ISAAC BABEL. TORTURE. DEATH BY EXECUTION. DIRE FOREBODINGS
Babel was among the most renowned of Soviet writers to be purged
in the Stalinist terror. He was arrested on May 15, 1939 and shot on January
27, 1940. What went on in the interval between those dates is not pleasant to
contemplate. Babel was forced to write denunciations of his writer friends,
accusing them of all sorts of outlandish crimes. He was forced to plead guilty
to spying for foreign powers.
Babel spent the last eight months of his life at Lubyanka Prison,
and, apparently, part of the time at another notorious jail, Butyrki. As far as
I know, there is no documentation of what, exactly, was done to him there, but we
can read the testimony of others who survived and told their gruesome tales.
Or, for example, we have letters of the avant-garde Soviet theater director,
Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose imprisonment overlapped Babel’s at Lubyanka and who
was shot on February 2, 1940. Meyerhold and Babel apparently were both
interrogated by, among others, a man named Schwartzman. Meyerhold describes in detail
how he was tortured.
As for the shooting, the official tale is that when they
finally got through tormenting and humiliating Babel, they held a trial in
Beria’s quarters, pronounced him guilty of spying, and then executed him by
firing squad in the early morning hours.
Who knows exactly how they killed Babel, but the reality of most Soviet executions was different. The
usual thing was for your jailer to do the deed—the same man who had been
escorting you back and forth from interrogations, and who softened you up by
beating you, knocking out your teeth, depriving you of sleep. The death
sentence was concealed from the prisoner. He would be walking down the
corridor, as if on the way to one more interrogation, and his jailer would
kill him with a pistol shot to the back of the head.
d
Knowing what happened to Isaac Babel at the end of his life,
you can look back—at both his life and his fictional works—and you find eerie
forshadowings of what was to come.
When giving writerly advice to young Dolya, a neighbor kid
in Odessa who wanted to be a writer, young Babel said in passing, “in war it’s
better to be killed than to be listed as missing in action (literally:
disappeared without a trace)” (reminiscences of Sergei Bondarin). After Babel
was arrested he disappeared without a trace. For years no one knew if he was
dead or alive. There were rumors, some of them apparently propagated by the
secret police, that Babel was still alive, serving a sentence in the Gulag. His
wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, was finally informed of the date of his death only
in 1954.
At a public reading in Odessa in the 1930s Babel begins with
a joke: “I can already foresee what exactly will do me in. My nasty character.
That’s what will crash my boat on the reefs” (reminiscences of Sergei
Bondarin).
“He loved to hide away, without telling anyone where he was;
his days resembled the comings and goings of a mole. In 1936 I wrote this about
Isaak Emmanuilovich:
‘His personal destiny resembles one of the books he has
written; he himself cannot untangle the complexities. Once he was on his way to
see me. His little daughter asked, “Where are you going?” He felt obliged to
answer; after that he changed his mind and didn’t come to see me…
In fleeing from predators, an octopus expels a cloud of ink;
all the same they catch him and eat him. A favorite dish among Spaniards is “octopus
in its own ink.”’ I wrote this in Paris at the very beginning of 1936, and I’m
in awe when rewriting those lines now. Could I have imagined how they would
sound several years later?” (reminiscences of Ilya Erenburg) [To be precise,
only four years after these words were written the Soviet secret police hunted
down Babel, caught him, and soon devoured him in his own ink.]
When he got to Lubyanka in 1939 Babel
probably came across familiar faces among the jailers. These were most likely
the same kind of people he had encountered in the Red Cavalry: single-minded,
uneducated, thoughtlessly cruel and unmerciful. It must have occurred to him,
as well, that he was face to face with his own literary personages.
Babel had
always “wanted to know everything,” and now, in the final days of his life, he
was given to experience things that—even had he lived—he may not have had the
fortitude to describe in fictional art.
He may well have experienced what his character, the landowner
Nikitinsky experienced at the end of his life—in “The Life Story of
Pavlichenko, Matvei,” the tale of a former serf who becomes a Red General and
returns to wreak his vengeance on his former master. Here is the ending of that
story:
“You got the soul of a jackal,” he [Nikitinsky] says, and
he’s give up trying to get free. “I treat you like I was talking to a officer
of the Russian Empire,” he says, “and you smuthound guttersnipes, you all
sucked the teats of a she-wolf. Shoot me, then, you son of a bitch.”
But I wasn’t about to shoot him, wasn’t no way I owed him a
shooting. I just dragged him back upstairs to the parlor. Up there was his
wife, lady Nadezhda, setting there plain out of her gourd, and she’s got the
bare-blade of a saber in her hands, sashaying around the room and watching
herself in the mirror.
And when I dragged Nikitinsky in there, she run off to
have a seat in a armchair, she’s got a velvet crown with feathers sprucing up
her head, and she sets there in that chair all pert and presents arms to me
with her saber.
Then I commenced to tromping on my master Nikitinsky. I
tromped him for a hour, maybe even more, and during that time I come to know
what life was all about. Shooting, now—I’ll be honest with you—shooting’s just
a way to get shed of a fellow. Like granting him a pardon, and for yourself
it’s just a lousy too easy thing to do. With shooting you don’t get down to the
soul, to where it’s at inside a fellow and how it makes itself shown. But me
now, there’s times when I don’t take no pity on myself, I been known to tromp
on the enemy for a hour, even more, cause I have this desire to learn about
life, what our life on earth amounts to. . .
You can’t help cringing as you imagine Babel in the hands of
his tormentors, who are trying to get deep down in his soul, where they can extract
confessions to anything they dream up. The ironies pile up late in the life of
the great ironic writer. In prison the blocked Babel, who had published practically nothing in years, was forced to write once
again. And write a very crude kind of fiction: denunciations he knew to be falsehoods and
confessions to spying (more falsehoods). The man who wanted to know everything,
to experience everything spent the last eight months of his life experiencing
the utterly unspeakable.
On Sept. 11, 1939, four months into his incarceration, he sent a letter to Beria, the head of
the secret police. This is the kind of letter a writer sends at the end of his
rope, a letter steeped in the kind of fiction that they beat out of you.
“The Revolution opened the path of creation for me, the path
of useful and happy labor. My individualism, false literary opinions, and the Trotskyite
influences I fell under from the earliest days of my work turned me away from
this path. With each passing year my writings became a bit more useless and
hostile to Soviet readers. But I thought I was right, and they were wrong. This
lethal separation dried up the very source of my creativity. My attempts to
free myself from the hold of that blind and egotistical narrow-mindedness proved
pitiful and vain. My liberation came
while I was in prison. During these months of incarceration, I have perhaps
understood more things than in my entire previous life. I’ve seen with
horrible clarity the mistakes and crimes I’ve committed” (David Remnick article
in NYRB, Apr. 10, 1997, p. 33).
The passage that I have italicized at the end
demonstrates, perhaps, one glimmer of truth that shines through the rest of the
total fabrication. He certainly must have learned and understood some things in those last months. And “My liberation came while I was in prison.” True. It came in January, 1940, with that bullet to the back of the head.
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