David Herman
Isaac Babel

David Herman | Isaac Babel | 05.31.22

- Anyway, I’m going to hand over to you and say welcome to everybody and thank you very much and looking forward to your presentation today. Thank you.

• [David] Thank you so much, Wendy. Hello again. I’m David Herman and I’m going to be talking over the next few weeks about three of the greatest Soviet writers, perhaps even the three greatest Soviet writers. On Thursday, I’m going to be talking about my favourite Soviet poet, Lev Ozerov, who’s not well known, but is an absolute genius, was an absolute genius. In July, I should be talking about the great Vasily Grossman, and tonight I’m going to start with Isaac Babel. Arguably the greatest short story writer of the 20th century, certainly one of the great short story writers of the 20th century. There’s an additional topical twist that all three of these writers, although they’re usually written about as Soviet writers, or indeed even Russian writers, were actually all from Ukraine. So Lev Ozerov was from Kiev, Grossman was from Berdichev, and Babel was from Odessa. And I’m going to start with his life, an outline of his life and then move on to the most important themes of his writing or what I consider the most important themes. His career really falls into two halves. He had a kind of creative peak, if you like, in the 1920s between 1921 and 27 when he wrote his best known work, especially three particular cycles of short stories. And then the years 1927 to 39 were the remaining 12 virtually barren years by comparison.

First of all, Babel was part of a new generation of Russian and Ukrainian Jewish writers, and they absolutely transformed Jewish writing in Russian and indeed in Yiddish. So born within 17 years of each other, you have Osip Brik, you have Boris Pasternak, of course or Doctor Zhivago. You have Ilia Ehrenberg, you have Osip Mandelstam, you have Viktor Shklovsky, one of the great critics who wrote about Babel. You have Babel himself. You have Peretz Markish, one of the great Yiddish poets. You have Ilf as in Ilf and Petrov. You have Nadezhda Mandelstam. You have Yevgenia Ginzburg. And you have the Vasily Grossman. That is an extraordinary explosion of creative Jewish talent. It’s not that there wasn’t Jewish talent in the Russian Empire before in the 19th century. There was, but the real explosion of modern creative genius in literature in Russia, in the Russian Empire came from this generation born in the 1890s and 1900s. So Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was born in 1894 in Moldavanka, a poor district of Odessa near the harbour. His family was Jewish, secular, well on its way to joining the middle class. As we’ll see, that becomes significant later in his life. Soon after his birth, the Babel family moved out of Odessa to a town 150 kilometres away, and they later returned to live in a more fashionable part of Odessa.

Odessa, we should remember, more than one third of the population in 1900 were Jewish. It was the second largest Jewish city in the empire after Warsaw. Babel subsequently used Moldavanka where he was born as the setting for his famous Odessa Tales and his play Sunset. And although his short stories present his family as destitute and “Muddle headed,” to use one of his phrases, they were in fact relatively well off. According to his daughter Nathalie, her father made up biographical information about his family in order to present an appropriate past for a young Soviet writer who was not a member of the Communist Party. He witnessed in 1905 the terrible pogroms, but he and his parents were untouched, although in fact he wrote very powerfully about the pogroms in in the Odessa area. In the “Story of My Dovecote,” one of his very best stories from 1925, he wrote, “The whole street was full of the crunching, cracking, and singing of shattering wood. Only Kuzma had not left. Kuzma, the yard keeper sat in the shed on Shoyl’s corpse, laying out the dead man. Look how the people have given our granddad the chop. Kuzma began to snuffle, turned away and started to take a pike perch out of the flies of great uncle’s trousers. Two pike perch had been stuffed into granduncle, one into the flies of his trousers, the other into his mouth.”

In his story, “First Love,” he writes about how “Crowds of hired murderers ransacked my father’s shop and killed my granduncle Shoyl.” These are very powerful, evocative accounts of the terrible pogroms of the Russian Empire in the early 1900s, allegedly from his childhood, but in fact his family were not actually affected by the pogroms. Then in 1905, 1906, his family moved back to Odessa, but this time to an imposing building in one of the most fashionable areas of the city. He was schooled at home by private tutors and in addition to regular school subjects, he studied the Talmud and he studied music. Though he was at home in Yiddish and Hebrew, Cynthia Ozick wrote later, and was familiar with the traditional text and their demanding commentaries, he added to these a lifelong fascination with Maupassant and with Flaubert. His first stories were composed in fluent literary French. He then went to college and he published his first story, “Old Shloyme,” in 1913. He graduated from college in 1916 and moves to Petrograd as it was then called, formally St. Petersburg, later Leningrad, and then later of course, again St. Petersburg. And he enrolled at university and in Petrograd, he met a crucial figure in his career.

The great Russian writer, Maxim Gorky, who published two of Babel’s early stories in his literary magazine, and Babel wrote in his autobiography, “I owe everything to that meeting.” And one of his most famous semi autobiographical short stories, “The Story of My Dovecote,” was later dedicated to Gorky. And Gorky played a huge role later in Babel’s life when Babel fell under the shadow of the Stalinist regime. Gorky was a hugely important figure in Stalinist Soviet Union. And Gorky was a kind of shield for Babel when he first came, got into trouble with the regime. And his death later, Gorky’s death that is, was crucial to the decline and fall of Babel. Then in 1917, of course comes the Russian revolution, and Babel has a sort of peripatetic existence really during the first few years after the revolution. Where was he and what was he doing at this time? According to his autobiography in 1924, he said, “For seven years, from 1917 to 24, I’ve been apprenticing among the people.” The people is a very good word phrase to use if you’re trying to ingratiate yourself with the communist regime. And he omits some significant events and invented what I might call an appropriate past for a young Soviet writer. So some of that has to be treated with some suspicion. He served briefly on the Romanian front, returned to Odessa in late 1917, and resurfaces in Petrograd early in 1918. He marries Yevgenia Gronfein, who he’d met in Odessa in 1919. And by 1925, the marriage soured, and Yevgenia Babel emigrated to France. And Babel flirted during the 1930s with the idea of joining her and their daughter, Nathalie in France. He never did.

