ISAAC BABEL'S "SIN OF JESUS" THE GOGOLIAN ORCHESTRATION OF VOICES

ISAAC BABEL’S “SIN OF JESUS”

Orchestration of Voices

Babel’s fiction owes a lot to Nikolai Gogol. While writing his unique works of fiction, the great Gogol stood at a lectern, alone, ventriloquizing. He would amble about the room, talking to himself, doing the voices of the different characters. Gogol often writes not exactly a narrative, but an orchestration of voices. The best example of this is his “Overcoat”—probably the most famous story in all of Russian literature—featuring, as so often in Gogol, a rather underclass, seemingly half-crazy narrator who  orchestrates the voices as he tells the tale.

All different characters come to life in the voices, and the narrator himself becomes a background character in the story. Funny, ironic effects are created by blending all different stylistic features: illiterate words with highly literary words, with Ukrainianisms with words from the lexicon of the Orthodox church.

Such writing cries out to be read aloud and lends itself to public performance. Gogol was an actor and a master at performing his works in public readings. He was so proficient at reading in public that he often had his audiences in stitches, rolling on the floor and holding their sides with laughter. Those who heard him read from his play, The Inspector General—still the best play in all of Russian literature—remarked that no actor on stage could hope to perform his role as successfully as Gogol did in public readings.

Babel’s Story “The Sin of Jesus”

Those not familiar with Isaac Babel’s writings may be shocked at the blasphemy in this story, as well as the attitude toward women (and men too, for that matter). Keep in mind that Babel, like Kafka, was a subversive writer, the kind of writer who wanted his fiction to be a blow to the head of his reader. 

It is also worthy of note that this story was written in 1922, at the dawning of the new Soviet Union, an atheistic state. Before the Russian Revolution Babel had once been sued for obscenity for one of his published stories. Only five years earlier, in 1917, “The Sin of Jesus” could never have been published, if not for its obscenity (and it is often obscene), then surely for the way it depicts Jesus Christ.

“The Sin of Jesus” is a highly Gogolian story, notable for its orchestration of voices. The narrator, apparently underclass and rather ignorant, is a background character. The basic trope involves having everyone, the narrator, even Jesus Christ, speaking the language of the Russian underclass. Blended in with the illiterate speech are other levels of style, sometimes highly literary. Old Church Slavonic words—OCS is the language of the Russian Orthodox liturgy—show up side by side with peasant vulgarities. Occasionally, the narrator throws in highly lyrical descriptions of nature. Taken as a whole, this mélange of voices makes for a bizarre, often funny, very ironical effect. Despite its complexity, the story is also oddly moving, especially at the end, when Jesus begs forgiveness of an underclass women, and does not receive it.