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Конармия. Одесские Рассказы.
В этот сборник вошли известный цикл рассказов Бабеля "Конармия" и его бессмертные, разобранные на цитаты "Одесские рассказы".
В конармейском цикле автор страстно и правдиво рассказывает о Гражданской войне, о "стихии революции", где нашлось место победам и поражениям, великодушию и жестокости.
"Одесские рассказы" - ироничные истории о неунывающих бандитах с Молдаванки и их неотразимом предводителе Бене Крике. Бабель мастерски изображает воров, налетчиков и контрабандистов в рождении, любви и смерти. Низкое и высокое, духовное и плотское в этой прозе существует нераздельно, как и сама жизнь, описанная живым, экспрессивным языком.
В конармейском цикле автор страстно и правдиво рассказывает о Гражданской войне, о "стихии революции", где нашлось место победам и поражениям, великодушию и жестокости.
"Одесские рассказы" - ироничные истории о неунывающих бандитах с Молдаванки и их неотразимом предводителе Бене Крике. Бабель мастерски изображает воров, налетчиков и контрабандистов в рождении, любви и смерти. Низкое и высокое, духовное и плотское в этой прозе существует нераздельно, как и сама жизнь, описанная живым, экспрессивным языком.
First published January 1, 1926
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About the author
Isaac Babel
211 books301 followersIsaak Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель; 1894 - 1940) was a Russian language journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry, Story of my Dovecote and Tales of Odessa, all of which are considered masterpieces of Russian literature. Babel has also been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry."
Loyal to, but not uncritical of, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Isaak Babel fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge due to his longterm affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Babel was arrested by the NKVD at Peredelkino on the night of May 15, 1939. After "confessing", under torture, to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, Babel was shot on January 27, 1940. The arrest and execution of Isaak Babel has been labeled a catastrophe for the world of literature.
Loyal to, but not uncritical of, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Isaak Babel fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge due to his longterm affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Babel was arrested by the NKVD at Peredelkino on the night of May 15, 1939. After "confessing", under torture, to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, Babel was shot on January 27, 1940. The arrest and execution of Isaak Babel has been labeled a catastrophe for the world of literature.
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September 26, 2024
I remember reading this intensely macabre but passionate set of stories in the grim New Year of 1989, and being incredibly stirred, shaken - and, alas, fried - by its totally in-your-face violence.
It depicts the horrific pogroms in Russia at the outset of the 20th century.
My wonderful buddy and once-roommate David - whose advice I will always affectionately remember - had imprinted Babel’s importance upon my fourteen-year-old brain twenty-five years earlier.
When I finally bought a copy of the Odessa stories, no timing could have been worse.
The button-down office where I worked was reeling from the aftershock of young Colleen’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. She was a familiar and witty mainstay of our big organization.
And I personally took it hard. You see, I had teased her for her serious demeanour - and was abruptly taken down a few pegs by her snappish rejoinder - just days before her hospital admission.
I had had no clue what she was then going through. And shortly afterward, she succumbed to that cancer.
It was, therefore, the worst time to plunge into Babel’s daylight nightmares. It sat hard on my stomach, if you know what I mean. My anxiety level skyrocketed.
But misery must love company! And Babel was ready to REALLY bend my ear with his grisly tales...
Well, the tales themselves are a bit bawdy and totally, unpredictably all-over-the-map in their primitive violence. You can tell that writing them musta administered an old-fashioned cathartic bloodletting to his sickened state of mind. Yes, pogroms were HELL.
But as for me, straitened severely by my draconian and gentrified office managers in 1991, it had given me a foretaste of my exile to the brutal reality of an organizational backwater -
To which unenvied locale my fate had led me -
As a serendipitous existential fix to the nameless dread my poor friend Colleen's death had uncovered.
And now, listening to Mozart’s E Minor Violin Sonata - occasioned by his beloved mother’s untimely death - I wonder if ploughing through the bitter regret of Colleen’s death and my antsy reading of Babel didn’t teach me a valuable lesson about life?