A crucial and disastrous mistake. Possibly the greatest mistake of his life. Then in 1919, 1919, 1920 comes the crucial turning point in Babel’s life and career. The Odessa Party Committee issues him the credentials for war correspondent under the name of Kiril Vasilevich Lyutov, which is important because of course it’s a very non-Jewish name. And he’s assigned to the Cossack first cavalry army. And in from June to the September 1920, he’s involved in the military campaign of the Polish Soviet War, and this becomes the subject of his masterpiece, “Red Cavalry,” a book of short stories. A collection of short stories, one could say. And the legendary violence of these stories harshly contrasts with the gentle nature of Babel himself. The Red Cavalry, with Babel attached, moves from Volhynia, one of the western most provinces of the pale, to the eastern part of newly polish Galicia. It is what we might call the borderlands between Western Russia and Eastern Poland. What Timothy Snyder, the great American historian later famously called the Bloodlands because this is where the great human catastrophes from the 1930s and 40s happens. And this is a kind of precursor, this terrible, terrible Polish Soviet war. And what Babel writes about in these stories is the treatment of the prisoners, the daily life on the road, fevers, itches, craving for comfort, the violence, the cruelty, the rape, the looting.

It is an extraordinarily modern, no holds barred account of modern warfare. In all its cruelty and its barbarism. And he creates for himself a fascinating kind of persona or identity because on the one hand, he’s a Jew travelling, riding with the Cossacks, watching what the Cossacks do to the Jews in these small godforsaken Jewish villages, “shtetl,” throughout this area. And he knows the the lengths of cruelty of which they’re capable. And at the same time, he’s of course riding with the Cossacks and is writing for the communists. So he is completely caught in the kind of middle. And this double vision, a Jew who sees what is being done by the Cossacks to the Jews, the Cossacks and the Poles. Because what happens is that the Cossacks move into a village. They rape the women, they destroy the shops and the small businesses, they kill the men, they move out. The Poles then arrive and do exactly the same. Then the Cossacks return and do exactly the same again. It is a terrible, terrible cycle of violence, brilliantly described by Babel in a way that, really there there’s nothing like it in 1920s literature. And so he conceals his own Jewishness with this false name Kiril Vasilevich Lyutov, but describes this landscape of these terribly primitive, desperately poor villages and the fate they suffer from the Cossacks that he’s riding with. And he then reaches his peak as a writer after the Russo Polish War from 1921 to 27.

He publishes three major story cycles, two plays and several pieces of short fiction. And these are his best known works. They’re among the masterpieces of Soviet literature and they’re written and published just in six years. And they make up half of Babel’s total literary output. So you get the “Red Cavalry” first, published in 1926. You get the “Odessa Stories,” and you get stories of his early childhood in Odessa. And this is his major fiction. And his major fiction always consists of a first person narrator watching unblinkingly, whether it’s the pogroms from his childhood or the terrible things he witnessed with the Cossacks or the gangsters of the underworld of Odessa in the “Odessa Stories.” Most of the Benya Krik stories, he was the main gangster in the Odessa Tales or “Odessa Stories,” were written and published in Odessa in 1923. Then Babel moves to Moscow and he writes the stories that make up “Red Cavalry,” and that’s published in 1926. And according to one of the great Babel scholars, Gregory Frieden, he writes, “For the first time in Russian letters, at least, the opulence and subtlety of modernism lent themselves to the expression of the cruellest and basis sensibility.”

And I suppose if you want to sum up the genius of Babel, what he does is he brings together crucial aspects of modernism together with the most extraordinary, lean, spare, evocative prose. And at the same time, a description of cruelty and inhumanity, which there was barely any parallel to it till you get to Holocaust literature. And then he writes this autobiography in inverted commas for the party to try and present himself as a man of the people. And at this point in the mid twenties, not only has his ex-wife moved to Paris, but his sister, and later his mother, immigrate to Brussels. So there is every inducement for him when the going gets terrible under the Stalin purges of the 1930s to join either his ex-wife and daughter in Paris or his mother and sister in Brussels. And tragically he does neither. And then in 1925, we also get the first major critical recognition of Babel when the great Soviet critic Viktor Shklovsky writes a piece on Babel. And the following year, D. S. Mirsky, one of the other great Russian critics of the 1920s, also writes a piece about Babel. So he is beginning to be discovered by not just minor critics, the great Soviet literary critics. And then in 1925, he publishes the first two childhood stories, which is the third cycle of short stories. And then in 1926, Red Cavalry itself is published.

