ISAAC BABEL THE SUBVERSIVE, THE INCENDIARY

BABEL THE SUBVERSIVE, THE INCENDIARY

Konstantin Paustovsky on Babel: “По натуре Бабель был разоблачителем. By his very nature Babel was an unmasker [a divester, one who strips away the clothing on imperfect man and shows his pristine nakedness]. He loved to back people into a cul de sac, and because of this he had a reputation around Odessa as a difficult and dangerous man.” 

In I. Babel: Reminiscences of Contemporaries (Moscow: 1972), from which this quote is taken (p. 11), not much is said about the sinister side of Babel. The sneakiness, the mockery. The way he had of looking at cruelty and brutality, and sometimes finding grace. His wife Antonina Pirozhkova, editor of this collection, who contributes a long piece to it, says, in essence, nothing about this side of her husband.

As if she had not read stories not for the faint of heart, such as those in Red Cavalry. “My First Goose” and “Makhno’s Boys” (“Батька Махно”). The goose story describes how a Jewish intellectual ingratiates himself with Cossacks, who are described as beautiful, amoral animals. He commits murder, but cannot rape a woman to get in their good graces, as he is advised to do. Rather, the best he can do is kill a goose. This ironic story ends with a description of the narrator and the Cossacks sleeping together, legs intertwined, while the narrator dreams of women. But his heart, “stained crimson by the murder [of the goose],” sleeps uneasily.

“Old Makhno’s Boys,” probably the most perverse piece of fiction that Babel ever wrote, features a narrator much like himself, who goes by out of literary curiosity, to see what a woman looks like the day after she is gang-raped. In his works Babel seems to be saying what he often repeated in his life: You must look at everything.

Babel, says his friend, the actor Leonid Utesov, was a man “with curious eyes and curious ears.” Once Babel invited Utesov to dine with a friend of his, a military man (see Reminiscences, p. 264). After the meal the old trooper said, “Come outside; I want to show you something.” Out in the courtyard there was a wolf in a cage. The trooper took a sharpened stick and began poking through the bars, tormenting the wolf, saying, “How do you like that, you sucker? Huh?”

Utesov whispered to Babel: “Tell him to stop,” but Babel answered, “Be quiet, old buddy. Man must know everything. This is not very nice (невкусно—not appetizing), but it’s interesting (любопытно—curious).” Somewhat in his life, and very much so in his fiction, Babel likes to walk a tightrope over an abyss of immorality and cruelty. He sees the cruelty all over the place, and he wants his reader to see it as well. He appears to believe that, in writing fiction, total indifference toward the cruelty described is the best narrative stance.

So that, in the upshot, we sometimes end up with a narrator who is the same cretin morally as those perpetrating violence or condoning it. The degenerate boy soldier in “Makhno’s Boys”— who walks around on his hands and mocks the Jewish girl who the day before had “taken on six Cossacks”—is despicable. But so is the narrator who drops by to have a literary look at the girl. 

Where do the sympathies of Babel himself, the man, lie? Almost certainly with the raped girl. But you would never know that when reading the story, where the figure closest to Babel, his alter ego the narrator, is portrayed as not the least sympathetic; he is, rather, an artist out gathering material.

This is a brave, but dangerous stance for a writer to take. In condemning Babel’s Red Cavalry stories, Marshall Budyonny, leader of the Red Cavalry, made special mention of “Old Makhno’s Boys,” and came to the easy conclusion that Babel himself is the flawed narrator of the story. The collection ends “with a display of the author’s scientific curiosity [wrote Budyonny], when he wishes to see what a Jewish woman raped by about ten Makhno men looks like.”

Babel is Kafka’s kind of writer, Kafka, who once said, “We must read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, then what are we reading it for?” Babel’s stories are blows upside the human head. Or, to put it differently, Babel was an incendiary, burning down received ideas and warm, comfortable truths, by which people live their lives. Reading Babel makes for discomfort in the reader. Like Kafka, Babel most likely would approve of the discomfort.