For I now think, in stark contradistinction to an unnamed recent American Administration -
That true existential freedom can only be won only on the bitter cross of self-sacrifice and compassion for the Victims on every side.
It depicts the horrific pogroms in Russia at the outset of the 20th century.
My wonderful buddy and once-roommate David - whose advice I will always affectionately remember - had imprinted Babel’s importance upon my fourteen-year-old brain twenty-five years earlier.
When I finally bought a copy of the Odessa stories, no timing could have been worse.
The button-down office where I worked was reeling from the aftershock of young Colleen’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. She was a familiar and witty mainstay of our big organization.
And I personally took it hard. You see, I had teased her for her serious demeanour - and was abruptly taken down a few pegs by her snappish rejoinder - just days before her hospital admission.
I had had no clue what she was then going through. And shortly afterward, she succumbed to that cancer.
It was, therefore, the worst time to plunge into Babel’s daylight nightmares. It sat hard on my stomach, if you know what I mean. My anxiety level skyrocketed.
But misery must love company! And Babel was ready to REALLY bend my ear with his grisly tales...
Well, the tales themselves are a bit bawdy and totally, unpredictably all-over-the-map in their primitive violence. You can tell that writing them musta administered an old-fashioned cathartic bloodletting to his sickened state of mind. Yes, pogroms were HELL.
But as for me, straitened severely by my draconian and gentrified office managers in 1991, it had given me a foretaste of my exile to the brutal reality of an organizational backwater -
To which unenvied locale my fate had led me -
As a serendipitous existential fix to the nameless dread my poor friend Colleen's death had uncovered.
And now, listening to Mozart’s E Minor Violin Sonata - occasioned by his beloved mother’s untimely death - I wonder if ploughing through the bitter regret of Colleen’s death and my antsy reading of Babel didn’t teach me a valuable lesson about life?
For I now think, in stark contradistinction to an unnamed recent American Administration -
That true existential freedom can only be won only on the bitter cross of self-sacrifice and compassion for the Victims on every side.
May 14, 2022
In the wake of the Russian Revolution, while the deadly Spanish flu pandemic was abating, Vladimir Lenin decided to invade territories once part of the Russian Empire, pretending to foster the Bolsheviks’ westward expansion. A war between Soviet Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and Latvia ensued. A century later, while the deadly Covid pandemic was abating, Vladimir Putin decided to invade territories once part of the Soviet Union, pretending to stop NATO’s eastward expansion. A war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine ensued. History often rambles like a nightmarish Groundhog Day.
Isaac Babel, a Ukrainian journalist of Jewish descent, joined the Revolution during that 1918-1920 conflict and was enlisted in the Red Army as an embedded war correspondent in a battalion of Cossacks (like Tolstoy, before him, during the Caucasian Wars). The collection of stories titled Red Cavalry stems from Babel’s diaries during these terrible times. Although Babel was, for a long time, an obscure figure in Russian literature (he was executed under the Stalinist regime on fabricated charges), his affinity with Western authors like Hemingway is well known, and his influence on more recent writers, like Joseph Heller, is evident.
Red Cavalry is a challenging read on different levels. First, the structure is like an irregular collage, continually jumping from one setting, one group of characters, and one mode of narration to the next. Second, the wartime situations depicted are intensely raw, brutal, grotesque, and at some point, almost unbearable. Yet, these descriptions are broken up, in stark contrast, with vivid, intensely expressionist depictions of nature (“An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head”, p. 91 of the Penguin edition).
There is a strange, often disturbing irony or ambivalence in Babel’s prose. Despite being a sensitive, bookish, bespectacled, nerdy Jew among blood-thirsty, Jew-oppressing, horse-loving Cossacks, the narrator strives to belong with them at all costs. To achieve this, he stifles his identity, suppresses his feelings, and even denies his humanity. This effort to fit in—fit in the group of soldiers and later tie into the censorship-ridden Soviet literary landscape—is manifest. He describes scenes of extreme violence in a flat, detached, desensitised, laconic, even cheerful way, refraining from any form of judgment, ultimately drawing a picture that weaves together irrepressible vital energy and utter moral degradation. A picture of war as it unfolds, brutal, beyond good and evil. Babel wrote in an earlier story, “No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time” (p. 74). His prose feels indeed like an iron in the heart.