33 short stories originally, two more were added subsequently. And they’re originally published in various journals and newspapers then published together as a book in 1926. And it’s his lengthiest work of fiction. And according to Gregory Frieden, again, it is the first true masterpiece of Russia’s post revolutionary prose fiction. And then in 1927, he has the first of a series of affairs with the future Mrs. Yezhov in Berlin. And the crucial thing about this is that Yezhov is later to be the key figure in the Soviet Secret Service and the terror that is unleashed by Stalin and particularly, well, not particularly, but against the Soviet intelligences among others. And it’s that the purges are actually called in Russian, the Yezhovshchina, named after Yezhov, and Grossman later wrote a famous short story about the Yezhovs in which Babel makes a fleeting cameo appearance. And this long on off affair with Mrs. Yezhov unfortunately leads finally to Babel’s terrible downfall. At the end of the twenties, he travels to the Ukraine and witnesses the brutality of forced collectivization. And then in 1931, he resumes his affair with the future. Mrs. Yezhov. And Yezhov is the head of the what was called the MKVD from 36 to 38 during the height of the Great Purge. And he organised the mass arrest, torture and executions during the Great Purge. And then he collaborates in the 1930s, which are much quieter years in terms of his short stories, which is really his claim to fame with Eisenstein, the great Jewish Soviet filmmaker on the film Vision Meadow.

And then tragically in 1935, resumes his affair with Yezhov’s wife. And in retaliation for Babel’s affair with his wife, Yezhov ordered the writer placed under constant surveillance by the secret police. And as the Great Purge began during the late 1930s, Yezhov was informed that Babel’s spreading rumours about the suspicious death of Maxim Gorky, as if he would, and alleging that his former mentor had been murdered on orders from Stalin. Babel had also been heard to say of Leon Trotsky, “It’s impossible to imagine the charm and strength of his influence on anyone who encounters him.” And further commented that Kamenev, one of the leading victims of Stalin, was the most brilliant connoisseur of language and literature. Then the Great Purges begin in 1936. This is a terrible time.

If you are going to pick a time to have an affair, an on off, long on off affair with the wife of the head of the MKVD, 1935, 36 was just the most terrible inopportune time to do it. And in this period, 2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned. 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps. Mandelstam, the theatre director Meyerhold, Babel, the 13 Yiddish poets who were murdered in 1952 under Stalin’s orders. And then the other critical thing that happens to Babel at this time, 1936, terrible timing again, is that Gorky, his shield dies, and therefore he has no great literary figure to protect him. And then in 1938, Yezhov is replaced by Beria and is arrested and gives evidence against Babel. And on May the 13th, 1939, Babel is arrested by the security police. And according to his then mistress, she wrote, “In the car, one of the men sat in back with Babel and me while the other one sat in front with the driver. The worst part of this is that my mother won’t be getting my letters, he said, and then he was silent for a long time. I could not say a single word.

Babel asked the secret policeman sitting next to him, so I guess you don’t get too much sleep, do you? And he even laughed. As we approached Moscow, I said to Babel, I’ll be waiting for you. It’ll be as if you’ve gone to Odessa, only there won’t be any letters. He answered, I asked you to see that the child not be made miserable, but I don’t know what my destiny will be. We drove to the Lubyanka Prison, and through the gates, the car stopped before the massive closed door, where a sentry stood guard. Babel kissed me and said, someday we’ll see each other. And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door.” And from that day on, Babel became a non-person in the Soviet Union. His name was blotted out, removed from all literary dictionaries and encyclopaedias, taken off school and university syllabuses. He became unmentionable in any public venue. Interrogated under torture, Babel confessed that his creative impotence, which has prevented me from publishing any significant work for the last few years was deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write. Despite months of pleading and letters sent directly to Beria, he was denied access to his papers. And in October 39, he was again summoned for interrogation and his trial took place in January, 1940 in one of Beria’s private chambers. It lasted 20 minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance. Death by firing squad to be carried out immediately.

He’d been convicted of active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organisation and of being a member of a terrorist conspiracy as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments. All nonsense, of course. Babel’s last recorded words were, “I’m innocent, I’ve 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’m 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. In 1954, a year after the death of Stalin, Babel’s rehabilitation began during the Khrushchev fall. A typed half sheet of paper ended the official silence. It read, “The sentence of the military collegium, dated 26th of January, 1940 concerning Babel IE is revoked on the basis of newly discovered circumstances and the case against him is terminated in the absence of elements of a crime.”

His works were once again widely published and praised. And it is at exactly this moment that he gets discovered in the United States in translation. There are pieces by leading American literary critics, including Irving Howe, famously, Lionel Trilling, and Trilling’s colleague at Columbia University, Stephen Marcus. As an American Russian critic wrote, “No Soviet writer has meant so much to so many Americans.” Earnest Hemingway read the first translation of Babel’s stories and turned green over his sentences. Raymond Carver cited Babel as a formative influence. Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman called himself a new world cousin in the Babel clan, a sentiment shared by Cynthia Ozick and Saul Bellow. Francine Prose recalls learning the extraordinary importance of compression, simplicity, bravery, and never underestimating the intelligence of the reader at Babel’s feet. Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and John Berryman wrote brilliant pieces about him. His collected stories were published in English in America with an introduction by Lionel Trilling in 1955, the first post-war republication of Babel’s work in any language. And the real takeoff of Babel, both in his native Russia and in the West, comes with Perestroika and the Gorbachev years, which includes various lost manuscripts which turn up including a then unknown masterpiece, Isaac Babel’s 1920 diary.

It was the first book of Babel’s I read in 1997, the first one I reviewed in 1997. And it is the diary he kept doing the Polish Soviet war. It was the model, the source book for the stories in Red Cavalry. But more important than that, it is even more morally complex, ambiguous, dark, and brutal than the stories in Red Cavalry themselves. It is a literary masterpiece in its own right as well as being the source for one of the great literary masterpieces of the 20th century. So you could say it’s a double literary masterpiece. And I would recommend it to anyone if you want a first way into Babel. This 1920 diary published in paperback by Yale University Press is a wonderful way to begin reading Babel. Then in 1990, his two volume works are published in Russia in Moscow, including the 1920 diary, which is collected last. And in 1994, penguin published in translation, the Babel collected stories. Then in 1995, the 1920 diary is published in English and the complete works of Isaac Babel at last come out in 2002, published by Norton. And a memorial to Babel was unveiled in Odessa in 2011. And the city already also has an already existing Babel Street in the Moldavanka. The Odessa Stories, Red Cavalry was translated in a very cheap and accessible new paperback by Pushkin Press in 2014.

