The best Soviet writers were extinguished under Stalin. Osip Mandelstam died in a prison camp; Marina Tsvetayeva, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Sergei Yesenin committed suicide. Whenever torturers failed to extract immediate confessions, Stalin would ask: “Is this a hotel or a prison?” Isaac Babel was “linked to the wife of the enemy of the people Yezhov,” former chief of the secret police. In January 1940, after a twenty-minute trial, Babel was condemned and shot in the head. His body was burnt, as well as his manuscripts and diaries, and his ashes were thrown into “bottomless grave number 1.” Soon afterwards, the temporarily surviving writers fought for possession of his dacha.
Babel’s life was as interesting as his death. A Jew, he fought alongside the savage Cossacks—portrayed in Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, and traditional enemies of the Jews—in the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. Lionel Trilling, noting the contrast between them, observed that “the Jew conceived his own ideal character to consist in his being intellectual, pacific, humane. The Cossack was physical, violent, without mind or manners.” Babel, a doe among wolves, a man (he said) “with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart,” proved himself under fire. “A Jew who climbs onto a horse,” he maintained, “stops being a Jew and becomes a Russian.” He was both hostile and sympathetic toward Jews. In one story he described the “narrow-chested Jews [who] hung mournfully about the crossways … the bitter scorn inherent in these long bony backs, these tragic yellow beards,” but added that “their capacity for suffering was full of a somber greatness.”
Though Babel was thick-lipped, bulbous-nosed, and bald, women were attracted to his talent and wit. He married Zhenya Gronfein in 1919; had an affair in 1925 with the blond actress Tamara Kashirina, which made Zhenya emigrate to Paris; had another affair with Evgenia Gladun, which had fatal consequences after she married Yezhov; and contracted a second “marriage” to the young engineer Antonina Pirozhkova. He had a son with Tamara in 1926, a daughter with Zhenya in 1929, and a daughter with Antonina in 1937.
Babel wrote stories, plays, and film scripts, but nearly dried up in the 1930s, when he practiced “the genre of silence.” He explained with characteristic irony that “as long as I don’t publish I am merely accused of laziness. If, on the other hand, I publish, then a veritable avalanche of weighty and dangerous accusations will descend upon my head.” His feelings about Jews, women, and writing were all desperately ambiguous.
Like his friend André Malraux, Babel was a mythomaniac who loved to invent and revise the facts of his life. But he was more successful than Malraux, during those chaotic times, in covering his tracks. He was born in 1894 in Odessa, that cradle of Jewish genius, and his family soon moved to Nikolaev, seventy miles northeast of the Black Sea. His father was in turn a shopkeeper, a warehouse owner, and a middle-class merchant. In 1905 Babel, a studious child of eleven, witnessed and was sexually excited by the violence of a pogrom (a favorite word of the Cossacks). In St. Petersburg in 1916, the bookworm met Maxim Gorky, who published his first stories and ordered him to go out into the world. Babel claimed that in 1917–1918 he served as a French translator for the Cheka (the secret police) and fought on the Romanian front, but no records have survived to substantiate his claims.
From June to September 1920, with General Semion Budenny’s Red Cavalry in Poland, Babel wrote battle reports, interrogated prisoners, and tended the wounded. Jerome Charyn does not explain that in November 1918, as the defeated German army withdrew from Poland, the Soviets advanced to recapture that country and bring Communism to Europe. Trotsky invented the slogan “Proletarians, to horse!” and created the Red Cavalry, with its machine-guns mounted on horse-drawn carriages. But in August 1920 Marshal Józef Pilsudski defeated the Russians and drove them out of Poland. When Babel’s Red Cavalry stories were published in 1926 and brought instant fame, Budenny attacked him for slandering the Cossacks and claimed that he’d never fought with the cavalry. Babel had dared to write that the Revolution was “eaten with gunpowder and spiced with best-quality blood.”
Babel had learned French in school, adored the stories of Maupassant (though he later said his idol “lacked heart”), and made three trips to France. Charyn doesn’t mention that Malraux, meeting Babel at a 1934 writers’ conference in Moscow, noted that he “speaks French well and is passionate about the literary tittle-tattle from Paris. His Red Cavalry is still a success.” Malraux liked Babel’s intense excitement and even his cruel accounts of summary executions, but was shocked by his frankness and mentioned “his unfortunate tendency to say what he thinks of the economic, political, and social situation in the USSR.” In 1935 Babel enjoyed all the privileges of the Russian elite. Charyn writes that he “had a big Ford, a chauffeur, servants; he could eat at ‘closed’ restaurants and travel wherever he wanted.” But in 1936 Gorky died, or was poisoned, and Babel lost his powerful protector. From then on it was essential to lie low and keep silent.
