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From the early Soviet period, the impassioned short fiction of the great Russian-Jewish writer
One of the most powerful short-story writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel expressed his sense of inner conflict through disturbing tales that explored the contradictions of Russian society. Whether reflecting on anti-Semitism in stories such as “Story of My Dovecote” and “First Love,” or depicting Jewish gangsters in his native Odessa, Babel's eye for the comical laid bare the ironies of history. His masterpiece, “Red Cavalry,” set in the Soviet-Polish war, is one of the classics of modern fiction. By turns flamboyant and restrained, this collection of Babel's best-known stories vividly expresses the horrors of his age.
“Amazing not only as literature but as biography.” —Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
“Marvelously subtle, tragic, and often comic.” —James Wood, The New Republic
One of the most powerful short-story writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel expressed his sense of inner conflict through disturbing tales that explored the contradictions of Russian society. Whether reflecting on anti-Semitism in stories such as “Story of My Dovecote” and “First Love,” or depicting Jewish gangsters in his native Odessa, Babel's eye for the comical laid bare the ironies of history. His masterpiece, “Red Cavalry,” set in the Soviet-Polish war, is one of the classics of modern fiction. By turns flamboyant and restrained, this collection of Babel's best-known stories vividly expresses the horrors of his age.
“Amazing not only as literature but as biography.” —Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
“Marvelously subtle, tragic, and often comic.” —James Wood, The New Republic
130 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1926
141 people are currently reading
1240 people want to read
About the author
Isaac Babel
210 books300 followersIsaak Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель; 1894 - 1940) was a Russian language journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry, Story of my Dovecote and Tales of Odessa, all of which are considered masterpieces of Russian literature. Babel has also been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry."
Loyal to, but not uncritical of, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Isaak Babel fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge due to his longterm affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Babel was arrested by the NKVD at Peredelkino on the night of May 15, 1939. After "confessing", under torture, to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, Babel was shot on January 27, 1940. The arrest and execution of Isaak Babel has been labeled a catastrophe for the world of literature.
Loyal to, but not uncritical of, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Isaak Babel fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge due to his longterm affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Babel was arrested by the NKVD at Peredelkino on the night of May 15, 1939. After "confessing", under torture, to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, Babel was shot on January 27, 1940. The arrest and execution of Isaak Babel has been labeled a catastrophe for the world of literature.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 64 reviews
May 14, 2022
In the wake of the Russian Revolution, while the deadly Spanish flu pandemic was abating, Vladimir Lenin decided to invade territories once part of the Russian Empire, pretending to foster the Bolsheviks’ westward expansion. A war between Soviet Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and Latvia ensued. A century later, while the deadly Covid pandemic was abating, Vladimir Putin decided to invade territories once part of the Soviet Union, pretending to stop NATO’s eastward expansion. A war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine ensued. History often rambles like a nightmarish Groundhog Day.
Isaac Babel, a Ukrainian journalist of Jewish descent, joined the Revolution during that 1918-1920 conflict and was enlisted in the Red Army as an embedded war correspondent in a battalion of Cossacks (like Tolstoy, before him, during the Caucasian Wars). The collection of stories titled Red Cavalry stems from Babel’s diaries during these terrible times. Although Babel was, for a long time, an obscure figure in Russian literature (he was executed under the Stalinist regime on fabricated charges), his affinity with Western authors like Hemingway is well known, and his influence on more recent writers, like Joseph Heller, is evident.
Red Cavalry is a challenging read on different levels. First, the structure is like an irregular collage, continually jumping from one setting, one group of characters, and one mode of narration to the next. Second, the wartime situations depicted are intensely raw, brutal, grotesque, and at some point, almost unbearable. Yet, these descriptions are broken up, in stark contrast, with vivid, intensely expressionist depictions of nature (“An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head”, p. 91 of the Penguin edition).
There is a strange, often disturbing irony or ambivalence in Babel’s prose. Despite being a sensitive, bookish, bespectacled, nerdy Jew among blood-thirsty, Jew-oppressing, horse-loving Cossacks, the narrator strives to belong with them at all costs. To achieve this, he stifles his identity, suppresses his feelings, and even denies his humanity. This effort to fit in—fit in the group of soldiers and later tie into the censorship-ridden Soviet literary landscape—is manifest. He describes scenes of extreme violence in a flat, detached, desensitised, laconic, even cheerful way, refraining from any form of judgment, ultimately drawing a picture that weaves together irrepressible vital energy and utter moral degradation. A picture of war as it unfolds, brutal, beyond good and evil. Babel wrote in an earlier story, “No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time” (p. 74). His prose feels indeed like an iron in the heart.
A few of these stories are particularly memorable. My First Goose is one of the most famous in this collection. It ends with this arrowing line that summarises, in a nutshell, the spirit of the whole book: “I had dreams and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed” (p. 123). Things of that nature are occurring now, as I write this, in the eastern provinces of Ukraine. One may hope that, beyond all the noise and disinformation going on in wartime, some poet or artist, like Babel in his time, will bear witness to the reality of this outrageous ordeal.
Isaac Babel, a Ukrainian journalist of Jewish descent, joined the Revolution during that 1918-1920 conflict and was enlisted in the Red Army as an embedded war correspondent in a battalion of Cossacks (like Tolstoy, before him, during the Caucasian Wars). The collection of stories titled Red Cavalry stems from Babel’s diaries during these terrible times. Although Babel was, for a long time, an obscure figure in Russian literature (he was executed under the Stalinist regime on fabricated charges), his affinity with Western authors like Hemingway is well known, and his influence on more recent writers, like Joseph Heller, is evident.
Red Cavalry is a challenging read on different levels. First, the structure is like an irregular collage, continually jumping from one setting, one group of characters, and one mode of narration to the next. Second, the wartime situations depicted are intensely raw, brutal, grotesque, and at some point, almost unbearable. Yet, these descriptions are broken up, in stark contrast, with vivid, intensely expressionist depictions of nature (“An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head”, p. 91 of the Penguin edition).
There is a strange, often disturbing irony or ambivalence in Babel’s prose. Despite being a sensitive, bookish, bespectacled, nerdy Jew among blood-thirsty, Jew-oppressing, horse-loving Cossacks, the narrator strives to belong with them at all costs. To achieve this, he stifles his identity, suppresses his feelings, and even denies his humanity. This effort to fit in—fit in the group of soldiers and later tie into the censorship-ridden Soviet literary landscape—is manifest. He describes scenes of extreme violence in a flat, detached, desensitised, laconic, even cheerful way, refraining from any form of judgment, ultimately drawing a picture that weaves together irrepressible vital energy and utter moral degradation. A picture of war as it unfolds, brutal, beyond good and evil. Babel wrote in an earlier story, “No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time” (p. 74). His prose feels indeed like an iron in the heart.
A few of these stories are particularly memorable. My First Goose is one of the most famous in this collection. It ends with this arrowing line that summarises, in a nutshell, the spirit of the whole book: “I had dreams and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed” (p. 123). Things of that nature are occurring now, as I write this, in the eastern provinces of Ukraine. One may hope that, beyond all the noise and disinformation going on in wartime, some poet or artist, like Babel in his time, will bear witness to the reality of this outrageous ordeal.
January 5, 2019
To begin with, an acknowledgment and thank you to my GR Friend Ilse, whose outstandingly good review of “Odessa Stories”, gave me the idea to read this collection.
The stories featured in this book are divided into four collections:
“Early Stories”, of which there only 3. They give the impression of a writer still learning his business.
“Autobiographical Stories” – there are 8 of these, although the Introduction suggests there is doubt about how “autobiographical” they really are. There are some notable pieces, especially two childhood tales, “The Story of My Dovecot”, and “Childhood. At Grandmother’s”. The last in this section, “The Journey”, features a young man leaving “the collapsed Front” in November 1917, and journeying to Kiev and then to St. Petersburg. The journey described is akin to a descent into Hell, and when he emerges, the narrator’s new situation is almost surreal.
“Red Cavalry” – although fiction, these stories are based on Babel’s experiences during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, when he accompanied the Red Army as a correspondent for the propaganda outlet “Red Trooper”. The stories were written separately, although they broadly follow the chronological events of the War, feature the same characters, and stretch to about 200 pages in total. They therefore have something of the feel of a novella. We might say that Babel was not a natural propagandist. The publication of these stories in 1926 caused the Soviet cavalry commander, Marshal Budyonny, to demand Babel’s arrest and execution over the way he portrayed the Red Army. (Babel escaped arrest on that occasion but was detained by the NKVD in 1939 and executed the following year).
“Odessa Stories” – these being of Jewish life in Odessa. Several feature the lives of gangsters prior to the Revolution. The last is set during the famine of 1921-22. A couple of the gangster stories were amongst those I enjoyed the most.
Babel had a highly distinctive and very descriptive style. If this translation is true to the original, he certainly had a memorable turn of phrase. In the comic story “In the Basement”, an aunt is described as “floating in with a samovar on a tray, surrounded by her fat, kindly bosom.” In one of the “Red Cavalry” tales, Babel describes how “At the head of the regiment, on a bowlegged little horse, rode kombrig [Brigade Commander] Maslak, full of drunken blood and the rottenness of his own fatty juices. His stomach, like a large tomcat, lay on the silver pommel.”
In almost all the stories, events happen very suddenly, and generally Babel doesn’t try to explain motivation. A man will walk past a woman sitting on a bench and will decide he wants to marry her. Many stories feature acts of extreme violence. This is particularly the case in “Red Cavalry” but it happens in the other stories as well. People are assaulted or even murdered on what seems like a whim. I struggled a bit with these aspects. Some of the stories seemed a bit disjointed to me, and in one or two of them I found it hard to work out what was going on, let alone why. It’s possible this was a translation issue – I notice the edition I read had a different translator from others, though whether better or worse I’m not qualified to say. I can say that the edition I read had a number of proof-reading errors. Even the title of “The Journey” was mistyped as “The Jocurney”.
I’m glad that I’ve read Isaac Babel, although my own reaction was mixed. I think he would appeal most to those who prefer writing and “mood” over plot.
The stories featured in this book are divided into four collections:
“Early Stories”, of which there only 3. They give the impression of a writer still learning his business.
“Autobiographical Stories” – there are 8 of these, although the Introduction suggests there is doubt about how “autobiographical” they really are. There are some notable pieces, especially two childhood tales, “The Story of My Dovecot”, and “Childhood. At Grandmother’s”. The last in this section, “The Journey”, features a young man leaving “the collapsed Front” in November 1917, and journeying to Kiev and then to St. Petersburg. The journey described is akin to a descent into Hell, and when he emerges, the narrator’s new situation is almost surreal.
“Red Cavalry” – although fiction, these stories are based on Babel’s experiences during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, when he accompanied the Red Army as a correspondent for the propaganda outlet “Red Trooper”. The stories were written separately, although they broadly follow the chronological events of the War, feature the same characters, and stretch to about 200 pages in total. They therefore have something of the feel of a novella. We might say that Babel was not a natural propagandist. The publication of these stories in 1926 caused the Soviet cavalry commander, Marshal Budyonny, to demand Babel’s arrest and execution over the way he portrayed the Red Army. (Babel escaped arrest on that occasion but was detained by the NKVD in 1939 and executed the following year).
“Odessa Stories” – these being of Jewish life in Odessa. Several feature the lives of gangsters prior to the Revolution. The last is set during the famine of 1921-22. A couple of the gangster stories were amongst those I enjoyed the most.
Babel had a highly distinctive and very descriptive style. If this translation is true to the original, he certainly had a memorable turn of phrase. In the comic story “In the Basement”, an aunt is described as “floating in with a samovar on a tray, surrounded by her fat, kindly bosom.” In one of the “Red Cavalry” tales, Babel describes how “At the head of the regiment, on a bowlegged little horse, rode kombrig [Brigade Commander] Maslak, full of drunken blood and the rottenness of his own fatty juices. His stomach, like a large tomcat, lay on the silver pommel.”
In almost all the stories, events happen very suddenly, and generally Babel doesn’t try to explain motivation. A man will walk past a woman sitting on a bench and will decide he wants to marry her. Many stories feature acts of extreme violence. This is particularly the case in “Red Cavalry” but it happens in the other stories as well. People are assaulted or even murdered on what seems like a whim. I struggled a bit with these aspects. Some of the stories seemed a bit disjointed to me, and in one or two of them I found it hard to work out what was going on, let alone why. It’s possible this was a translation issue – I notice the edition I read had a different translator from others, though whether better or worse I’m not qualified to say. I can say that the edition I read had a number of proof-reading errors. Even the title of “The Journey” was mistyped as “The Jocurney”.
I’m glad that I’ve read Isaac Babel, although my own reaction was mixed. I think he would appeal most to those who prefer writing and “mood” over plot.
September 6, 2020
Introduction & Notes, by David McDuff
Early Stories
--Old Shloyme
--Ilya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna
--Shabbos Nakhamu
'Autobiographical' Stories
--Childhood. At Grandmother's
--The Story of My Dovecot
--First Love
--In the Basement
--Awakening
--Di Grasso
--Guy de Maupassant
--The Journey
Red Cavalry
--Crossing the Zbrucz
--The Catholic Church in Novograd
--A Letter
--The Konzapas Commander
--Pan Apolek
--The Sun of Italy
--Gedali
--My First Goose
--The Rebbe
--The Way to Brody
--The Theory of the Tachanka
--The Death of Dolgushov
--Kombrig 2
--Sashka Christ
--The Life Story of Pavlichenko, Matvey Rodionych
--The Cemetery in Kozin
--Prishchepa
--The Story of a Horse
--Konkin
--Beresteczko
--Salt
--Evening
--Afonka Bida
--At St Valentine's
--Squadron Commander Trunov
--The Ivans
--A Sequel to the Story of a Horse
--The Widow
--Zamość
--Treason
--Czesniki
--After the Battle
--The Song
--The Rebbe's Son
--Argamak
Odessa Stories
--The King
--How It was Done in Odessa
--Justice in Brackets
--Lyubka Kózak
--The Father
--Sunset
--The End of the Almshouse
--Karl-Yankel
Notes
Textual Notes
Appendix: Lionel Trilling's introduction to the first English translation (1955) of Isaac Babel's 'Collected Stories'
Early Stories
--Old Shloyme
--Ilya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna
--Shabbos Nakhamu
'Autobiographical' Stories
--Childhood. At Grandmother's
--The Story of My Dovecot
--First Love
--In the Basement
--Awakening
--Di Grasso
--Guy de Maupassant
--The Journey
Red Cavalry
--Crossing the Zbrucz
--The Catholic Church in Novograd
--A Letter
--The Konzapas Commander
--Pan Apolek
--The Sun of Italy
--Gedali
--My First Goose
--The Rebbe
--The Way to Brody
--The Theory of the Tachanka
--The Death of Dolgushov
--Kombrig 2
--Sashka Christ
--The Life Story of Pavlichenko, Matvey Rodionych
--The Cemetery in Kozin
--Prishchepa
--The Story of a Horse
--Konkin
--Beresteczko
--Salt
--Evening
--Afonka Bida
--At St Valentine's
--Squadron Commander Trunov
--The Ivans
--A Sequel to the Story of a Horse
--The Widow
--Zamość
--Treason
--Czesniki
--After the Battle
--The Song
--The Rebbe's Son
--Argamak
Odessa Stories
--The King
--How It was Done in Odessa
--Justice in Brackets
--Lyubka Kózak
--The Father
--Sunset
--The End of the Almshouse
--Karl-Yankel
Notes
Textual Notes
Appendix: Lionel Trilling's introduction to the first English translation (1955) of Isaac Babel's 'Collected Stories'
Want to read
August 21, 2017
The cult of Babel: Odessa's literary flashmobs attract book-loving tourists. The Black Sea city may lack the pedigree of St Petersburg but it was home to Isaac Babel, and has a storied past as a stopping point for globe-trotting intellectuals.