The Odessa Stories by the same translator Boris Dralyuk, also published by Pushkin Press in paperback in 2016. And just about to come out is a new paperback called, “Of Sunshine and Bugs The Essential Stories of Isaac Babel,” also published in paperback by Pushkin Press, also translated by Boris Dralyuk. And that is a mix of the three other books of short stories that Babel had written. Themes, important themes in Babel. The childhood… He is one of the great writers about childhood and one of the three cycles of stories he wrote was his autobiographical stories about growing up in Czarist Russia, about pogroms, about nervous illnesses, about first love, and so on. Second great theme. Choices and moral complexity. As Lion Trilling wrote, “It was not really clear how the author felt about say, Jews or about religion or about the goodness of man.” Should he say in Odessa, should he move to Moscow? Should he write in Yiddish? He translated some of the great 19th century Russian Yiddish writers. Or should he write in Russian? Should he ride with the Bolsheviks, or should he side with the Jews? Should he ride with the Cossacks or should he side with the Jews? And his stories, particularly in Red Cavalry, particularly in the 1920 diary, are full of these moments of choice.

He’s riding with the cossacks but pitying the Jews. And this double vision is at the heart, I would say, of Babel’s greatness as a writer. There is something fascinating about the relationship between this bespectacled, bookish, balding Jew, and the tough guys he wrote about. On the one hand, there are the Jewish gangsters from Odessa that he wrote about in The Odessa Stories. And then of course there are the brutal cossacks, who he encountered as a war correspondent. And he’s fascinated by these brutal men, but he was always aware of their victims. One of his greatest stories is “My First Goose” in Red Cavalry, in which he describes how he first joins the cossacks and desperately tries to fit in by killing a goose. Treif, of course. And what is particularly poignant is that he knows that the goose is one of the few worldly possessions belonging to a desperately poor woman. But he also knows that if that is the price to pay for winning over the Cossacks, for becoming one of them, it is a price he’s prepared to pay. Though of course it is the old woman who’s really paying the price. And this is what makes the stories in Red Cavalry and throughout Babel’s writing so astonishing, is this constant double vision that he sides with the bad guys, the tough guys, but he pities the victims. He knows only too well what will be the fate of the Jews when the Cossacks arrive.

When the revolution reaches these villages. The Jews know that he’s Jewish. they sense that he’s Jewish and they ask him, “How will it be when the revolution comes and comes to our area?” And he says, “It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine.” And of course he knows it’ll not be fine. It’ll be the worst possible thing to happen in their lives. It’ll be the very opposite of fine. It will be hell on earth. And he knows this, but he feels he has to lie to them. So he’s on the side of the revolution, but he doesn’t simply cheer on the revolution. He has no utopian vision of the revolution and he doesn’t simply condemn the violence of the Red Cavalry. He constantly moves between these two positions. And this double vision comes to life in one of Babel’s greatest stories, “The Rebbe” in Red Cavalry. “The Rebbe blessed the food and we sat down at table.” He writes, “Outside the window, horses neighed and Cossacks shouted. The desert of war yawned outside the window.” There he is inside with the rabbi, and at the same time he’s aware that outside the window the Cossack cavalryman are wreaking havoc, to put it mildly. And where is Babel? Is he inside with the Jews or outside with the red Cossacks? This is great writing. Few have written better about what humans are capable of doing to each other, whether they’re gangsters or cossacks. He witnessed pogroms and massacres and wrote down what he saw in unforgettable prose until Stalin’s secret police came for him.

It was a tragic end for a writer who never had any illusions about the 1917 revolution. So his stories are full of these choices, twists and turns. He writes in one story, “A cossack walked over,” and this is in My First Goose. “A cossack walked over to my trunk and hurled it out of the gate. Then crawling about on the ground, I began to gather up the manuscripts and the torn castoffs that had fallen out of my trunk. Outside the hut on some bricks stood a mess tin. Pork was being cooked in it. It’s smoke was like the smoke that rises in the village of one’s childhood home and it’s aroused within me mingled hunger and a loneliness without parallel.” Lonely because he is the only Jew travelling with the Cossacks, who are of course vicious Jew haters. “I was alone among these men,” he writes, “whose friendship I’d not succeeded in obtaining.” But then he becomes one of them. He eats with them, eats treif with them and then sleeps with them. “I’ve ceased to be a pariah among the cossacks,” he writes in another story. in Zitomer, he spends the Sabbath with Gedali and the rebbe. And this is where he describes the scene about the cossacks outside in the rebbe inside. And he writes in The Rebbe’s Son, “And I received my brother’s last breath.”

