When a young Isaac Babel left his job as a literary editor in Odessa in 1920 and ran off to the Polish front, to ride with the Red Cavalry against the Poles, his family saw this as a suicidal act, something only an insane man would do. But two years later he came back home with a notebook full of literary impressions. Based on this notebook he wrote his Red Cavalry stories, which pull no punches in describing what war is like.
The caricature of Babel above, by Boris Yefimov, references his famous story "Мой первый гусь," ("My First Goose"), a first-person narrative that describes how a war correspondent, Jewish, in spectacles, joins up with a Cossack unit. One of them advises him how to behave: "No making it here with them glasses on your nose . . . . but go mess up a lady, a right and proper lady, and the boys will love you for it."
Whereupon the bespectacled intellectual establishes his credibility with these savage warriors by acting the macho man. He kills a goose and orders an old woman to cook it for him. The Cossacks accept him, and the story ends with a striking homoerotic image of the narrator sleeping amidst the Cossacks, all of their legs intertwined, warming one another.
Murder sleeps easy, it appears, in the soul of a natural-born killer like a Cossack, but the bespectacled one sleeps fitfully. Here is the last line of the story: "Я видел сны и женщин во сне, и только сердце мое, обагренное убийством, скрипело и текло." "I had dreams and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, stained crimson by the murder, squealed and heaved."
With the double meaning of the word "goose" in English, the title of the story in English has an extra dimension (quite appropriate) not available in its Russian title.
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