BABEL IN PEREDELKINO

Boris Pasternak's Dacha in Peredelkino; Now a Museum Devoted to Pasternak

BABEL IN PEREDELKINO

Isaac Babel seems to have been afflicted with a near lifelong writer’s block. After he had published Red Cavalry and the Odessa stories, he spent the remainder of his life trying to get the writing juices flowing. He wrote screenplays, but never really seemed to like that kind of writing. He preferred the short story form. He had a way of dropping out of view for weeks at a time, and no one knew where he was. He often fled to the boondocks, where he would take a room in a small village, living with some old woman. There he would write. Or try to. Sometimes he would move in with friends, or stay in a hotel for several weeks.

He met Antonina Pirozhkova for the first time in the summer of 1932. They began living together at the very end of the year 1933, and stayed together until May, 1939. After they had a child, Lida, some of Babel’s bizarre behavior was toned down, but never completely.

He hated having discussions about literature and often preferred the company of workers, peasants, and oddballs to the company of fellow writers. He hung out around the hippodrome in Moscow, where he could indulge his love for horses, and his interest in the people who rode them and trained them.

Babel belonged to the Union of Soviet Writers and was widely recognized as one of the best writers of fiction in the country. That gave him the right to a villa in Peredelkino, a writers’ colony some twenty kilometers from Moscow. “Villa” is probably too grand a word. When Babel and Pirozhkova moved to Peredelkino in April, 1938, the small cottage was badly in need of repair. They ended up living there for only one year.

Babel had resisted moving to Peredelkino for some time, but was assured that he could live there without close association with the other writers. When asked how he was liking it in Peredelkino, Babel replied, “Being in the midst of nature is wonderful, but there’s something terrifying about the realization that dozens of people to the right and left of you are sitting there composing.”

Babel had trouble working in Peredelkino, just as he had trouble working practically everywhere. Pirozhkova writes that he was tormented at Peredelkino by graphomaniacs, who kept bringing him their writings and asking his opinion. Babel was too polite to tell them what they wrote was bad; he tried to encourage them. So they would rewrite their stuff and then bring it back to him again. Babel at Peredelkino took to answering the telephone in a woman's voice, "No, he's not home. No, he's gone out."

Babel spent his last happy year in Peredelkino, where he was arrested in the middle of the night, May 15, 1939, and taken to Lubyanka Prison. The recent documentary film, “Finding Babel,” shows Babel’s grandson, Andrei Malaev-Babel, on a journey to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of Babel’s death. Andrei travels  back to Ukraine and Russia, visiting places where his grandfather had lived and had his being.

One of the places Andrei goes, in seeking the great writer’s roots, is Peredelkino, Babel’s last place of civilized residence on earth. He arrives at the location of the small cottage/villa only to find it gone—replaced by a chic new edifice, complete with high walls, obviously the domain of some nouveau riche Russian. 

Andrei rings the doorbell at the gate, and all the bodyguards come out. He tries to explain to them who he is and what he is there for. These men appear never to have heard of Isaac Babel. Not only do they not admit him to the property. They threaten the photographers with the video cameras and then bodily remove Andrei from the premises.

Much of the land in this lush pine forest now appears to have been bought up by the new Russian ruling class of the rich. A commentary on the meretricious new capitalist Russia that has replaced the socialist Soviet Union of Babel’s time. Everything in Mother Russia changes; and everything stays the same. At least in Putin's Russia they are no longer arresting, torturing, murdering writers as a matter of course.