So on the one hand he lies to the Jews. On the other hand he dines with the rebbe, he hears the rebbe’s son’s last breath. And that is the ambiguity at the heart of all of these stories. His identity constantly slips. “Every house remains in my heart,” he writes in the 1920 diary. “Clusters of Jews, their faces. This is the ghetto and we are an ancient people. Exhausted, but we still have some strength left. An old Jew, I like talking with my own kind. They understand me. A fine synagogue. How fortunate that at least we have the old stones. These words, there, we, I, constantly slipping around.” Is he identifying with the Jews or is he in some way complicit in the slaughter and the destruction of Jewish lives in these small villages? And yet he writes so movingly about Jewish life, the vanishing Jewish life in these communities. “These Jews are like portraits,” he writes. “Elongated, silent, long bearded. Not like our type, fat and jovial. How unimaginably sad it is these Galicians grown wild and pitiful in the ruined synagogues and this petty life against a background of fearful events.” He has no illusions about these fearful, what he calls these fearful events. He knows not only are the men being killed, the women being raped, there’s shops and homes being destroyed, but he knows that the whole way of life is about to be destroyed because the Cossacks are just a precursor to an even greater kind of destruction.

So even when the cossacks and Poles have done their worst, there will have later be the Bolsheviks, and they will really put these small communities to the sword. And later when he witnesses the collectivization in Ukraine, then he knows that this is the future. He has no longer any illusions at all about the revolution by then. This is 1929, 1930. And perhaps explains the kind of creative paralysis that then sets in in his writing in the 1930s. He finds it impossible to write another kind of masterpiece, the equivalent of the 1920 diary, the equivalent of childhood stories, the Red Cavalry or The Odessa Stories. I’ve just got a few more minutes till we throw things open for questions. But this kind of complexity in these kind of contradictions are what makes Babel such an extraordinary writer. There is no sentimentality, there is absolutely no kind of simplicity or illusion or simplification. He’s constantly aware of how complicated all these situations, all these forms of identification are and how complicated his situation is. The situation of the Jews of course is very simple. They’re just going to be killed and treated appallingly. The situation of the Cossacks is very simple. They are going to treat everybody appallingly that they come across. He is the only one it seems who is caught in the middle, who is aware of the complexity of this situation.

That becomes, really, his greatest subject. That and cruelty. “After that, there was the front,” he writes in a story in Red Cavalry. “The Red Cavalry and the men’s smelling of damp blood and human remains.” And this is where he finds his voice in these early stories in the early 1920s, both in Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories. A particular kind of style that is unique at this stage to Babel. And this is why so many other great short story writers like Hemingway, like Raymond Carver were so influenced by him, like Cynthia Ozick in some respects. There’s also the theme of escape and running away. He’s constantly in his life and in his literature, running away. In a story called “Childhood With Grandmother,” he writes, “The room was hot and stuffy and this always made me depressed and feel I wanted to escape to freedom.” He writes a couple of pages later, “That moment it all seemed extraordinary to me. It made me want to flee from it and yet remain forever.” Another couple of pages on, “I cannot breathe, there is nothing to breathe. I must run outside to fresh air to freedom, but I have no strength to raise my drooping head.” And it’s as Stephen Steven Zipperstein, one of the great Babel critics, wrote “It is just this moment, this longing to escape while clutching tightly at the hand he will never entirely flee to which he will turn repeatedly in his fiction.

He did so with an astonishing facility to probe its complexity, its poignancy, and always its mysterious beauty.” Running away from Odessa to the big cities of Petrograd and Moscow, running away from his Jewishness, running away or not running away from the Soviet Union. Should he go to Brussels? Should he go to Paris? Should he follow Gorky to Italy? Should he follow sativa to Berlin? Should he follow Nabokov to Berlin? These were options for him throughout the 1920s and 30s, but he never took them. In a story called “Awakening,” he writes, “We walked along Popstvia Street. Bubbe held me tightly by the hand so that I should not run away. She was right. I was thinking of escape.” And he spends his life really thinking of escape and never does. And he ends up in the Lubyanka prison, the most terrifying prison in the world at that time. And he ends up after that in a communal grave, buried, forgotten, completely banned throughout his homeland. And it is only after the death of Stalin that the rehabilitation begins. And it is only after Perestroika that more manuscripts turn up and are published and then translated. And now we recognise that Babel is indeed one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

So let me see if I can answer some of your questions. I see there a number of questions here.

Q&A and Comments

Jennifer Malvin writes, Ruth Visser, the great Yiddish scholar, recently analysed Babel’s story, “The Story Of My Dovecote,” and you can find her lecture by clicking on this link. Thank you very much.` Ruth Visser is a great critic of Yiddish and Jewish literature, based in America. Thank you very much Jennifer for that. And she adds, by the way, Visser’s new series, “The Stories Jews Tell,” is excellent and includes Babel’s Dovecot story and she provides a link to that as well.

Q: Gita Khan asked, “How could he ride with the cossacks without participating in the violence? Very disturbing.” A: Absolutely. It is very disturbing. He was a war correspondent, remember, writing for a Red Army newspaper. So he’s not expected by anybody to participate in the violence. Also the Cossacks regard him as a schmuck, as a nebbish, really. He’s bald, he’s bespectacled, he’s short, he is not a warrior and they know that. But they grow to respect him in some way or to like him or to at least tolerate him, which is what he longs for. And he’s extremely good at evoking the wish, the desperate wish to belong, to be considered one of the guys at whatever cost for other people or indeed for his sense of his own moral morality. And, sorry, let me just see if I can find some more here.

