Freidin - The Enigma of Isaac Babel

Eduard Beltov, Eto nuzhno ne mertvym-zhivym , cited in Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 578.

Gregory Freidin, Vopros vozvrashcheniia II: Velikii perelom i Zapad v biografii I. E. Babelia nachala 1930-kh godov, Stanford Slavic Studies 42 (1991): 19 5204. See also Janina Salajczyk, Polski epizod w biografii Izaaka E. Babla. Zeszyty naukowe wyzszej szkoly pedagogicznej im. Powstancow slaskich w Opolu. Filologia rosyjska IX. Seria A. (Opole, 1972), pp. 103111.

This controversial issue is further discussed in G. Freidins contribution to this volume. Ed.

Clara Malraux, Le bruit de nos pas: Voii que vient lt (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1973), pp. 28587.

Quoted in Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope , trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 11.

Ervin Sink, Egy regny regnye: Moszkvai napljegyzetek, 19351937 (Novi Sad, 1961). A Serbo-Croatian edition came out earlier as Roman jednog romana: Biljeske iz moskovskog dnevnika od 1935 do 1937 godine (Zagreb: Zora, 1955).

The late military historian Dmitrii Volkogonov, who had exceptional archival access, estimated that nearly a million were shot and five million arrested. Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 105. Higher and lower figures continue to be put forward in the absence of full documentation.

Lev Razgon, True Stories , trans. John Crowfoot (Dana Point, CA: Ardis, 1997), 267.

Two months after my detention by the KGB, two Soviet journalists, obviously with close connections with the secret police, attacked me in Izvestia as a scrawny woman who had previously written a calumny about the status of national minorities in our country. The piece ends: Why accord hospitality to hacks like these who come here as tourists. Wouldnt it be better to send hacks like these packing? D. Dmitriev and A. Cherkasov, Izvestia , September 12, 1962, 3.

This reconstruction is drawn from the authors several interviews with Boris Souvarine in the 1960s and also: Boris Souvarine, Derniers entretiens avec Babel, Counterpoint (Paris) 30 (1979).

Sergei Povartsov, Prichina smerti-rasstrel: Khronika poslednikh dnei Isaaka Babelia (Moscow: Terra, 1996); Vitalii Shentalinskii, Raby svobody: v literaturnykh arkhivakh KGB: Babel, Bulgakov, Florenskii, Pilniak, Mandelshtam, Kliuev, Platonov, Gorkii (Moscow: Parus, 1995).

http://www.stanford.edu/group/isaac_babel/bibliography/index.htm , accessed January 4, 2009.

Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are by the author.

Khodya (Chink), 1923. Isaak Babel, Sochineniia , 2 vols., comp. and ed. Antonina Priozhkova, comment. Sergey Povartsov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1990), vol. 1, p. 98. This edition is hereafter cited as Sochineniia , followed by volume and page number.

See Isaak Babel, Peterburg 1918 , ed. Efraim Sicher (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987). Among the Babel scholars, Sicher has been most consistent and meticulous in recognizing Babels book projects. Babel used cycles to fill his need for an epic sweep while preserving the form of a short story in a manner similar to that employed by his contemporary poets, among them Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam, who arranged their lyric poems into larger cycles or books, creating a lyric Bildungsroman of sorts. On Babels use of the epic frame, see Gregory Freidin, Isaac Babel (18941940), in George Stade, ed., European Writers: The Twentieth Century (New York: Scribners, 1990), p. 1993ff.

I. Babel, Moi listki. Odessa, Zhurnal zhurnalov 51 (December 22, 1916), Sochineniia 1:64.

The Acmeist manifestoes of Gumilev, Mandelstam, and Gorodetsky.

Lev Lunts, Na zapad! Beseda 2 (1923).

On Babels complex relationship with Gorky, see chapter 7 (Spravkarodoslovnaia [Babel i Gorkii]) of Alexander Zholkovskys Poltora rasskaza Babelia: Gui de Mopassan i Spravka/Gonorar. Struktura, smysl, fon (Moscow: KomKniga, 2006). This edition is hereafter referred to as Zholkovsky 2006.

