The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  An aesthete with a heightened interest in all the colorful revelations of the human character, inclined towards the abstract intellectual humanism and to romanticism, expressing through his whole life and work the agonizing sensation of his own dilettante weaknesses, Babel admired the heroic spirit of the Revolutionary and saw the Revolution as essentially elemental, accepting it without fear.

  In his portrayal of Red Cavalry soldiers, as with the gangsters of Odessa, Babel expresses both admiration and horror of their strength and natural daring, through his own intellectuals skeptical irony. This creates an original combination of heroics and humor. Characteristically, in his book “Red Cavalry,” Babel focuses his attention less on the colorful episodes of military life, and more on the wild escapades of the partisans.

  Typical for Babel is his primordial florid imagery, his original synthesis of romanticism and sharp naturalism, of the physiological and the erotic, which at times becomes pathological. His great mastery is in his concise picturesque story telling, his bright and witty communication of local color and life (for example—the subtly humorous depiction of Jewish life in “Odessa Stories”).

  The stories which he published after his long silence in 1931-1932, including the fragment “Gapa Guzhva”—which touches separately on the theme of collectivization, are similar in nature to his earlier literary work.

  Indeed, the author of this “politically incorrect” article was on dangerous ground. One wonders whatever happened to Mr. Kagan.

  By this time, the Great Purges were in full swing. Stalin held the country in his fist. His Revolutionary comrades, his generals, writers, anarchists, so-called Trotskyites, and their associates were arrested, tortured, and shot. The political terror penetrated all spheres of life, including literary and cultural circles. It was only a matter of time before my fathers turn would come. He surely must have known that he himself had been under the vigilant surveillance of the secret police for some years.

  On May 15, 1939, Babel was arrested. He disappeared. Not a trace, not a word. He vanished. His lodgings were searched and every scrap of paper was confiscated—correspondence, drafts, manuscripts, everything. None of it has ever resurfaced. His name, his works, were officially erased as though he had never existed. There was only silence. How could a man so friendly, so socially astute, so famous, not be able to pass a word to the outside? And so the guessing began, and slowly, a sort of myth emerged. He never existed, but by his nonexistence, he became famous. I have been asked many times in my life, “Do you know how he died? Do you know where? Do you know why?” There is another question also often asked. “Why did he go back to the Soviet Union? The times were already bad. Didn’t he know it? Why didnt he stay in Paris with his family?” Babel came to Paris in the summer of 1935, as part the delegation of Soviet writers to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace. He probably knew this would have been his last chance to remain in Europe. As he had done numerous times for some ten years, he asked my mother to return with him to Moscow. Although he knew the general situation was bad, he nevertheless described to her the comfortable life that the family could have there together. It was the last opportunity my mother had to give a negative answer, and she never forgot it. Perhaps it helped her later on to be proven completely right in her fears and her total lack of confidence in the Soviet Union.

  My mother described to me these last conversations with my father many times.

  So, why did he go back to Moscow in 1935? For many years, Babel had battled with the dilemma of his life situation. During his lengthy visits to Paris dating from 1926, he could express his thoughts without fear of possible betrayal. According to his close friend Boris Souvarine,2 for example, Babel had a great knowledge of high political spheres in the Soviet Union, of its plots, manipulations and daily practices. He knew very well the nature of Stalins character and private life, and had no illusions about Stalins monstrous intentions and crimes.

  Another person with intimate knowledge of Babels political views at the time was Yuri Annenkov. In his memoirs, Annenkov wrote of his many encounters with Babel in Paris and of the letters he received from him through the early 1930s. In 1932, Babel returned to Paris to visit his family, after an absence of three years. Annenkov wrote, “Babels moods had changed significantly in the past months. It’s true, he was still a big joker, but his topics of conversation were different. The last stay in the Soviet Union and the growing repression of creative art through the demands and instructions of the State had completely disillusioned him. To write within the framework of'the barrack mentality of Soviet ideology’ was intolerable for him, yet he didn’t know how he could manage to live otherwise.”3

  Annenkov described another visit with Babel in 1932, noting that the conversation had just one subject: how to manage to live further.