Right, Sorrell Kabel writes, “I’m wondering where this biographical information derives. Is it largely Gregory Frieden? I couldn’t catch the names and would appreciate a recording, please. I hope Judy can pass that on about a recording.” Yes, I mean, what has happened is that there has been a whole number of very impressive essays and introductions to various anthologies of Babel, which include a lot of biographical information about his childhood in Odessa, his time as a young writer in Moscow, in Petrograd Moscow and his time in the Polish and Soviet war and later his death. His daughter Nathalie, who grew up in Paris, later immigrated to America and became a great Babel scholar. And so there are a lot of essays by people like Steven Zipperstein, Z I P P E R S T E I N, by Nathalie with an H. N A T H A L I E Babel. There are early essays, very influential essays as I said by the American critics, Lionel Trilling, Steven Marcus, M A R C U S, and Irving Howe, H O W E, and later by Alfred Kazin. So a number of the best known American critics of the 1950s to the 80s wrote about him. And then a new generation of critics and scholars, Boris Drayluk, D R A L Y U K, who translated, has translated three recent paperbacks for Pushkin Press of Babel’s stories and has written introductions to each of them. There’s a very good introduction by David McDuff to his translation of the Penguin edition of 1994 of the Babel collected stories. There is also the massive collected Babel stories full of biographical and bibliographical information. So there is a lot of material around.

Gita Khan says, forgive me for laughing Gita, but you’re right, “He doesn’t sound like the sort of guy you would want as a pal.” Well, yes. I think he was a great pal and he had some very interesting pals. His pals included Maxim Gorky, Ilia Berg, the great French writer, Andre Melroe. He was very well connected until of course he wasn’t. And Gorky’s death, that’s why I keep going on about Gorky’s death in 1936, because that really did leave him brutally exposed once he was still in the Soviet Union when the, when the great purges started. And then of course he was completely trapped. He had made the lifelong enmity of Yezhov and then Yezhov betrayed him to Beria. And by then it was just all too late. So I think actually he was, he was not only a good pal to a lot of the famous male writers at the time, he also had an extraordinary succession of wives and mistresses and affairs. So despite his appearance, he seemed to somehow, he obviously had some kind of charm or intelligence that appealed to quite a lot of women.

Q: Somebody here says, “Isn’t it ironic that his ultimate fate was the result of accusations and torture by the NKVD, which was headed by Beria?” A: Yes, I don’t think ironic quite does justice on this occasion to his fate. Really it was an appalling fate to be tortured, to be arrested in the middle of the night, to be tortured in the Lubyanka, to be executed in the middle of the night just with a bullet through the head, to be thrown into a communal grave. And then, you know, not knowing what would happen to any of his manuscripts that had survived him and whether there would be anyone to remember him. And this was the agonising situation of so many Soviet writers during the 1930s and 40s. Would their writing survive? Would anyone remember them? Would anybody read them? These are the questions that haunt the poetry of Lev Ozerov, who I’ll be talking about on Thursday afternoon, which he’s very explicit about. And this is clearly what haunted Babel right at the end of his life, pleading with the security police on the guards to let him have access to manuscripts which he knew still survived.

Fortunately for him, or for his reputation I should say, the 1920 diary was guarded by his latest lover. And although it didn’t see the light of day from until after Stalin had died, at least it has survived. And as I say, was published in translation in a wonderful edition by Yale University Press in paperback in the mid, in the mid 1990s. So suddenly we realised that not only were there three of the great masterpieces of the 20th century, The Childhood Stories, the Red Cavalry, Red Calvary rather, and The Odessa Stories, but there was also a fourth masterpiece, the 1920 diary. And even though it’s not as well known, it didn’t get widely reviewed when it was translated. Shame on our critics. But it is one of the great, I believe is one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. And I think it is actually the greatest masterpiece that he wrote. Harriet de Koen writes, “But I’m sure Beria wrote sympathetically about Babel’s death. This is an ironic comment for those who might not have guessed it.”

Well, yes, more irony. I think Beria did not feel sympathy for Jews who had come across to Stalin or Stalinism. Stephen Herman kindly writes and says, “Despite the difficult audio,” I’m so sorry about the problems with the audio, I can’t account for it. Gita Khan writes, again, “You give no examples of any care, compassion or loyalty to his Jewish brethren. Doesn’t sound like conflict or ambiguity.” That, I’m sorry if that’s the impression I gave. It really is not the case. I tried to say by example, the dinner with the rabbi, the hearing the last breath of the rabbi’s son. He’s enormously sympathetic to his Jewish brethren. He’s enormously sympathetic to the fate of the Jews on the hands of the cossacks. And worse still, as he knows it will be the future fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks. And this is what is so magnificent about his writing is that yes, he does feel sympathy and compassion and loyalty to his Jewish brethren as individuals, but also as communities, as traditions. He translated the great Yiddish writers of the 19th century. He had a very powerful sense of Jewish tradition and Jewish religion, which he studied as a child.

But at the same time, the reality is he’s with the Cossacks. And this is just after the revolution and the Soviet Union is at war with Poland. And what do you do in these situations? And this is what I mean about no illusions, no sentimentality. He presents, we know that his dilemma, he’s absolutely torn in his loyalties. He’s riding with, sleeping with, eating with the cossacks. Let me just quickly find amongst this pile of Babel books here, the ending of My First Goose, which will give you a sense of how this works. Sorry, just one moment. Also, I should point out these stories are mostly incredibly short. They’re only three or four pages, and yet many of them are masterpieces. So yes, so he’s eaten. He writes, “Surovkov, the most senior of the cossacks, says, brother, he said to me all of a sudden, sit down and have some of our grub until your goose is ready.” This is the goose belonging to the old woman, which he has slaughtered. He produced a spare spoon from his boot and handed it to me. We gulp down the homemade cabbage soup and ate the pork.“ And the thing is, he doesn’t make a song and dance about this in the story. We know what it meant to him to have to eat pork with the cossacks. He knows it’s treif, we know it’s treif, but that’s all he needs to say.

