering on the life and exploits of an Odessan Jewish gangster
named Benya Krik, expose a lost universe of brawling sensuality and rampant
individualism. If better stories than these have ever been written, I don't know
them.
''The purple eye of the sunset, rummaging over the earth, stumbled upon Grach
in the evening, snoring under his cart,'' one passage reads. ''An impulsive ray
bumped into the sleeping man, and with its blazing reproach led him to
Dalnitskaya Street, which lay dusty and shimmering like green rye in the wind.''
Babel was at his most active for only about 20 years, until he began to
practice what he called ''the genre of silence'' and wrote, it seems, mostly
though not entirely for the drawer. Among the works collected here are several
plays and screenplays for silent films.
''Roaming Stars,'' based on a story by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem,
may be the best. It is a stormy and tragic story of two lovers whose lives are
destroyed by greed and history. Babel wrote another screenplay just before his
arrest in 1939. It is entitled ''Number 4 Staraya Square,'' after the address of
the Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow. It is half a satire on Soviet
bureaucracy and half a paean to the inevitable triumph of Communism. Though it
was never produced, it does seem to illustrate the impossibility of being a
member of the Soviet Writers' Union and keeping entirely silent at the same
time.
In any case, it is Babel's short stories that are immortal, some of the best
of which seem drawn from Babel's youth -- at least they depict a young man
growing up in a weirdly unconventional family in Odessa: ''There were drunks in
our clan, we had run away with the daughters of generals and then abandoned them
before crossing the border.'' The boy is caught midway between Jewish ritual and
the excitement of Odessa itself with its harbor, its English sea captains, its
Turkish traders, its Kirghiz wet nurses and its music teachers who sent Jascha
Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist into the world.
''The heavy waves by the harbor wall separated me more and more from a home
reeking of onions and Jewish fate,'' the boy says, running away from violin
lessons and into the arms of literature and adventure.
The boy seems to be the same as the narrator of one of Babel's most gaily
bawdy stories, about a young man living a bohemian life in St. Petersburg in
1916 who gets a job helping a buxom, literary matron translate the works of Guy
de Maupassant. This story is a compact marvel, full of social ambition and
youthful exuberance. It also includes a few lines, frequently cited in
commentaries on Babel, that show the young man telling his rich, untalented
patron how he works:
''I spoke to her of style, of an army of words, an army in which every type
of weapon is deployed. No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a
period in the right place. She listened with her head inclined and her painted
lips apart.''
There is an entire literary theory in the first two sentences of that
passage, and in the last there is a delicious glimpse into the human condition,
about which we learn more in a few words from Isaac Babel than in many heavier
tomes of lesser writers.
But Babel comes close. His stories and sketches, his journalism and
diaries, even his screenplays -- until now only available in English in partial
collections -- have an electrifying cumulative impact. Babel wrote a kind of
cauterizing prose that Hemingway declared to be even leaner and more concise
than his own. Cynthia Ozick, in an admirable introduction to this collection,
describes him as a figure who ''wrested his sentences out of a purifying
immediacy.''
Related Terms: