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Feb. 5th, 2009 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsCan you call something a set of slice-of-life stories if the life that is being sliced is almost ridiculously full of death, destruction, rape, looting, and murder?
Reading Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories is like getting shoved into a world that works by completely different rules than anywhere you've ever been - brutal and nonsensical rules that are never explained, just demonstrated.
I read a couple of the stories in a short story class last year, which is when I found out about Babel for the first time - a Russian writer during the Revolution who, as a Jewish glasses-wearing intellectual, decided to go out as a war correspondent with the Cossacks on the Polish front. Let me reiterate: Isaac Babel grew up in a Jewish village that was often the target of pogroms, and he decided to go riding with the Cossacks. (Under an assumed name, of course, and not advertising his Jewishness. But still.)
The stories that come out of this are horrifying and fascinating - all of them very short, just an impression of an event or series of events. Some of them are funny, in a twisted way. All of the Cossacks come across as real people, and the events were mostly based on real events; the copy I read included Babel's journal of his time with the Cossacks, and you could see the stories sort of appear in embryo form as he writes about the things tha thappen. The stories were brilliant, but the journal may have been my favorite part. It starts out mostly as a writer's journal - 'remember this, describe this' - and as it goes on, and he sees more horror and the war prospects become bleaker, he writes more and more about what he's actually feeling. In most of the stories, he's the observer, but he doesn't allow himself much reflection, just description. You get that reflection a lot more in the journal, though it still doesn't answer my question about his choice to join the army at all, namely why, why would anyone would do that! That's probably a question without an answer at this point.
(However, serious business aside, my favorite line in the journal is probably this:
I hate Gowinski, he is such a happy-go-lucky, gluttonous walking disaster. They are no longer giving me any coffee.
GEE, Isaac Babel, do you think those two things might be related? I have this glorious image of caffeine-deprived Babel raging around all "I HATE EVERYTHING, I HATE EVERYONE, WHERE IS MY COFFEE.")
Reading Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories is like getting shoved into a world that works by completely different rules than anywhere you've ever been - brutal and nonsensical rules that are never explained, just demonstrated.
I read a couple of the stories in a short story class last year, which is when I found out about Babel for the first time - a Russian writer during the Revolution who, as a Jewish glasses-wearing intellectual, decided to go out as a war correspondent with the Cossacks on the Polish front. Let me reiterate: Isaac Babel grew up in a Jewish village that was often the target of pogroms, and he decided to go riding with the Cossacks. (Under an assumed name, of course, and not advertising his Jewishness. But still.)
The stories that come out of this are horrifying and fascinating - all of them very short, just an impression of an event or series of events. Some of them are funny, in a twisted way. All of the Cossacks come across as real people, and the events were mostly based on real events; the copy I read included Babel's journal of his time with the Cossacks, and you could see the stories sort of appear in embryo form as he writes about the things tha thappen. The stories were brilliant, but the journal may have been my favorite part. It starts out mostly as a writer's journal - 'remember this, describe this' - and as it goes on, and he sees more horror and the war prospects become bleaker, he writes more and more about what he's actually feeling. In most of the stories, he's the observer, but he doesn't allow himself much reflection, just description. You get that reflection a lot more in the journal, though it still doesn't answer my question about his choice to join the army at all, namely why, why would anyone would do that! That's probably a question without an answer at this point.
(However, serious business aside, my favorite line in the journal is probably this:
I hate Gowinski, he is such a happy-go-lucky, gluttonous walking disaster. They are no longer giving me any coffee.
GEE, Isaac Babel, do you think those two things might be related? I have this glorious image of caffeine-deprived Babel raging around all "I HATE EVERYTHING, I HATE EVERYONE, WHERE IS MY COFFEE.")
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Date: 2009-02-05 04:35 pm (UTC)Sounds like an amazing read, though!
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Date: 2009-02-05 04:55 pm (UTC)To be fair to Isaac Babel, in my head everyone sort of talks in capslocks. >.> Especially when caffeine-deprived.
Isaac Babel actually looks like the dorkiest dork who ever lived, though, it's kind of adorable. Look!
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Date: 2009-02-05 04:57 pm (UTC)(--whoa. They're playing "Cornflake Girl" at this Corner Bakery. NOW I'M WEIRDED OUT.)
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Date: 2009-02-05 05:11 pm (UTC)Actually, from the journal, it sounds like he kept traveling through these shtetls when they were barracked in villages, and the people he stayed with would be like "YOU'RE TOTALLY JEWISH, RIGHT?" and he would basically go "ummmmmmmm. No comment!" There's one part, though, where another officer is in an argument with a family over food - it's a Jewish fast day, the officer is threatening the family if they don't dig up some potatoes to feed the officers with, the family doesn't want to because of the religious holiday, and Babel writes "and I say nothing because I am Russian" and it breaks my heart a little.
(. . . well, that's sort of unnerving. O.O)
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Date: 2009-02-05 05:07 pm (UTC)*jots down book name EVEN THOUGH IS NOT BUYING ANY MORE BOOKS UNTIL BACKLOG IS READ, REALLY*
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Date: 2009-02-05 05:12 pm (UTC)Ahahahahaha yeah um. *eyes library backlog, eyes COMPLETE INABILLITY to stop self from reserving five million more books despite already overwhelming backlog!*
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Date: 2009-02-05 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-05 05:46 pm (UTC). . . which is really probably not a good thing, now that I think about it. >.>
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Date: 2009-02-05 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-05 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-05 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-05 06:29 pm (UTC)Um that is probably not helpful. But there is probably a French translation! Babel's daughter is the editor and she was born in Paris.
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Date: 2009-02-06 02:58 am (UTC)I brought a book of Isaac Babel stories with me to Israel. And another to college. Except some of the ones about his childhood in the ghetto (and pogroms) make me kind of ill with woe and sorrow.
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Date: 2009-02-06 03:42 am (UTC)Of the childhood ones I have only read 'The Story of My Dovecote', but . . . yes. :( And you can tell from his attitude about the ghettos in the later ones that it screwed him up so badly. Um. Unsurprisingly.