"We ate the pork. What do they write in the newspaper? Asked the lad with the flaxen hair making a place for me. Then in his writing in it, I said, pulling out my copy of Pravda, he says that we have a shortage of everything and loudly like a deaf man triumphant, I read then in speech to the cossacks. The evening tucked me up in the life giving moisture of its crepuscular sheets. The evening placed its motherly palms on my burning forehead. I read and rejoiced and watched out as I rejoiced for anything crooked in the Lenin’s straightness. For anything crooked in the Lenin’s straightness. The truth tickles every nostril said Surovkov when I’d finished. And how is a man to pull it from the pile, yet Lenin hits it at once, like a hen picking a grain of corn. Surovkov, platoon commander of the staff’s quadrant, said this about Lenin. And then we went up to sleep in the hayloft. Six of us slept there together, warming one another with our bodies, our legs tangled together under the roof in which there were holes that let in the stars. I had dreams and I saw women in my dreams and only my heart stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed.”

At the same time, in the same paragraph, you get our legs tangled together, this tremendous evocation of belonging, of being accepted by the Cossacks. And at the same time, he knows the price he has paid. My heart stained crimson with murder, the murder of a goose. But of course he will witness far, far worse over the coming months. And he knows what he has done to the old woman by murdering this goose so that he could cook it and show to the cossacks that he was a man who could kill a goose and eat treif food. But he knows what he has done to this woman because that is her livelihood of this goose.

Julian Goodkin writes, “Yet he never tries to justify his own behaviour in not intervening on behalf of the Jews. After all, he could have written the stories to show himself in a better, more heroic light.” Julian, I absolutely agree. This is the wonderful ambiguity and moral complexity of Babel, written in a prose, which is incredibly clear and accessible and simple. Short sentences, short paragraphs, short stories. Which is why they had such an influence on people like Hemingway and Carver. And that is the thing, you know. He knows that what he has done is and what he’s witnessed, that he’s complicit in terrible things really beyond our imaginings in many ways until, you get to the Holocaust in the same part of the world. There’s a wonderful history of the pogroms of Ukraine, which just came out recently, 1918 to 1921, which is at this very moment that Babel is writing about in his stories. And it’s the same part of the world that Babel is writing about and riding through with the Cossacks. And this book describes the number and ferocity of the pogroms.

And in a way the historians today are just beginning to catch up with Babel because nobody really cared about the history of pogroms as a subject because it took really, if we are honest with each other, took a Jewish generation of American historians in particular because they spoke Ukrainian, they spoke Yiddish, they speak Russian, they could read the archives which opened up after the fall of the Soviet Union. So suddenly, the graphic cruelty of the pogroms of this part of the world has now been discovered. And of course now this very time as I speak, we know the cruelty that is going on in Ukraine with the Russian invasion. And thank you Alison for your very kind words.

Somebody in this, somebody called T writes, “Baffling why the cossacks accepted him as one of themselves. Was it his personal charisma? They must have known he was a Jew.” I’m sorry, it’s Vladka. I beg your pardon. They must have known he was a Jew. Yes, it is baffling. And maybe this is his, this is another twist in these stories, in this narrative voice that maybe he wasn’t accepted by the cossacks and maybe he would like to pretend that he was accepted on a personal level or maybe perhaps more plausibly, he thought it made for better literature if he is torn in his loyalties, to depict his struggle to be accepted by the Cossacks. So whether or not he was accepted, then perhaps he wasn’t. But nothing seems to have befallen him in his travels and adventures with the cossacks. He wasn’t, it seems he was not beaten up. It seems he certainly wasn’t killed. So, but I agree Vladka, it’s a very interesting point.

Q: “Was anything published in Samizdat form?” asks Jonathan Matthews. A: A very, very interesting question. The answer is no, not doing the Stalin years. And then after Stalin, some of Babel’s work begins to be republished in the Soviet Union, not necessarily in Samizdat form. A lot of it in straightforward was, was published straightforwardly, as the political temperature forward under Khrushchev. But there were certain things that were not published until the Perestroika period, and particularly the 1920 diary.

Beverly Matthews says, “I heard perfectly.” She thinks geese is kosher. “My father always said it was a special Yomotov treat.” Well, I guess it would depend perhaps on how the goose was killed or whether it was killed by a kosher butcher. I think if it wasn’t, if it was just killed with a sword by a Jewish journalist, then it probably wasn’t terribly kosher is my guess. But it is only a guess and perhaps others have more knowledge of this. Serena Kapinsky writes, “I met the stories of Isaac Babel in a fabulous set of cassette tapes called Short Stories of Eastern Europe and Beyond.” Thank you very much for that recommendation. I wonder who the reader or readers were.

Q: Mimi Rolland asks, “How influential is Mikhail Bakhtin on Babel’s style?” A: Now Bakhtin was one of the great Soviet literary critics of the early 20th century. He was a formalist, he’s most famous for his idea of epiphany of voices within literary works. He was particularly interested in Rabbi and how that played out in rabbi’s writing. I would say, I don’t wish to disappoint you Mimi, but I think he was not influential at all. And as far as I know did not write about Babel. As I said earlier, Mirsky and Shklovsky, two of the greatest Soviet literary critics, did write about Babel very early on in his career. I don’t, I’m not aware that Bakhtin did, and I’m certainly not aware that he had any influence on Babel’s style. But it is true to say that there is a fascinating element of modernism. And this is what is so interesting about, one of many things which is interesting about Babel, which is how he brings together some of the insights of modernism with the most naturalistic, clear, accessible kind of prose. And by the ideas of modernism, what I mean are things like shifting identity. So you’re never quite sure where exactly the reader’s sympathies are supposed to lie, where his sympathies lie, what his beliefs and values are, how he comes to reconcile riding with the Cossacks, with what he sees the Cossacks doing. That is a sort of key aspect of modernism. But I don’t think that is influenced by Bakhtin, and I don’t really know where it comes. I think it was other writers who influenced him more. Maupassant certainly was, the French writer, not 19th century writer. And indeed he wrote a short story about Maupassant. And Maupassant and Flaubert were huge influences on him stylistically and morally. So I would say that would be, those would be sort of bigger influences really.