LAveu is one of the three stories that Babel translated for the three-volume Collected Works of Maupassant: Sobranie sochinenii , 3 vols., ed. I. Babel (Moscow: Zemlia i fabrika, 192627), vol. 1, pp. 3443. The other two were: Le Mal dAndr and Idyll. See also E. Pogorelskaia, I. E. Babelredaktor i perevodchik Giui de Mopassana, Voprosy literatury 4 (2005).

For more on Babels uses of Nietzsche, see my Justifying the Revolution as an Aesthetic Phenomenon: Nietzschean Motifs in the Reception of Isaac Babel (19231932), in Bernice G. Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary , Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 14973.

Cf. Zholkovsky 2006, pp. 17, 135, and elsewhere.

No wonder, then, that the Marxist theoretician, critic and literary entrepreneur, Aleksandr Voronsky, the proponent of the view of art as a higher form of the cognition of life, championed Babel in the 1920s.

See also Gabriella Safrans discussion of Babels early fiction as a response to Maxim Gorkys search for a new type of Russian-Jewish writer in her Isaak Babels Elia Isaakovich as a New Jewish Type, Slavic Review 61(2): 25372, esp. p. 258.

Viktor Shklovsky was the first to elaborate Babels Odessa Stories as an allegory of a Russian-Jewish assault on Russian culture. Babel, wrote Shklovsky, is a brave man, I even think that he could spend the night with a Russian woman and the Russian woman would be satisfied. Because the Russian woman loves eloquence. I. Babel (Kritichesky romans), LEF , no. 6 (1924): 153. On the phrase refreshing blood and a range of contemporary references implied by it, including the tainted blood of the Romanovs, see Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russias Fin de Sicle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 274 and elsewhere.

For a review of responses to Babels debut in 19221926, see my Justifying the Revolution.

Babels Autobiography is datelined Sergiev Posad, November 1924 and was intended as a response, if oblique, to Budennys attack on him in the September issue of Oktiabr , as well as a statement safeguarding the fate of the book Red Cavalry , which came out a year and a half later.

I. Babels letter to Gorky, June 25, 1925. Sochineniia 1:242ff.

Ilya Ehrenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn , ed. B. Ia. Frezinskii, 3 vols. (Moscow: Tekst, 2005), 1:517.

I owe this observation to Oksana Bulgakowa.

Sergei Povartsov, Pesa I. Babelia Mariia: Opyt kommentariia, Uchenye zapiski Moskovskogo oblastnogo pedinstituta (Sovetskaia literature 10) , 265: 7787. Povartsov traces Maria back to Babels 1918 piece O gruzine, kerenke i generalskoi dochke (About a Georgian, Kerensky Rubles, and a Generals Daughter).

In its journal publication, The Story of My Dovecote was accompanied by a note indicating that it was the beginning of an autobiographical prose fiction ( nachalo avtobiograficheskoi povesti ). Krasnaia nov 4 (1925): 33.

See my biographical essay, Isaac Babel (18941940), ed. G. Stade, in European Writers: The Twentieth Century , vol. 11 (New York: Charles Scribners Sons), pp. 18851914.

Nevskys original name was officially restored in January 1944.

Viktor Shklovsky, I. Babel: Kritichesky romans, p. 155.

The only known publications after the closing of Novaia zhizn were his sketch Na stantsii ( Era , July 17, 1918), Na Dvortsovoi ploshchadi, and Kontsert v Katerinienshtadte, the latter two subtitled diary and published in Zhizn iskusstva on November 11 and 13, 1918, respectively. His next publication, Na pole chesti, a free reworking of Gaston Vidals Figures et anecdotes de la Grande Guerre (Paris, 1918), appeared in the Odessa journal Lava 1(July 1920), when Babel was at the Polish front.