Red Cavalry (Babel)
기병대 (바벨)
A cycle of short stories by Isaac Babel (book 1926), drawn from his time with the First Cavalry Army in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920. A bespectacled Jewish intellectual tries to win acceptance among the Cossacks; a dazzling style sets cruelty and heroism side by side. It enraged Budyonny and was banned for years after Babel was shot in 1940.
In depth
What kind of book is it?
More than thirty very short stories together make up a single war. Their thread is the narrator Lyutov, a Jewish intellectual attached to the First Cavalry Army, who has taken another name while not hiding his origin. The stories follow neither the order of events nor that of first publication, so the book reads less like a novel than a string of flares going up along a front.
The first story, "Crossing the Zbruch", shows at once what the book is. It opens with incredible beauty, fields of poppies and "the orange sun rolling through the sky like a severed head". At night the narrator reaches a town and is billeted in a ransacked Jewish house. He cries out in his sleep; a pregnant woman wakes him and asks him to stop pushing her father. She pulls back the blanket from the sleeper beside him. The old man is dead, his throat torn out and his face split in two. The Poles did it, she says.
In the best-known story, "My First Goose", the narrator is mocked by Cossacks for his glasses. He brutally kills a goose and orders a woman to cook it, and only then do they accept him. In "Gedali" an old Jewish shopkeeper asks which is the revolution and which the counter-revolution, since Reds and Whites alike have done terrible things to the Jews.
Where does it meet the actual war?
A real record lies beneath it. Babel kept a diary on Budyonny's campaign, which survives as his 1920 Cavalry Diary. The place names are almost faultless, and most stories are dated June to September 1920. But diary and fiction differ. The book omits the defection of many First Cavalry Cossacks to the Polish and Ukrainian People's Republic armies in 1920-1921; "white Cossacks" appear briefly in "The Widow" and "After the Battle" with no account of how they crossed over.
Why was Budyonny furious?
When the first stories ran in 1923-1924, in Odessa's Izvestia and Moscow's LEF and Krasnaya Nov, Babel became famous at a stroke. But his characters were no poster heroes. Semyon Budyonny, a prototype of one of them, published an angry note in the journal Oktyabr in 1924, and Gorky defended Babel against him. Military opinion was not uniform: Vasily Blyukher called it a vivid picture of the First Cavalry Army; Vitaly Primakov wrote that he looked forward to all Babel's work; Iona Yakir supported him too.
How did it disappear and return?
Whenever prototypes became "enemies of the people" in the 1930s, the book was revised; the 1936 edition lost even a mention of commander-in-chief Kamenev. That year the censorship agency Glavlit secretly instructed that it be attacked and removed from libraries, judging: "The cavalrymen are shown as robbers, looters and rapists... The book has no artistic value." Babel was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940, and his work was banned until the 1950s. Rehabilitated in 1954, he returned to print and is now read in over twenty languages. Hemingway called his writing wonderful. The Nazis too listed the book for burning.
How to read it?
Editions differ slightly in content. Babel gathered 34 stories in 1926 and went on revising; "Argamak" entered the 1933 edition, while "The Kiss", written in 1937, entered none of those published in his lifetime.