Babel - the Bard of the Black SeaCover: Montage from an album of Russian pictures, 1938. Courtesy of the British Library LR276.c.5
Edited with notes by Efraim Sicher
Translated with an introduction by David McDuff
Early Stories (3)
Autobiographical stories (8)
Red Cavalry
Odessa Stories
Notes
Textual Notes
Appendix
June 7, 2018
Ruhu pelteleştiren savaşı, aciz bırakan birtakım fiziksel ve zihinsel şiddetleri akla tek değini darbesiyle çakmak! Bunu ancak farkına varmadan yapabilir bir yazar. Bütün ayrıntılara bulaşmaz. Oradadır, orada değildir. Olayın etrafında boksörce dans eder, hesaplar gibi görünür ama aradığı tesadüfi bir boş bulunmadır. Bir cümle. Bir sözcük. Ve güm! Sert ama uyanıldığında bir türlü anımsanamayan düşün belleğe gömülüşündeki yumuşaklıkla.
Kim nefret etmez ki savaştan? Kurşuna dizilenlerin arkasındaki duvar her zaman delik deşiktir, her zaman.
Kim nefret etmez ki savaştan? Kurşuna dizilenlerin arkasındaki duvar her zaman delik deşiktir, her zaman.
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March 24, 2022Really liked The Story of My Dovecote, My First Goose, The Story of a Horse, The Tachanka Doctrine, Salt, the one about the icon painter, but ultimately didn't finish this one.
I don't know if it was the translation, or just my lack of knowledge of the time period, but a lot of this remained quite obscure to me. I have the Penguin translation but I'm told the Pushkin Press one is better. Might come back and finish this at a later date.
Collection included Babel's early Jewish stories, autobiographical stories, and Odessa Tales as well as Red Cavalry.
I don't know if it was the translation, or just my lack of knowledge of the time period, but a lot of this remained quite obscure to me. I have the Penguin translation but I'm told the Pushkin Press one is better. Might come back and finish this at a later date.
Collection included Babel's early Jewish stories, autobiographical stories, and Odessa Tales as well as Red Cavalry.
January 18, 2020
‘Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the noonday wind is playing in the yellowing rye, the virginal buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn is curving. The Volyn is withdrawing from us into a pearly mist of birch groves, it is creeping away into flowery knolls and entangling itself with enfeebled arms in thickets of hops. An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, a gentle radiance glows in the ravines of the thunderclouds and the standards of the sunset float above our heads.’
October 12, 2015
Red Cavalry: 5/5
The other two collections: 3.5/5
The other two collections: 3.5/5
January 28, 2024
Reread pod wpływem wydanej niedawno biografii Babla.
Nic się nie zmieniło, wciąż uważam, że Babel jest mistrzem.
Nic się nie zmieniło, wciąż uważam, że Babel jest mistrzem.
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July 19, 2022Short stories have always been difficult for me to enjoy. No sooner do I just begin to appreciate the characters than the story ends, another to begin, a memory bank reset. Then, when I finish the volume, I wonder, “What did I just read?” Such was the case with these stories, alas. Mr. Babel spins tales of Russians engaged in the Polish-Soviet War as well as the lives of citizens, mostly repressed and Jewish, in that country we now know as Ukraine, or what remains of it as of this writing. My thoughts turned to memories of Pushkin. I think I recall a short story where an owner drowned his litter of puppies in a stream without much fuss. There’s a recurrent brutality to the Russian experience that may be unfairly placed, yet seems firmly cemented in my mind, set long before I happened upon Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. Of course, therefore, the Russians commit unprovoked atrocities and barbarities when unleashed on the battlefield. Of course they commit gross injustices upon their unfortunates and unwelcomed. What Russian writer would cause us to believe otherwise? Not Mr. Babel, especially since his life ended in the way it did.
July 30, 2022
My uncle grew up in Siberia and recommended the Odessa stories. Growing up, the protagonist was a hero for my uncle and his Jewish friends. They would quote him and pretend to be him, gaining strength from the writing. A Jew who stood up to oppression and maintained power.
The King is a quotable hero: "Since I was blessed with being born a Jew, I became a broker", "My honor is dearer to me than my happiness", etc. Unfortunately, the translation I got doesn't seem to let the characters shine through. I found the stories garbled and the in-jokes lacking. There is some spirit in the writing, but I was more confused than anything.