A few of these stories are particularly memorable. My First Goose is one of the most famous in this collection. It ends with this arrowing line that summarises, in a nutshell, the spirit of the whole book: “I had dreams and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed” (p. 123). Things of that nature are occurring now, as I write this, in the eastern provinces of Ukraine. One may hope that, beyond all the noise and disinformation going on in wartime, some poet or artist, like Babel in his time, will bear witness to the reality of this outrageous ordeal.
Isaac Babel, a Ukrainian journalist of Jewish descent, joined the Revolution during that 1918-1920 conflict and was enlisted in the Red Army as an embedded war correspondent in a battalion of Cossacks (like Tolstoy, before him, during the Caucasian Wars). The collection of stories titled Red Cavalry stems from Babel’s diaries during these terrible times. Although Babel was, for a long time, an obscure figure in Russian literature (he was executed under the Stalinist regime on fabricated charges), his affinity with Western authors like Hemingway is well known, and his influence on more recent writers, like Joseph Heller, is evident.
Red Cavalry is a challenging read on different levels. First, the structure is like an irregular collage, continually jumping from one setting, one group of characters, and one mode of narration to the next. Second, the wartime situations depicted are intensely raw, brutal, grotesque, and at some point, almost unbearable. Yet, these descriptions are broken up, in stark contrast, with vivid, intensely expressionist depictions of nature (“An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head”, p. 91 of the Penguin edition).
There is a strange, often disturbing irony or ambivalence in Babel’s prose. Despite being a sensitive, bookish, bespectacled, nerdy Jew among blood-thirsty, Jew-oppressing, horse-loving Cossacks, the narrator strives to belong with them at all costs. To achieve this, he stifles his identity, suppresses his feelings, and even denies his humanity. This effort to fit in—fit in the group of soldiers and later tie into the censorship-ridden Soviet literary landscape—is manifest. He describes scenes of extreme violence in a flat, detached, desensitised, laconic, even cheerful way, refraining from any form of judgment, ultimately drawing a picture that weaves together irrepressible vital energy and utter moral degradation. A picture of war as it unfolds, brutal, beyond good and evil. Babel wrote in an earlier story, “No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time” (p. 74). His prose feels indeed like an iron in the heart.
A few of these stories are particularly memorable. My First Goose is one of the most famous in this collection. It ends with this arrowing line that summarises, in a nutshell, the spirit of the whole book: “I had dreams and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed” (p. 123). Things of that nature are occurring now, as I write this, in the eastern provinces of Ukraine. One may hope that, beyond all the noise and disinformation going on in wartime, some poet or artist, like Babel in his time, will bear witness to the reality of this outrageous ordeal.
June 21, 2021
Just a general observation: except maybe War and Peace i don’t think I’ve ever read a Russian novel I have not enjoyed.
January 5, 2019
To begin with, an acknowledgment and thank you to my GR Friend Ilse, whose outstandingly good review of “Odessa Stories”, gave me the idea to read this collection.
The stories featured in this book are divided into four collections:
“Early Stories”, of which there only 3. They give the impression of a writer still learning his business.
“Autobiographical Stories” – there are 8 of these, although the Introduction suggests there is doubt about how “autobiographical” they really are. There are some notable pieces, especially two childhood tales, “The Story of My Dovecot”, and “Childhood. At Grandmother’s”. The last in this section, “The Journey”, features a young man leaving “the collapsed Front” in November 1917, and journeying to Kiev and then to St. Petersburg. The journey described is akin to a descent into Hell, and when he emerges, the narrator’s new situation is almost surreal.