  “I have a family: a wife and daughter,” said Babel, “I love them and have to provide for them. Under no circumstances do I want them to return to Sovietland. They must remain here in freedom. But what about myself? Should I stay here and become taxi driver, like the heroic Gaito Gazdanov? But you see, he has no children! Should I return to our proletarian revolution? Revolution indeed! Its disappeared! The proletariat? It flew off, like an old buggy with a leaky roof, thats lost its wheels. And it stayed wheelless. Now, dear brother, its the Central Committees that are pushing forward—they’ll be more effective. They don’t need wheels—they have machine guns instead. All the rest is clear and needs no further commentary, as they say in polite society. . . . Maybe I won’t become a taxi driver after all, although, as you know, I passed the driving test long ago. Here a taxi driver has more freedom than the rector of a Soviet university. . . . Driver or no driver, I’m going to become a free man.4

  On July 27,1933, Babel wrote to Annenkov that he had received a strange summons from Moscow and was departing immediately, “in the most dramatic conditions and no money and a lot of debts everywhere. . . . Live well without me. Don’t forget Evgenia Borisovna^ while I’m gone. ... I kiss you. I’m glad that I’m going to Moscow. All the rest is bitter and uncertain.”5

  This turned out to be the last letter Yuri Annenkov ever received from my father. In their correspondence, Babel sounds to me like a man divided in his heart, a man pulled with equal force in two different directions.

  In 1933, Babel still had a powerful political protector, his beloved mentor Alexei Maximovich Gorky. Gorky had played a critical and irreplaceable role in Babel’s life. Babel wrote in 1924, “At the end of 1916,1 happened to meet Gorky. I owe everything to this meeting and to this day speak the name of Alexei Maximovich with love and reverence. He published my first stories in the November 1916 issue of Letopis. Alexei Maximovich taught me extremely important things and sent me into the world, at a time when it was clear that my two or three tolerable attempts as a young man were at best successful by accident, that I would not get anywhere with literature, and that I wrote amazingly badly.”6

  During a trip to Italy in the spring of 1933, shortly before returning to the Soviet Union, my father visited Gorky in Sorrento. His death in 1936 was a great personal loss for Babel and signaled the inevitable coming tragedy.

  One of Babels main preoccupations was money. All his adult life, Babel had money problems and worried about them. Not that he did not make money. On the contrary, he made a lot of money. In the 1920s, his stories were published and republished in book form. In one year (1924-1925), four collections of stories and two screenplays were published. He also received payment for foreign editions. In the 1930s, he worked for film studios in Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad and was extremely well paid for his efforts. He not only wrote original scripts, but also revised the screenplays of others, without attribution to himself. Apparently, he was the main author of The Gorky Trilogy, which appeared only after his arrest and without his name in the film credits.

  Babel's problem was not the absence of money, but his inability to manage it. Above all, he felt the oblig
ation to take care of his relatives abroad. His sister Meri Emmanuelovna Chapochnikoff had left in 1924 to join her fiance, who was studying medicine in Belgium; my mother Evgenia Borisovna had left in 1925, taking with her a lifelong hatred of the Bolsheviks; and his mother, the last one to leave, joined her daughter in Brussels in 1926.

  As I noted in my introduction to The Lonely Years, “Money matters tormented him. To make more money, he had to work under increasingly difficult conditions. Moreover, the impractical Babel would let his generosity run away with him. Whether he was in Moscow or in Paris, distant relatives, friends and friends of friends were continually imploring him for financial assistance. A few weeks after his return to the Soviet Union from a trip abroad, he would find himself totally impoverished, his Soviet friends having finished the job that had begun in Paris. Above all, Babel feared that his economic position would affect his work. His life centered on writing.”7

  His inability to imagine himself as anything but a writer played a critical role in his refusal to leave the USSR. His stays abroad made him understand that he could not make a comfortable living as an emigre writer.