The King is a quotable hero: "Since I was blessed with being born a Jew, I became a broker", "My honor is dearer to me than my happiness", etc. Unfortunately, the translation I got doesn't seem to let the characters shine through. I found the stories garbled and the in-jokes lacking. There is some spirit in the writing, but I was more confused than anything.
October 29, 2023
EDIT grabbing the 5 here too. It’s a great day to be one of my reviews
Absolute winner, actually.
Murky, disparate scenes of battle and the times between battle. The characters are idiosyncratic such that they’d be funny if they weren’t so steeped in blood and violence.
The language is consistently excellent, poetic but with complete economy; there are no wasted words. I was often caught between admiration of the poetry and a lip-scrunching revulsion at horrors so precisely described.
Absolute winner, actually.
Murky, disparate scenes of battle and the times between battle. The characters are idiosyncratic such that they’d be funny if they weren’t so steeped in blood and violence.
The language is consistently excellent, poetic but with complete economy; there are no wasted words. I was often caught between admiration of the poetry and a lip-scrunching revulsion at horrors so precisely described.
August 1, 2021
A masterpiece in blood and savageries. Earlier than Curzio Malaparte, it was Babel before.
September 5, 2020
After reading that this oft overlooked and grim collection of short stories by one of Russia’s most ill-fated literary talents, Isaac Babel, a Jewish prose and screenplay writer who was the at mercy of various pogroms throughout his early life, and a victim of Stalin’s reign of terror which tragically ended it. He was also a journalist on the frontlines of the Russian Revolution and the resultant Russo-Polish war, where he experienced the full frontal assault of the human condition in all its wretchedness…Thus after reading Babel…I’m left with a series scenes and images, each more gruesome and disturbed than the last, all of them disconnected from their respective chains of causality. These stories and the history of bloodshed which they are built upon, refuse to be molded into tight and easily recounted narratives, rather they sit and hover in the corners of my mind like figments from a nightmare that refuses to recede into forgetfulness.
Whether it be the old man in the opening story Old Shloyme, who decides, upon facing the prospect of eviction at eighty-seven and the decades of calcified neglect from his family, to hang himself and end his life in the house which he was born and lived. Or the Jewish newly wedded couple, warmly embraced in sleep on a night train to St Petersburg. Which is abruptly halted and searched by a rogue band of Bolshevik fighters searching for Jews. The commandant thus finds the couple asleep. He promptly shoots the man in the head and castrates him, and stuffs his severed penis into the wife’s mouth before shooting her as well....
As I said before this isn’t light reading. And it to top it all off its buttressed by some of the most fetid and impressionistic prose I’ve ever read from within the Russian tradition. Think Gogol or Bulgakov but perhaps more extreme and hellish. There’s a clear influence from the French symbolists. Though the collection (or rather the three collections bound within this volume) are not without their faults. This is perhaps the most lopsided grouping of stories I’ve ever read. The first collection, the autobiographical stories, which recount Babel’s tormented youth are some the greatest things ever written, truly. They each feature a stark and central image that consumes you and refuses to leave. Though this effect is gradually diminished in the succeeding volume, the titular Red Calvary…It starts off strong but I found the increasing and fragmentary nature of the stories and their bizarre use of recurring characters to be a bit tiring, it’s almost like a novel with chapters stripped away at random, so you’re left with this piecemeal heap. Though there are some standouts like the story Salt etc etc.
This feeling of fragmentation continues with the final collection, Odessa Stories, which are about lives of a various group of Jewish gangsters from the titular city. Many of these pieces I resorted to skimming and it was a rather crushingly disappointing end to a book that had started with so much promise. I was actually considering this throughout its first 100 pages as a potential book of the year candidate. But this final grouping of stories and their recount of various marriages and the intricate relations between the otherwise dull and clichéd characters, just didn’t do it for me. I also found the prose a bit overloaded under its own trappings for my taste, and the circuitous ways Babel goes about building his narratives just fell flat here and became patience testing endeavors.
Though the book is worth the price of admission alone just for the first collection and the first half of Red Calvary. Isaac Babel truly had the potential to be the greatest Russian prose writer of the 20th century, his arrest and false conviction and eventual execution at the hands of the Soviet state…Only reaffirms my disgust and dismay at the Stalinist system which decimated an entire culture, all for the sake of totalitarian control.
Recommended to those not afraid of the darker aspects of the human animal, and of course Russian lit aficionados.
4/5
Whether it be the old man in the opening story Old Shloyme, who decides, upon facing the prospect of eviction at eighty-seven and the decades of calcified neglect from his family, to hang himself and end his life in the house which he was born and lived. Or the Jewish newly wedded couple, warmly embraced in sleep on a night train to St Petersburg. Which is abruptly halted and searched by a rogue band of Bolshevik fighters searching for Jews. The commandant thus finds the couple asleep. He promptly shoots the man in the head and castrates him, and stuffs his severed penis into the wife’s mouth before shooting her as well....