“Red Cavalry” – although fiction, these stories are based on Babel’s experiences during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, when he accompanied the Red Army as a correspondent for the propaganda outlet “Red Trooper”. The stories were written separately, although they broadly follow the chronological events of the War, feature the same characters, and stretch to about 200 pages in total. They therefore have something of the feel of a novella. We might say that Babel was not a natural propagandist. The publication of these stories in 1926 caused the Soviet cavalry commander, Marshal Budyonny, to demand Babel’s arrest and execution over the way he portrayed the Red Army. (Babel escaped arrest on that occasion but was detained by the NKVD in 1939 and executed the following year).
“Odessa Stories” – these being of Jewish life in Odessa. Several feature the lives of gangsters prior to the Revolution. The last is set during the famine of 1921-22. A couple of the gangster stories were amongst those I enjoyed the most.
Babel had a highly distinctive and very descriptive style. If this translation is true to the original, he certainly had a memorable turn of phrase. In the comic story “In the Basement”, an aunt is described as “floating in with a samovar on a tray, surrounded by her fat, kindly bosom.” In one of the “Red Cavalry” tales, Babel describes how “At the head of the regiment, on a bowlegged little horse, rode kombrig [Brigade Commander] Maslak, full of drunken blood and the rottenness of his own fatty juices. His stomach, like a large tomcat, lay on the silver pommel.”
In almost all the stories, events happen very suddenly, and generally Babel doesn’t try to explain motivation. A man will walk past a woman sitting on a bench and will decide he wants to marry her. Many stories feature acts of extreme violence. This is particularly the case in “Red Cavalry” but it happens in the other stories as well. People are assaulted or even murdered on what seems like a whim. I struggled a bit with these aspects. Some of the stories seemed a bit disjointed to me, and in one or two of them I found it hard to work out what was going on, let alone why. It’s possible this was a translation issue – I notice the edition I read had a different translator from others, though whether better or worse I’m not qualified to say. I can say that the edition I read had a number of proof-reading errors. Even the title of “The Journey” was mistyped as “The Jocurney”.
I’m glad that I’ve read Isaac Babel, although my own reaction was mixed. I think he would appeal most to those who prefer writing and “mood” over plot.
The stories featured in this book are divided into four collections:
“Early Stories”, of which there only 3. They give the impression of a writer still learning his business.
“Autobiographical Stories” – there are 8 of these, although the Introduction suggests there is doubt about how “autobiographical” they really are. There are some notable pieces, especially two childhood tales, “The Story of My Dovecot”, and “Childhood. At Grandmother’s”. The last in this section, “The Journey”, features a young man leaving “the collapsed Front” in November 1917, and journeying to Kiev and then to St. Petersburg. The journey described is akin to a descent into Hell, and when he emerges, the narrator’s new situation is almost surreal.
“Red Cavalry” – although fiction, these stories are based on Babel’s experiences during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, when he accompanied the Red Army as a correspondent for the propaganda outlet “Red Trooper”. The stories were written separately, although they broadly follow the chronological events of the War, feature the same characters, and stretch to about 200 pages in total. They therefore have something of the feel of a novella. We might say that Babel was not a natural propagandist. The publication of these stories in 1926 caused the Soviet cavalry commander, Marshal Budyonny, to demand Babel’s arrest and execution over the way he portrayed the Red Army. (Babel escaped arrest on that occasion but was detained by the NKVD in 1939 and executed the following year).
“Odessa Stories” – these being of Jewish life in Odessa. Several feature the lives of gangsters prior to the Revolution. The last is set during the famine of 1921-22. A couple of the gangster stories were amongst those I enjoyed the most.
Babel had a highly distinctive and very descriptive style. If this translation is true to the original, he certainly had a memorable turn of phrase. In the comic story “In the Basement”, an aunt is described as “floating in with a samovar on a tray, surrounded by her fat, kindly bosom.” In one of the “Red Cavalry” tales, Babel describes how “At the head of the regiment, on a bowlegged little horse, rode kombrig [Brigade Commander] Maslak, full of drunken blood and the rottenness of his own fatty juices. His stomach, like a large tomcat, lay on the silver pommel.”
