3. i. Babel′ , Stories

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content-saturated as they are to an astonishing degree, where every step of the way one’s breath is taken away by the boldness, the profundity, and the faithfulness of the historical intuition. mandel′shtam’s style too is remarkable. as pushkin demanded, his prose lives by thought alone. and what our ‘stupid, god forgive me’ novelists cannot attain, mandel′shtam attains simply through the energy of his thought. His extremely figurative, sometimes even unexpected manner of expression – not entirely free from tongue-tie, but almost – is free from calculation, deliberate refinement, and redundancy. only in the Crimean chapters, which are clearly poorer in thought, is there wilful and unnecessary ornamentation. i will close with a short quotation ‘by way of example’, one that is not by any means exceptional in its density, concerning the Baltic region after the pacification of 1905: ‘that year in segevold13 on the Courland river aa it was bright autumn with cobwebs on the barley fields. they had just burned out the barons, and a savage silence following pacification rose up from the scorched brick service buildings. sometimes, not often, a two-wheel cart would clatter past along the firm german road with a steward and his bodyguard, and the uncouth latvian would doff his cap. within its brickred, cave-riddled layered banks like a german undine flowed the romantic stream, and the towns were mired up to their ears in greenery. the inhabitants retain a dim memory of konevskoi14, who had drowned in this stream not long before’. prince D.sviatopolk-mirskii

i. babel′ , StorieS, moscow-leninGrad, state publishinG house, 1925. (10,000 copies). price 70 kopeks ‘i.e. Babel′ , Rasskazy’, Sovremennye zapiski, xxvi, 1925, pp. 485-488 of all the ‘soviet best-sellers’ who have become known since 1922, Babel′, it would seem, is the most well-known, and perhaps the only one who is genuinely and without exaggeration popular; in particular, he is perhaps the only one who is read by all Russia ‘for pleasure’, and not only in order to

such a division at all, for him a third category would have had to be created, of cribsheetpeople’. (From The Noise of Time). 13 the town of sigulda, in latvia; mandel′shtam uses its german name. 14 the early symbolist poet and critic ivan ivanovich konevskoi (1877-1901), translator of swinburne, verhaeren, maeterlinck, and others. He did indeed drown in the aa (now the gauia) while bathing in the summer of 1901.

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keep track of what is being written ‘on the other shore’. one has to say that this attitude is entirely justified; Babel′ really is the only fully-formed master among the ‘fellow-travellers’15, the only one who writes for the reader and simultaneously ‘for himself’. other masters, such as pasternak, think least of all about the reader, but instead only about the creative tasks at hand. other popular writers, such as seifullina16, think least of all about their creative duty and write only so as to give the com-public what it wants. one of the reasons why in late 1923 Babel′ suddenly appeared in the full armament of his mastery, like minerva from the head of Jupiter, is that he had long been working in the shadows and in silence. after his first debut, back in 1916, in gorky’s Chronicle [Letopis′], he published nothing for seven years, meanwhile working with might and main, as viktor shklovsky relates in the 1923 Lef17 . since then several stories have been published in various soviet journals.

Babel′’s admirers waited a long time for his best ‘stories’ to come out as a separate book. there were rumours that the soviet censorship was standing in its way. i do not know whether this explains the comparatively late appearance of this book, but i fully understand the suspicious attitude towards Babel′’s ideology on the part of the soviet authorities. whatever may be the case, the book has been published, and by the state publishing House; evidently the ‘liberals’ such as voronsky18 have had the upper hand over the hard-liners from mapp and vapp19 . as far as the soviet rulers are concerned, Babel′’s ‘ideology’, of course, really is suspicious. it is an ideology sooner of the makhno kind20, in the best case of the ‘Budenny’ kind21, and it ‘does not’, of course, ‘correspond to

15 a term used in early soviet criticism for a writer who was not a party member, but whose sympathies lay with the soviet regime. 16 lidiya seifullina (1889-1954), a popular soviet prose writer, whom mirsky several times denigrated in print as pandering to vulgar taste (see inter alia iswolsky, letter 3 below). 17 Lef, the journal of the moscow-based ‘left Front of the arts’ group, 1922-8; the first stories from Babel’s Red Cavalry were published here in 1923, endorsed by the eminent theorist and critic viktor shklovsky (1893-1984). 18 aleksandr konstantinovich voronsky (1884-1937), one of the most prominent literary critics and functionaries of the 1920s, was a party member but opposed to emerging stalinism. 19 Respectively, the moscow association of proletarian writers, and the all-Russian association of proletarian writers, left-wing predecessors of the union of soviet writers. 20 nestor makhno (1888-1934), the revolutionary anarchist, who led an army in ukraine during the Russian Civil war. 21 semen Budenny (1883-1973), the outstanding soviet cavalry commander of the Civil

war.