During the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway told Babel’s friend Ilya Ehrenburg, “I have been criticized for writing too concisely, but I find that Babel’s style is even more concise than mine.” A chapter in Hemingway’s In Our Time, based on his dispatch from Thrace during the Greco-Turkish War in October 1922, has the bare, direct, elemental effect of Babel’s war stories: “Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through the mud… . The Maritza was running yellow almost up to the bridge.”
Babel achieves stunning effects with surrealistic imagery in realistic stories: “Blue roads flowed past me like streams of milk spurting from many breasts,” or with startling similes: “the moon hung above the yard like a cheap earring,” “evening flew up to the sky like a flock of birds.” Some of his sentences, in the English translation, have perfect poetic meter: “The frozen, basalt Venice stood transfixed.” Stephen Crane famously wrote that “the red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer”; Babel surpasses this with “the orange sun rolled down the sky like a lopped-off head.” His moon, “like chloroform on a hospital table,” recalls T. S. Eliot’s evening “spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table.”
Babel’s stories are filled with ghoulish images of death. His “vague odor of corruption,” his “fire of silent and intoxicating revenge,” made Frank O’Connor wonder if he was “a real writer or a dangerous lunatic.” His finest story, “Crossing into Poland,” concerns violence and cruelty, grief and loss. The narrator travels across a beautiful landscape, but finds slaughtered horses and a man apparently asleep amidst intolerable filth. The narrator then has a nightmare and wakes to discover that the man has actually been murdered inside the looted house. His nightmare echoes the grim reality just as the victim, his throat cut and face cleft in two, recalls the slaughtered horses. The dead man has sacrificially attempted to maintain a shred of dignity and prevent his pregnant daughter from witnessing his murder. Her sudden cry is an elemental reaction to the domestic tragedy: “I should wish to know,” she asks, “where in the whole world you could find another father like my father?”
The blurbs on the jacket of Charyn’s book, like guardians of a fortress, dare the reviewer to assault it. But Charyn has missed a precious opportunity to use all this fascinating material and write the first English biography of Babel. Though he knows some Russian, Charyn did not visit Odessa or hire a researcher to delve into the rich, recently opened Russian archives. There are no foreign language books in his bibliography, half of which is not on Babel; John Berryman’s important essay is not listed; and the names of Herlihy and Poggioli are misspelled. Though he lives in Paris, he found nothing about Babel in France. He interviewed Babel’s daughter Nathalie, but she remembered nothing of her father’s visit to Paris when she was three years old, and he learned very little from her. Finally, she satisfied him with a scrap of conventional memory: “As excited and happy as [mother] was before [he came], she was very downcast after he left.”
This brief but unconscionably padded book is fleshed out with two sketchy chronologies, and the material in these sections, the second overlapping the first, is recycled throughout the text. Charyn repeats several of his own banal remarks about the stories: the comparisons with Don Quixote and with Yankee Doodle, and the phrase about Babel “chasing his own tail.” He meaninglessly exclaims that Babel “takes us where we’ve never been and where we could never go” and “gives us a jolt that’s hard to ignore.” There are long, pointless digressions about his introduction to Babel’s work, Lionel Trilling (on whom Charyn, using the same quotations, is heavily dependent), science fiction, Roland Barthes, the photographer Diane Arbus, and Charyn’s brief teaching career at Stanford.
The book has some notable errors. Nikolaev is not a port on the Black Sea; Babel’s father-in-law, not his father, sold agricultural machinery; Virginia Woolf did not attend Malraux’s 1935 writers’ conference in Paris; the last cavalry campaign in modern European warfare did not take place in Poland in 1920, but in Poland in 1939. And Charyn fails to mention that the film Bezhin Meadow, which Babel wrote with Sergei Eisenstein, alluded to a story by Turgenev.
Charyn’s book—superficial criticism disguised as serious biography—does not reveal how Babel’s life illuminates his stories, but uses the stories to describe his life. After the most perfunctory efforts to discover the truth about his subject, Charyn confesses that Babel and his heroes “escape our grasp.” After asking, “Who the hell was Isaac Babel, and what can we reliably say about him?,” he reveals the fatal weakness of his book and regretfully answers: “Very little.”