  As Cynthia Ozick observed in a review of Babels 1920 Diary:“By remaining in the Soviet Union and refusing finally to bend his art to Soviet directives, Babel sacrificed his life to his language.”

  Souvarine remembers what he called Babels leitmotiv, “I am a Russian writer. If I did not live with the Russian people, I would cease being a writer. I would be like a fish out of water.”8 Actually, my mother would use these words almost verbatim to explain my father’s absence and why I had no brothers and sisters, whom I had always wanted. This romantic ideal of the writer, which was only part of the story, stayed with me for a very long part of my life. It took many years to let it go.

  For Babel, it is clear that there was no one ideal solution. In the end, a mans destiny is his own.

  In 1954, after many years of official silence, Babels name was heard again. A typed half sheet of ordinary paper, accepted as an official document, declared, “The sentence of the Military College dated 26 January 1940 concerning Babel I. E. is revoked on the basis of newly discovered circumstances and the case against him is terminated in the absence of elements of a crime.” The news took a couple of years to leak out of Moscow to the rest of Europe. Several decades later in the early 1990s, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, some brave souls were able to get access to the KGBs archives on Babel. Minute records had been kept about the arrest and interrogations of the accused.

  As we now know, his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria’s private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately Babel had been accused and convicted of “active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization” and of “being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments.”

  Babel's last recorded words in the proceedings were, “I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others. ... I am asking for only one thing— let me finish my work.” He was shot the next day and his body was thrown into a communal grave. All of this horrific information was revealed in the early 1990s, a relatively short time ago.

  Considering that revelations about my father have been coming to light for almost fifty years, a large portion of my life, I understand why it has never been possible to put an end to grieving. In this edition, I have also included in the afterword a few of my own memoirs, which illustrate how his absence affected me personally. For many years now, I have been involved with attempting to bring together and to light what is recognized as the body of Babels work. I hope the present ambitious project will provide further insights into his personality, as well as a greater knowledge and appreciation of his literary legacy.

  Nathalie Babel

  Washington, D. C.

  March 2001

  FOREWORD

  by Peter Constantine

  One of the great tragedies of twentieth century literature took place in the early morning hours of May 15,1939, when a cadre of agents from the Soviet secret police burst into the house of Isaac Babel in Peredelkino, arrested him, and gathered up the many stacks of unpublished manuscripts in his office. From that day on, Babel, one of the foremost writers of his time, became a nonperson in the Soviet Union. His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi. He became unmentionable in any public venue. When the film director Mark Donskoi’s famous Gorky trilogy premiered the following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplay, had been removed from the credits.

  Babel was executed in 1940. It was only in 1954, fourteen years later, that he was officially exonerated, but his books were only warily republished in the Soviet Union, and in censored form. And yet today, sixty-two years after his arrest and the subsequent silence surrounding his name, Babel is considered, both inside and outside Russia, to be among the most exciting—and at times unsettling—writers of the twentieth century.

  Babel is one of the great masters of the short story, and for the translator a great and challenging master of style. It has been fascinating to see his style change from work to work. We are familiar with terms such as Proustian, Chekhovian, and Nabokovian, but, as I soon realized, the term “B abelian” is harder to define.

  Babel burst onto the literary scene after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, becoming within a few years one of Russia’s most original and highly regarded authors—“the best Russia has to offer,” as Maxim Gorky wrote to Andre Malraux in 1926. Babel began his career during a time when Russian culture, society, and language were in total upheaval. World War I, the February and October Revolutions of 1917, and the Civil War left in their wake poverty, hunger, and social instability. At the same time, the promise of limitless change was in the air. The people of Russia felt that they were being given the opportunity to participate in an exhilarating and unprecedented social experiment which, if World Communism was to have its way, would be a global one.