In almost all the stories, events happen very suddenly, and generally Babel doesn’t try to explain motivation. A man will walk past a woman sitting on a bench and will decide he wants to marry her. Many stories feature acts of extreme violence. This is particularly the case in “Red Cavalry” but it happens in the other stories as well. People are assaulted or even murdered on what seems like a whim. I struggled a bit with these aspects. Some of the stories seemed a bit disjointed to me, and in one or two of them I found it hard to work out what was going on, let alone why. It’s possible this was a translation issue – I notice the edition I read had a different translator from others, though whether better or worse I’m not qualified to say. I can say that the edition I read had a number of proof-reading errors. Even the title of “The Journey” was mistyped as “The Jocurney”.
I’m glad that I’ve read Isaac Babel, although my own reaction was mixed. I think he would appeal most to those who prefer writing and “mood” over plot.
September 6, 2020
Introduction & Notes, by David McDuff
Early Stories
--Old Shloyme
--Ilya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna
--Shabbos Nakhamu
'Autobiographical' Stories
--Childhood. At Grandmother's
--The Story of My Dovecot
--First Love
--In the Basement
--Awakening
--Di Grasso
--Guy de Maupassant
--The Journey
Red Cavalry
--Crossing the Zbrucz
--The Catholic Church in Novograd
--A Letter
--The Konzapas Commander
--Pan Apolek
--The Sun of Italy
--Gedali
--My First Goose
--The Rebbe
--The Way to Brody
--The Theory of the Tachanka
--The Death of Dolgushov
--Kombrig 2
--Sashka Christ
--The Life Story of Pavlichenko, Matvey Rodionych
--The Cemetery in Kozin
--Prishchepa
--The Story of a Horse
--Konkin
--Beresteczko
--Salt
--Evening
--Afonka Bida
--At St Valentine's
--Squadron Commander Trunov
--The Ivans
--A Sequel to the Story of a Horse
--The Widow
--Zamość
--Treason
--Czesniki
--After the Battle
--The Song
--The Rebbe's Son
--Argamak
Odessa Stories
--The King
--How It was Done in Odessa
--Justice in Brackets
--Lyubka Kózak
--The Father
--Sunset
--The End of the Almshouse
--Karl-Yankel
Notes
Textual Notes
Appendix: Lionel Trilling's introduction to the first English translation (1955) of Isaac Babel's 'Collected Stories'
Early Stories
--Old Shloyme
--Ilya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna
--Shabbos Nakhamu
'Autobiographical' Stories
--Childhood. At Grandmother's
--The Story of My Dovecot
--First Love
--In the Basement
--Awakening
--Di Grasso
--Guy de Maupassant
--The Journey
Red Cavalry
--Crossing the Zbrucz
--The Catholic Church in Novograd
--A Letter
--The Konzapas Commander
--Pan Apolek
--The Sun of Italy
--Gedali
--My First Goose
--The Rebbe
--The Way to Brody
--The Theory of the Tachanka
--The Death of Dolgushov
--Kombrig 2
--Sashka Christ
--The Life Story of Pavlichenko, Matvey Rodionych
--The Cemetery in Kozin
--Prishchepa
--The Story of a Horse
--Konkin
--Beresteczko
--Salt
--Evening
--Afonka Bida
--At St Valentine's
--Squadron Commander Trunov
--The Ivans
--A Sequel to the Story of a Horse
--The Widow
--Zamość
--Treason
--Czesniki
--After the Battle
--The Song
--The Rebbe's Son
--Argamak
Odessa Stories
--The King
--How It was Done in Odessa
--Justice in Brackets
--Lyubka Kózak
--The Father
--Sunset
--The End of the Almshouse
--Karl-Yankel
Notes
Textual Notes
Appendix: Lionel Trilling's introduction to the first English translation (1955) of Isaac Babel's 'Collected Stories'
Want to read
August 21, 2017
The cult of Babel: Odessa's literary flashmobs attract book-loving tourists. The Black Sea city may lack the pedigree of St Petersburg but it was home to Isaac Babel, and has a storied past as a stopping point for globe-trotting intellectuals.