As I said before this isn’t light reading. And it to top it all off its buttressed by some of the most fetid and impressionistic prose I’ve ever read from within the Russian tradition. Think Gogol or Bulgakov but perhaps more extreme and hellish. There’s a clear influence from the French symbolists. Though the collection (or rather the three collections bound within this volume) are not without their faults. This is perhaps the most lopsided grouping of stories I’ve ever read. The first collection, the autobiographical stories, which recount Babel’s tormented youth are some the greatest things ever written, truly. They each feature a stark and central image that consumes you and refuses to leave. Though this effect is gradually diminished in the succeeding volume, the titular Red Calvary…It starts off strong but I found the increasing and fragmentary nature of the stories and their bizarre use of recurring characters to be a bit tiring, it’s almost like a novel with chapters stripped away at random, so you’re left with this piecemeal heap. Though there are some standouts like the story Salt etc etc.
This feeling of fragmentation continues with the final collection, Odessa Stories, which are about lives of a various group of Jewish gangsters from the titular city. Many of these pieces I resorted to skimming and it was a rather crushingly disappointing end to a book that had started with so much promise. I was actually considering this throughout its first 100 pages as a potential book of the year candidate. But this final grouping of stories and their recount of various marriages and the intricate relations between the otherwise dull and clichéd characters, just didn’t do it for me. I also found the prose a bit overloaded under its own trappings for my taste, and the circuitous ways Babel goes about building his narratives just fell flat here and became patience testing endeavors.
Though the book is worth the price of admission alone just for the first collection and the first half of Red Calvary. Isaac Babel truly had the potential to be the greatest Russian prose writer of the 20th century, his arrest and false conviction and eventual execution at the hands of the Soviet state…Only reaffirms my disgust and dismay at the Stalinist system which decimated an entire culture, all for the sake of totalitarian control.
Recommended to those not afraid of the darker aspects of the human animal, and of course Russian lit aficionados.
4/5
February 20, 2016
I heard about "Red Cavalry" some years ago, and got the book in order to read it. However, while I enjoyed that portion, I liked the tales of the gangsters and characters of Odessa's Jewish slum even more.
March 20, 2022
He’s the Soviet Truman Capote; a great stylist and short story writer, who, like Capote, Babel should have produced a great novel or two.
March 14, 2023
A rather draining, violent and lyrical short story cycle by the great Russian Jewish writer. Killed by the Party in 1940.
November 4, 2022
The stories in Red Cavalry are mostly three or four pages. Deeply felt little sparks, prose poems, that flair and glitter with vitality – and ache and spurt blood.
I loved the way the stories worked together. It’s less a collection than a cycle. They’re all set in the Soviet—Polish war, they feature the same narrator, a young man, often in the background, sharing anecdotes. As I made my way through them the picture was enlarged – the vignettes building to a breadth of experience.
The writing is incredibly beautiful, fresh, lively and voluptuous. And while it’s lush it also has many of the qualities of a minimalist style: directness, accuracy, quickness. George Saunders has talked very articulately about Babel’s art. No one writes like that anymore. And the lyricism powerfully brings into focus the horrors of war and life in a cavalry regiment.
There’s the violence and nightmarish daily existence of these characters, and there’s the painterly, evocative prose, the fabulous style. The contrast is striking, and something Babel did that I think was significant in fiction, and highly influential. When I began reading I quickly thought of Bohumil Hrabal and Denis Johnson, their collections Mr Kafka and Other Tales from the Cult, and Jesus’ Son, respectively. And a quick Google confirmed my suspicions: Johnson has said that his was just a “rip-off of Red Cavalry” lol, and Hrabal has written of being “taught” by Babel.
I dug these stories because of Babel’s brutality and tenderness, and his emphasis on contradictions, on the general calamity of the world he depicts. What fascinating, sad creatures we are. What absolute disasters.
Blackly funny but mostly heartrending. Full of people not coping, not understanding, literally losing their minds. Totally engaging, radiant and undeniably magnificent. A must for any lover of Russian classics.
I loved the way the stories worked together. It’s less a collection than a cycle. They’re all set in the Soviet—Polish war, they feature the same narrator, a young man, often in the background, sharing anecdotes. As I made my way through them the picture was enlarged – the vignettes building to a breadth of experience.
The writing is incredibly beautiful, fresh, lively and voluptuous. And while it’s lush it also has many of the qualities of a minimalist style: directness, accuracy, quickness. George Saunders has talked very articulately about Babel’s art. No one writes like that anymore. And the lyricism powerfully brings into focus the horrors of war and life in a cavalry regiment.
There’s the violence and nightmarish daily existence of these characters, and there’s the painterly, evocative prose, the fabulous style. The contrast is striking, and something Babel did that I think was significant in fiction, and highly influential. When I began reading I quickly thought of Bohumil Hrabal and Denis Johnson, their collections Mr Kafka and Other Tales from the Cult, and Jesus’ Son, respectively. And a quick Google confirmed my suspicions: Johnson has said that his was just a “rip-off of Red Cavalry” lol, and Hrabal has written of being “taught” by Babel.
I dug these stories because of Babel’s brutality and tenderness, and his emphasis on contradictions, on the general calamity of the world he depicts. What fascinating, sad creatures we are. What absolute disasters.