Q: Pauline Panofsky writes, "There are some horrid stories of the privation that Osip Mandelstam was exposed to banishment and starvation. Did Babel suffer similarly?” A: Well, he was never sent to the Gulag, so he did not suffer the freezing cold, the boiling hot, the insect bites, the hunger. We’ll come back to that on Thursday with Lev Ozerov’s wonderful story and poems about writers like Shalabov and their experience of the Gulag. So he didn’t suffer like that, but he was held in the Lubyanka for a few weeks. And of course the terror of, well there was the torture of course to get him to kind of make false confessions even though everybody involved from Babel to his torturers knew they were false. But nevertheless he had to be seen to have confessed. And of course the fear of his ultimate fate, which he must have known from the moment that he was taken to the Lubyanka. He must have known that he would be executed, and indeed he was. And I suppose his other concern was whether people close to him would be executed and they were not.

And Jay Resnick says, “If CSP could send out a bibliography of the books that David mentioned, that would be terrific.” Well, I will certainly send out a bibliography, a short bibliography, you’ll be glad to know. And Jay and I will see if that can be posted somewhere on the relevant website.

A: Kitty and Gabrielle writes, “Did Babel know Isaac Bahava singer?” A: No, he didn’t because Bahava singer was based in Poland primarily as a writer in Warsaw before he went to New York in the 1930s. I’m not aware that Babel knew any of the great Yiddish writers. He knew a lot of the Soviet writers, Gorky in particular, they were very close, but I don’t think he knew any of the Yiddish writers. As I will be talking about on Thursday, Lev Ozerov knew a lot of the great Yiddish writers and wrote about them. And I’ll be talking about that on Thursday afternoon.

Q: Serena Kapinsky. “Wasn’t he with the cossacks as a journalist, not as a soldier?” A: Exactly. He was. He was with the Cossacks as a journalist, therefore he would not have been expected to be involved in the brutal excesses of the Cossacks.

Q: “Why would the Cossacks not on the side of the whites in the Civil War?” asked Carol Wengrow. A: A very good question, Carol. The answer is of course, that some were and some weren’t. So these particular Cossacks were not, they were with the Red Cavalry, but there were other Cossacks who fought equally ferociously with the whites. And I’m afraid, I don’t really know enough about the history of the Cossacks in the Russian Civil War or the Polish Russian war to answer your question why this particular group were not. It may be, this is only speculation though, it may be that they hated the Poles even more than they hated the Bolsheviks, which is perfectly possible. And they certainly hated the Jews more than they hated the Bolsheviks. So I mean this was a time of terrifically complex forms of identification, identity and allegiance. The period after the first World War, the immediate aftermath 1918, 1919 to 21, approximately throughout Eastern Europe. And it’s a curious thing that in Britain we’re basically taught that the First World War ends on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. But we also know that, and we’ve are increasingly being made aware by historians of East Europe and the former Russian empire, that the war continued in many terrible ways in the Baltic Republics, in Poland, in the Polish Russian battles and in the Russian Civil War. And the Jews of course were the greatest victims of all, because whoever came to town wanted to kill the Jews. So whether it was the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Russians, the Red Cavalry, the white cossacks, whoever it was, was going to do terrible things to the Jews. And in this book that I mentioned earlier about the pogroms of 1918 to 21, an American historian does a fantastic job of showing how these were the forerunner because these pogroms, these terrible pogroms in the three years after the first World War foreshadowed what would happen in the Holocaust. Because what happened in these villages was these were the same villages as in 1941 and 42.

Abigail Hirsch, and I think this probably has to be the very last question, “I recall the amazing humour and paradox of Babel’s stories when I read them years ago.” Well, I’m glad. Erica Lewis, “You say he knew the fate they would before the Jews after the revolution, but he doesn’t warn them. In fact, he lies to them telling them everything is going to be fine. Doesn’t that make him a traitor to his own people?” I think he was aware. It’s a very good question, Erica. I think the answer is that he knew they had nowhere to run to. They had nowhere to go just as the people in the pogroms that he describes in Odessa in 1905 had nowhere to go. And you know, if you were in some tiny, godforsaken village in Ukraine or Belarus or the Polish Russian border, you have no money. All your possessions are, you know, you have a few pieces of livestock, you have a few pieces of furniture. Where are you going to go? Because if you go to Poland, it’ll be just as bad. If you go to Germany, it might be just as bad for all you know. How are you going to get the money together to get to anywhere that will be even remotely safe? That’s not a definitive answer, that’s just my sort of off the cuff response to a very, very interesting question. Thank you Erica. Thank you all for your very interesting questions. Thank you all for listening. I hope you’ll join me on Thursday when we come to the great Soviet poet, Lev Ozerov. And thank you again. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you.

• [Wendy] Thank you David, and I will see you on Thursday. Thank you everybody who joined us and I’ll see everybody in 45 minutes for Professor Dema. Thank you everybody. Bye-bye.

• Thank you. Bye-bye.