Babel - the Bard of the Black SeaCover: Montage from an album of Russian pictures, 1938. Courtesy of the British Library LR276.c.5
Edited with notes by Efraim Sicher
Translated with an introduction by David McDuff
Early Stories (3)
Autobiographical stories (8)
Red Cavalry
Odessa Stories
Notes
Textual Notes
Appendix
November 17, 2023
Rat je i dalje tu, samo pisci više nisu isti. Pitam se, hoće li se nakon ovog rata Rusije i Ukrajine pisati knjige poput ove?
Rereading poslije 12 godina.
Rereading poslije 12 godina.
March 2, 2025
L'armata a cavallo è stato un fulmine: è un'opera costituita da un'insieme di raccontini (della dimensione di qualche paginetta) che nel loro insieme si fondono in un'originalissima cronaca della guerra sovietico-polacca, vissuta in prima persona dallo stesso Babel come giornalista e propagandista a seguito della leggendaria prima armata a cavalo di Budënnyj.
Sono raccontini popolareschi e vivaci, ricchi di colore, favolistici e grotteschi, carichi di un furore espressionistico radicato tanto nella tremenda e sanguinaria realtà bellica quanto, soprattutto, nella solita, assoluta follia del popolo russo. È una scrittura quella di Babel che sa essere al contempo essenziale e poetica, scarna ed aristocratica, una scrittura di assoluta vividezza espressiva. Il racconto si nutre e si incentra su una passione viscerale per le storie, le storie più popolane, le storie più assurde, senza mai tuttavia trascendere nel mero surrealismo: e così vedremo soldati bolscevichi rimembrare le proprie radici contadine (e quel novero di storie e di assurdità che la propria identità trascina) nel mezzo della guerra che incendia e distrugge la campagna russa e polacca, soldati bolscevichi trascinati da pulsioni animalesche compiere gesta di assoluta insensatezza... E il tutto condito da due fondamentali fattori: da un lato un'attenzione fervida nei confronti dell'ortodossia bolscevica, un'attenzione tuttavia non di formale convenienza, ma dettata dalla convinta accettazione da parte di Babel della missione storica comunista; dall'altra un'attenzione fondamentale nei confronti della realtà ebraica (lo stesso Babel era ebreo), ebraismo che sarà una, se non la tematica più importante della produzione letteraria del Babel post armata a cavallo.
Ciò che mi ha disturbato invece della raccolta è stata la fine (così come per Il villaggio della nuova vita di Platonov, altra opera che ho amato e con cui L'armata a cavallo conta numerosi punti in comune): improvvisa, lapidaria, nel pieno sviluppo della narrazione.
I Racconti di Odessa accentuano la passione popolaresca e folkloristica dell'Armata a cavallo, ma secondo me senza raggiungere la follia e l'intensità della prima raccolta: ambientati ad Odessa e più particolarmente nella Moldovjanka, quartiere degradato nella quale aveva vissuto fino ai propri vent'anni lo stesso Babel, rappresentano quattro racconti di breve durata (la raccolta sarà massimo di una trentina di pagine) incentrati sull'immaginaria figura del bandito ebreo Benja Kirk, zingaresco e romantico fuorilegge. La raccolta rappresenta un grande affresco, oltre che un grande atto d'amore verso Odessa e la sua comunità ebraica, un affresco pittoresco e romantico della vera Odessa, quella nascosta, povera e fatiscente.