Blackly funny but mostly heartrending. Full of people not coping, not understanding, literally losing their minds. Totally engaging, radiant and undeniably magnificent. A must for any lover of Russian classics.
April 2, 2021
Iako su poneke priče stvarno upečatljive uz taj sjajni naturalistički način kojim autor prikazuje nemilosrdne scene iz rata, podredivši ga u isto vrijeme konciznošću, ne mogu reći da su kratke priče iz zbirke Crvena konjica i one koje nisu ušle u zbirku na mene ostavile neki sjajan utisak, vjerovatno jer je broj priča koje su ni po čemu autentične ipak veći. Čitao sam na silu, vjerovatno iz poštovanja, i knjige, razumjevajući kakvu je ulogu i pometnju napravila deglorifikujući Crvenu armiju u vremenu kad je nadahnuće Oktobra polako jenjavalo, ali i krajnje teškog života autora.
December 22, 2022
"Size şunu söyleyeyim, yoldaş Savcı Burdenko, pencereden gülüyor bize ihanet, evimizde çıplak ayakla dolaşıyor; gıcırdamasınlar diye potinlerini sırtına alıp dolaşıyor..."
May 19, 2022
4.5. i'll be back
April 11, 2021
These stories by Isaac Babel are vivid and visceral, and they portray an alien world that most readers today will have very little understanding of. Babel grew up in the Jewish community of the Russian Pale of Settlement. A community of Rabbis and artisans, many living in small towns in what is known as a Shtetl. They lived lives that were fairly removed from the society surrounding them and lived under the regular threat of Pogroms, encouraged by the ruling class as a means of distracting the Russians when they started getting upset about the oppression and exploitation they were made to suffer at their hands. The Pogroms were led by Cossacks, who are a separate people, also removed from the lives that most people around them were living, but in this case they were descendents of nomadic hordes who lived martial lives on horseback, acting as elite soldiers and mercenaries (a bit like the Dothraki if you are into Game of Thrones). This world seems bizarre and alien from this vantage point.
There are three types of story here. The first are stories about Shtetl life, remeniscent of paintings by Chagal. One story depicts a Pogrom taking place from the perspective of a child, who is astonished when an adult he has known and been fond of all his life turns on him and attacks him for being a Jew. The second set of stories depict life in the Red Army, mainly focusing upon a Jewish soldier serving as part of a Cossack squadron as they fight the Polish. The third set of stories depict life in the Jewish criminal underworld of Odessa. The Jewish mafia come from here, and after a lot of Jewish people and criminals left or were expelled from the Soviet Union many of them ended up moving to Brooklyn, and settling in Brighton Beach, which is where the Jewish and Russian Mafias emerged from in America.
Babel writes vividly and laconicly, describing moments of violence and brutality like flashes of lightning. He doesn't really explain what the Russian Revolution is, why it came about, or what it was trying to achieve. From the perspective of the Jews, Cossacks, soldiers and peasants in the stories it seems like the backdrop to events of their lives and the cause of war and poverty, but Babel doesn't really explore what the Revolution meant. There are occasional references to Lenin or Trotsky, and a Polish commanding officer refuses to surrender to Communists, prefering to be killed, but you don't get much more context.
Babel was in the Red Army and the NKVD, and was friends with Maxim Gorky, but he eventually fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested and executed, being accused of being a Trotskyist. He has become a big influence on many subsequent writers, particulalry Amercian Jewish authors.
There are three types of story here. The first are stories about Shtetl life, remeniscent of paintings by Chagal. One story depicts a Pogrom taking place from the perspective of a child, who is astonished when an adult he has known and been fond of all his life turns on him and attacks him for being a Jew. The second set of stories depict life in the Red Army, mainly focusing upon a Jewish soldier serving as part of a Cossack squadron as they fight the Polish. The third set of stories depict life in the Jewish criminal underworld of Odessa. The Jewish mafia come from here, and after a lot of Jewish people and criminals left or were expelled from the Soviet Union many of them ended up moving to Brooklyn, and settling in Brighton Beach, which is where the Jewish and Russian Mafias emerged from in America.
Babel writes vividly and laconicly, describing moments of violence and brutality like flashes of lightning. He doesn't really explain what the Russian Revolution is, why it came about, or what it was trying to achieve. From the perspective of the Jews, Cossacks, soldiers and peasants in the stories it seems like the backdrop to events of their lives and the cause of war and poverty, but Babel doesn't really explore what the Revolution meant. There are occasional references to Lenin or Trotsky, and a Polish commanding officer refuses to surrender to Communists, prefering to be killed, but you don't get much more context.
Babel was in the Red Army and the NKVD, and was friends with Maxim Gorky, but he eventually fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested and executed, being accused of being a Trotskyist. He has become a big influence on many subsequent writers, particulalry Amercian Jewish authors.
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September 28, 2021The following applies only to the "Red Cavalry" as translated by D. McDuff.