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the views of the highest reaches of government’. i have in mind, of course, his artistic ideology, i.e. what results from the impact of his stories on the reader’s psyche. in private life and at work, he is perhaps a model party man, but in his stories he is the most legitimate successor to the young gorky, and his Red fighting men and odessa raiders are the direct descendants of Chelkash, shakro and mal′va22, except in a new situation, both in life and in literature. it is in this dependence on the young gorky that Babel′’s main literary distinctiveness lies; all the other prose writers of today in one way or another have gone through symbolist or post-symbolist influences, and only Babel′ continues the pre-symbolist tradition. But the thirty years separating Chelkash from Red Cavalry could not count for nothing, and it is interesting to determine how this difference in time is reflected in the difference in devices and approaches. the main difference between Babel′ and the young gorky is greater compression. in Babel′ there are no passages that are empty from the artistic point of view; every phrase, every word plays its part in the overall artistic effect. this is something gorky never achieved, nor indeed tried for. the other difference between Babel′ and gorky is characteristic of our time as a whole: it is much more ‘formal’ and much less psychological. in gorky (as in all Russian literature of the realist epoch) it is extra-aesthetic, extraliterary interests that dominate. Both for gorky and his readers the living shakro was more interesting than shakro represented; the psychology of the human ‘model’ is more interesting than the aesthetic result. the ‘ideology’ of Chelkash had an autonomous existence outside the story Chelkash, and gorky’s entire ideology had a ‘social’ content independent of the artistic forms it assumed. art was not sufficient unto itself. with Babel′ it’s the other way round. the impression his stories make is exclusively literary, aesthetic. For him ideology is a constructive device. His heroes do not give rise to an interest in live raiders and Red Cavalrymen, they are artistically self-enclosed, independent of the demands of life, they are complete ‘art objects’. only people who have read very little can take Babel′’s ideology seriously, or see in it a politically significant phenomenon. His art is absolutely ‘disinterested’. is this an advantage or a shortcoming? it is neither, a ‘property’ and no more. many of the greatest literary creations also have a ‘property’, the stories of pushkin, for example. But more often this property is rare, and it can be dangerous. the actual process of creation has to be very intensive for literature of this kind not to degenerate into ‘elegant trifles’

22 Heroes of stories by gorky.

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such as mérimée’s stories or gautier’s poetry. there can be no doubt that this formalism is characteristic of our time. But Babel′ does not emphasise his formalism, and his public success is explicable mainly in terms of his choosing themes that are interesting in themselves – the adventures of noble ‘knights of the moldavanka’23 and the exploits of the Revolution’s fighting men as they ‘cut down the base polish gentry’.

Babel′’s literary physiognomy is very complex. its most obvious merit is the astonishing mastery of verbal imitation. in this respect he has long since left zoshchenko standing. He speaks to the same degree of perfection both the Russian-Jewish slang of odessa and the language of the kuban Cossack who has been thoroughly propagandized. what is most surprising (especially for those who know this language) is the way Babel′ can achieve the maximum effect without for a moment forgetting his sense of proportion, never exaggerating, and never making up a word or two on his own behalf, the way leskov used to.

Babel′’s other manifest merit is the art of the pointed and usually tragic anecdote. Here he is at his most original. the stories that have this pointedness are the most successful ones. such are The King, The Letter, and especially Salt. the stories that lack this are significantly weaker, and several of them (especially The Sin of Jesus) evoke simple incomprehension with their motiveless piling up of vileness. with all his contemporaries Babel′ shares a certain proclivity for ‘filth’. the ‘tone’ of the stories is also complex. in its makeup is a certain enchantment with ‘the heroes’ and contempt for ‘myself’, a bespectacled thinking man who because of his weak nerves is incapable of shooting a comrade who is in agony; and an overall subtle irony, which is never absent; and, on the other hand, an exceedingly odd ‘poeticality’ which could almost have been taken from verbitskaia24 or the modernists of 1900; and (and this is the most unexpected and perhaps the most valuable thing in Babel′) a kind of genuine epic quality. this genuine poetry sometimes appears in a fairly unexpected way in the letters of the kuban ‘fighting men’, as for example in this astonishing passage from Salt: the train struck its third bell and moved off. and the glorious night spread out like a tent. in this tent there were stars like oil lamps. and the fighting

23 the moldavanka is a district of odessa, and the principal setting for Babel′’s early stories. 24 anastasiia alekseevna verbitskaia (1861-1928), author of ‘women’s fiction’ phenomenally popular in pre-revolutionary Russia, and since the 1990s increasingly acclaimed as a major author, especially for the novel The Keys to Happiness (1909-13).