  The abrupt social changes on all levels, the abolition of imperial censorship, and the new feeling of liberty drove writers of Babels generation—Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Zamyatin, Bulgakov—to write in new ways about new topics with an unprecedented vigor. Babel did this with a vengeance. His themes were steeped in the brutal realism of the times: In the arctic night of Petersburg a Chinese man, seeing a desperate prostitute, holds up a loaf of bread—“With his blue fingernail he draws a line across the crust. One pound. Glafira [the prostitute] raises two fingers. Two pounds.” A teenage girl tries to help her younger sister abort her baby with a clothes hanger—their mother walks in on them just in time. The morgues of Petersburg are filled with corpses— the narrator gazes at a dead aristocratic couple and, looking at the noblewoman, thinks, “In death she keeps a stamp of beauty and impudence. She sobs and laughs disdainfully at her murderers.” Starving wet nurses feeding undersized infants in state-run maternity wards beg the narrator for a crust of bread.

  These were contemporary topics that before Babel nobody had dared touch. When the valiant Red Cavalry rode into Poland, in what was intended to be the first step that would carry the glories of Communism to Europe and the world, Babel rode along. He brought back with him a series of stories that presented a literary portrait of war that has awed and haunted readers for almost eighty years.

  One apt definition of “Babelian” might be: a trenchant and unrelenting literary re-creation of a world in war and turmoil. And yet this is a limited definition, for it leaves out Babels irrepressible sense of humor in his stories, plays, and screenplays. In the screenplay Roaming Stars, Babel describes a production of King Lear in the hinterlands of Volhynia, where Lears daughters appear onstage as “[two] stout, mid-dle-aged Jewish women, the third is a gir
l of about six . . . the actresses are also wearing lacquered officers boots with spurs.” In the play Sunset, Babel portrays a synagogue scene that the Moscow Arts Theater cut out of its 1928 production of the play because the scene was deemed too irreverent toward Judaism. As the carters chant and pray, Arye-Leib, the synagogue shamas, discusses market prices with them:

  ARYE-LEIB (serenely): Lifnei adonai ki vo, ki vo... Oy, I am standing, oy, I am standing before God . . . where do oats stand?

  SECOND JEW (without interrupting his prayer): A ruble and four, a ruble and four!

  ARYE-LEIB: Im going crazy!

  In translating The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, I was constantly struck by the different registers of Babels voice in different stories. The minute I thought I had pinned down Babels style, it transformed itself into something very different in the next story. Babels first published piece, “Old Shloyme,” which opens this volume, has absolutely nothing in common with the style, content, language, or rhythm of the second story, “At Grandmother s,” or with the story after that, or with any of the other stories. The Odessa stories, traditionally thought of as a stylistic unit threaded through with feisty B abelian color, are, on closer scrutiny, just as disparate. In the first Odessa story, “The King,” the author-narrator draws us into the wild gangster world of Odessa with his elegant and surprising prose: “The tables, draped in velvet, coiled through the yard like a snake on whose belly patches of every color had been daubed, and these orange and red velvet patches sang in deep voices.” The second Odessa story, “Justice in Parentheses,” begins on a very different note: “My first run-in was with Benya Krik, my second with Lyubka Shneiweis. Do you understand the meaning of these words? Can you drink in their full essence?” Here the narrator Zudechkis, a small-time wheeler-dealer who operates on the fringes of Odessa’s Jewish underworld, suddenly steps into the foreground. The story is told from his perspective and in his subtly Yiddling words, “At five o’clock in the morning—or no, it must have been four, and then again, maybe it wasn’t even four yet—the King entered my bedroom, grabbed me, if you will pardon the expression, by my back, dragged me out of bed....” In the next story, “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” the primary narrator is an unworldly Jew, described as having glasses on his nose and autumn in his heart.