RUSSIAN CULTURE NAVIGATOR

english
win1251
KOI8
By Lyubov Kuznetsova
On July 13 we are marking the 105th anniversary of the birth of the prominent Russian writer Isaak Babel, a writer whose best-selling "Odessa Stories" and "The Cavalry Army" have been translated into dozens of languages. The writer's deity is humor, and his prose contains a wealth of jokes, aphorisms and amusing stories. But his life, like that of many other writers and artists in Stalin's era, was tragic.
"He was not like anybody else, and no one could be like him," writer Ilia Erenburg used to say about Babel. Babel was such a versatile and contradictory person that should anyone try to imitate him, he wouldn't manage this in one lifetime. It would take a group of people to repeat the roles Babel played in life. Such a group would include a quiet intellectual, an adventurer, a researcher, a merry-maker, and an executive in a provincial office.
The writer's early years were, perhaps, the only smooth period in his life. Isaak Babel was born in 1894 in the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea into a well-to-do and educated Jewish family. He was a diligent student, first at the Odessa Commercial School named after Nicholas I, then at the Commercial University. He went in for history and seriously studied German and English, while French came so naturally to him that he even tried his hand in writing short stories in this language in imitation of Maupassant. He contributed to amateur theatricals and wrote plays. All these activities were only natural for the cultural environment he was brought up. Upon graduating from the university Babel refused to pursue a commercial career and chose to work at a publishing house. He would recall this period of his life as little short of idyllic.
The Odessa of his childhood and youth was a bright, picturesque and festive world, a world he loved and in his travels was always eager to come back to. The city residents spoke a specific dialect, had specific ways and a rare sense of humor. Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, Moldavians and Greeks all had contributed to what is known as an Odessa character. The city concentrated its energy in a place called Moldavanka, a district next to a cargo railway station and home to draymen, dockers, robbers and thieves. All these were later described by Babel in his "Odessa Stories". For a short time Babel even rented a room at Moldavanka: he wanted to come into closer contact with the characters of his books. No matter what dramatic events took place in Odessa (for example, his landlord was killed by bandits because he violated the laws of the thieves' code), the writer always admired them and examined them like colored pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope.
"He took the world of the daily life of a poor neighborhood," says a researcher at the Odessa Literary Museum Anna Misyuk. "This world was inhabited with vulgar people from provinces, people who were deprived of their original cultural environment but did not acquire an elite culture. These people were composed of contradictions, as if of diamonds, stripes and squares, like on the canvasses of Cubists. Babel took their lives and composed a romantically tense carnival. He writes, for example: 'Torches were blossoming on the black soil like fiery roses'. Meanwhile the picture he is drawing is not attractive at all: bandits are slaughtering cows in the yard of a rich man. Blood is pouring down on the ground, and 'women are squealing at gun point of friendly Brownings.'" Babel has created an image of Odessa, a city in which he never finds anything bad, anything worthy of contempt. His is a city living its private life, both good and bad.
In 1916 Babel arrived in St. Petersburg, the then Russian capital. He had made up his mind to make a living by writing. He took his short stories from one publishing house to another. All to no avail. The situation was all the more difficult because Babel lived in St. Petersburg on an illegal basis. In the Russian Empire Jews were not allowed to live beyond the so-called Jewish Pale and, therefore, could not settle in big cities without special permission. A native of Odessa, who had grown on the coast of a warm sea, Babel felt sad and cold in chilly St. Petersburg. Hoping to receive aid from the well-known writer Maxim Gorky, Babel took his works to him. Gorky read them and suggested that Babel should travel across the country to accumulate firsthand experience, just the way Gorky had done himself as a young man.
For seven years Babel traveled across the country, changing occupations. Those were the years of social unrest and upheavals: the end of the monarchy, the 1917 revolutions and a civil war. In 1919 Babel fought in the ranks of the First Cavalry Army. He kept a diary. Later he would use it as a basis for a series of short stories "The Cavalry Army". Published in 1923-1926, the stories earned him fame and at the same time the hatred of such powerful figures as the commander of the First Cavalry Army, a Civil War hero, Budyonny. "I demand protection from irresponsible slander for people who have been covered with the 'artistic' spittle of class hatred by the literary degenerate Babel," writes Budyonny. The cruel truth about the Civil War, about the cavalrymen, among whom there were many cutthroats who took carts for spoils wherever they went, did not fit into the romantic ideology of revolution. This stand earned the writer a great number of enemies among the members of the new authorities. Gorky stood by the young writer. If it hadn't been for Gorky's protection, anything could have happened to Babel. The writers Maykovsky, Yesenin, Bely and Furmanov admired "The Cavalry Army". Shortly the first translations appeared. Say, into Spanish the book was translated as early as 1928. Its French edition was a great success. Babel could boast such outstanding readers as Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Martin du Gard. Among his admirers were Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger. European prominence changed neither Babel's character nor habits. He was indifferent to worldly possessions. He used to give away his belongings, and when some money came his way he would loan it to anyone who turned to him. Meanwhile he often happened to be in low water himself. Then he would beg publishing houses for money as advance payment for works yet to be written. He never lived in one place for a long time and kept learning new professions, say, that of an instructor at a stud farm, or an executive at a collective farm (when he wanted to get an idea of rural life). He even edited enthusiastically a special issue of a journal devoted to the cultivation of beet.
As a journalist Babel was absolutely different from Babel, the writer. In his fiction he takes just one phrase to fully describe a character, and two or three phrases suffice to convey a message that would take another author a novel. Babel, the journalist, was ideologically correct, armed with revolutionary rhetoric, which replaced the humor of his fiction. In his articles he paid homage to his party authorities. Yet he was fully aware of the ultimate futility of all his compromises.
In the 1930s the hideous machine of Stalin's repression was gathering momentum. Many of Babel's friends and acquaintances were arrested and sent to die in concentration camps. The frightening atmosphere was becoming increasingly tense. In 1939 Isaak Babel was arrested. During the arrest 24 files from his archives were confiscated. What happened to these files remains unknown to this day. The writer's widow, Antonina Pirozhkova, lived in the agony of suspense for 15 years, hoping to see her husband alive again. It was not until 1954, one year after Stalin's death, that she and thousands of relatives of the other victims, had learned the horrible truth: Babel was shot in the basements of the security bodies in 1940 on the fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage. He was 46.
In 1996 in the United States Antonina Pirozhkova published her book about Babel "By His Side". The widow, nearly 90 now, lives permanently in the United States together with daughter Lidia Babel, born in 1937. The two women live in a Washington suburb in the house of the writer's grandson, who was educated in Russia, has a theater of his own in the United States and produces plays written by his grandfather. Every year on the eve of the writer's birthday his grandson comes to Moscow to visit his grandfather's grave on the territory of the Donskoi Monastery .
 
 
 

BACK TO MAIN PAGE