I have checked David McDuff's translation at several places in the "Red Cavalry" and find it unsatisfactory. Not in the sense that he somehow made a mistake in grammar or did not understand the phrase. Although in one place I had doubts, but there I myself cannot say what the phrase in the original refers to. The problem is that McDuff has remade everything into literary English. Literary Russian must be translated into literary English. At Babel, very few people speak literary Russian. Each character, including the figure of the author, has its own speech. For the Jews this is one type of language, another for the Cossacks, another for the commissar. another among the Ukrainian-Polish population, another among the townspeople-intellectuals, and so on. Turning all this complexity into plain standard English is simply wrong and leaves nothing of Babel's talent as an artist. Babel is not easy to read in the original, the speech of some characters is "strange", bizarre, sometimes completely incomprehensible. But such people are embedded in the era about which Babel writes, although much is simply the fruit of his imagination. To make Babel an easy reading for the Anglophone public is simply to remove 2/3 of his author's skill.
I hope English-speaking readers will be able to study I.E. Babel in a more creative translation.
I have checked David McDuff's translation at several places in the "Red Cavalry" and find it unsatisfactory. Not in the sense that he somehow made a mistake in grammar or did not understand the phrase. Although in one place I had doubts, but there I myself cannot say what the phrase in the original refers to. The problem is that McDuff has remade everything into literary English. Literary Russian must be translated into literary English. At Babel, very few people speak literary Russian. Each character, including the figure of the author, has its own speech. For the Jews this is one type of language, another for the Cossacks, another for the commissar. another among the Ukrainian-Polish population, another among the townspeople-intellectuals, and so on. Turning all this complexity into plain standard English is simply wrong and leaves nothing of Babel's talent as an artist. Babel is not easy to read in the original, the speech of some characters is "strange", bizarre, sometimes completely incomprehensible. But such people are embedded in the era about which Babel writes, although much is simply the fruit of his imagination. To make Babel an easy reading for the Anglophone public is simply to remove 2/3 of his author's skill.
I hope English-speaking readers will be able to study I.E. Babel in a more creative translation.
March 19, 2018
A most fascinating read
I had read of Isaac Babel in a story a few weeks back on the New York Review of Books website. That story intrigued me a lot, so I ordered Red Cavalry and Other Stories. Babel's storytelling about life in southern Ukraine before and after the October Revolution of 1917, and of Soviet cavalry during the 1919-21 Russo-Polish War, all made for such good reading. Here, we see life as both tragedy and as farce.
I only wish the explainations for various people, places, enpvents, and terms appeared as footnotes in the text. That would have saved the trouble of flipping back and forth between the passages and the notes at the book's end. Also, a bit of knowledge about Jewish life in Ukraine during this time might be helpful.
Overall, though, this was a work I greatly enjoy reading and can highly recommend to fans of Soviet literature.
I had read of Isaac Babel in a story a few weeks back on the New York Review of Books website. That story intrigued me a lot, so I ordered Red Cavalry and Other Stories. Babel's storytelling about life in southern Ukraine before and after the October Revolution of 1917, and of Soviet cavalry during the 1919-21 Russo-Polish War, all made for such good reading. Here, we see life as both tragedy and as farce.
I only wish the explainations for various people, places, enpvents, and terms appeared as footnotes in the text. That would have saved the trouble of flipping back and forth between the passages and the notes at the book's end. Also, a bit of knowledge about Jewish life in Ukraine during this time might be helpful.
Overall, though, this was a work I greatly enjoy reading and can highly recommend to fans of Soviet literature.
September 28, 2013
One of my favourite Soviet writers. Some of the short stories in Red Cavalry are barely a page long – but they are always brilliant snapshots of war, of its moral ambiguity. The Odessa Stories are sunny, funny tales of Jewish life in the years before the Revolution. Very different from the Red Cavalry cycle, they are like a Russian version of Damyon Runyan – but darker and more threatening. Babel said two great things about writing in general: "No iron can enter the soul like a full stop put in the right place." and "A simile should be as exact as a sliderule and as fresh as the smell of dill." He follows his own advice to the letter – and so should every storyteller.
June 27, 2022
It was probably a problem of translation, but I did not understand a lot of these stories. I think of myself as knowing a lot of this history, but I definitely lacked context for the Red Cavalry short stories. For the ones about Jewish life in Odessa, I had my feet under me a little better, but that's where the editor put all the explanatory notes! I kept thinking, "why are all the notes explaining the things I know and assuming I have a detailed, granular knowledge of the Russian Civil War?" Especially considering that Babel's point seemed to be to contradict current cultural assumptions.
August 19, 2020
Bleak true tales of a Ukrainian Jew, who joined the Cossacks, and fought in Poland after the First World War. The cold and dirty misery, mixed with casual violence and death is pretty depressing, but hey, so's life.
May 21, 2014
This is actually my second reading of these stories - the first was in university - and I had forgotten how sparse Babel's style is and yet how vivid the imagery. Highly recommended for anyone interested in early 20th century Russian literature but not for the feint of heart or the squeamish.
July 9, 2008
Isaac Babel was a brilliant writer. He was murdered by Stalin. If you can read "Red Cavalry Stories" without having an emotional reaction you're not human.
December 24, 2013
Completely incredible. Worth reading slowly, to savor them. At times beautiful, at times heart-rendingly horrifying, but absolutely amazing throughout.
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