La raccolta si chiude poi con vari racconti, editi e non: i primi racconti (quelli della giovinezza) non sono nulla di che, realisti di quel degradante e lurido realismo dostoevskijiano, profondamente quotidiani anche nello stile dimesso. I successivi vertono la propria attenzione quasi interamente sull'autobiografismo e sulla comunità ebraica russa, e particolarmente sull'inferno della vita dei cittadini ebrei durante l'impero zarista (particolarmente toccante è Storia di una colombaia, racconto sul pogrom di Odessa vissuto dallo stesso Babel bambino), ma è con gli ultimi racconti che Babel si riconferma il meraviglioso scrittore dell'Armata a cavallo: sono racconti ricchi di tensione, di violenza improvvisa, di rancore e pura rabbia, intervallati da perle di una saggezza talmudica, rabbinica. Ritorna l'estro del migliore Babel, arricchito di un nuovo, fondamentale problema sorto con l'avvento della rivoluzione, ossia il problema (insolvibile) dell'identità: lo scontro tra potere sovietico, con la sua esigenza di progresso e di benessere, e le comunità (ebraica e contadina), con i propri riti, le proprie sacre quanto assurde tradizioni.
Sono raccontini popolareschi e vivaci, ricchi di colore, favolistici e grotteschi, carichi di un furore espressionistico radicato tanto nella tremenda e sanguinaria realtà bellica quanto, soprattutto, nella solita, assoluta follia del popolo russo. È una scrittura quella di Babel che sa essere al contempo essenziale e poetica, scarna ed aristocratica, una scrittura di assoluta vividezza espressiva. Il racconto si nutre e si incentra su una passione viscerale per le storie, le storie più popolane, le storie più assurde, senza mai tuttavia trascendere nel mero surrealismo: e così vedremo soldati bolscevichi rimembrare le proprie radici contadine (e quel novero di storie e di assurdità che la propria identità trascina) nel mezzo della guerra che incendia e distrugge la campagna russa e polacca, soldati bolscevichi trascinati da pulsioni animalesche compiere gesta di assoluta insensatezza... E il tutto condito da due fondamentali fattori: da un lato un'attenzione fervida nei confronti dell'ortodossia bolscevica, un'attenzione tuttavia non di formale convenienza, ma dettata dalla convinta accettazione da parte di Babel della missione storica comunista; dall'altra un'attenzione fondamentale nei confronti della realtà ebraica (lo stesso Babel era ebreo), ebraismo che sarà una, se non la tematica più importante della produzione letteraria del Babel post armata a cavallo.
Ciò che mi ha disturbato invece della raccolta è stata la fine (così come per Il villaggio della nuova vita di Platonov, altra opera che ho amato e con cui L'armata a cavallo conta numerosi punti in comune): improvvisa, lapidaria, nel pieno sviluppo della narrazione.
I Racconti di Odessa accentuano la passione popolaresca e folkloristica dell'Armata a cavallo, ma secondo me senza raggiungere la follia e l'intensità della prima raccolta: ambientati ad Odessa e più particolarmente nella Moldovjanka, quartiere degradato nella quale aveva vissuto fino ai propri vent'anni lo stesso Babel, rappresentano quattro racconti di breve durata (la raccolta sarà massimo di una trentina di pagine) incentrati sull'immaginaria figura del bandito ebreo Benja Kirk, zingaresco e romantico fuorilegge. La raccolta rappresenta un grande affresco, oltre che un grande atto d'amore verso Odessa e la sua comunità ebraica, un affresco pittoresco e romantico della vera Odessa, quella nascosta, povera e fatiscente.
La raccolta si chiude poi con vari racconti, editi e non: i primi racconti (quelli della giovinezza) non sono nulla di che, realisti di quel degradante e lurido realismo dostoevskijiano, profondamente quotidiani anche nello stile dimesso. I successivi vertono la propria attenzione quasi interamente sull'autobiografismo e sulla comunità ebraica russa, e particolarmente sull'inferno della vita dei cittadini ebrei durante l'impero zarista (particolarmente toccante è Storia di una colombaia, racconto sul pogrom di Odessa vissuto dallo stesso Babel bambino), ma è con gli ultimi racconti che Babel si riconferma il meraviglioso scrittore dell'Armata a cavallo: sono racconti ricchi di tensione, di violenza improvvisa, di rancore e pura rabbia, intervallati da perle di una saggezza talmudica, rabbinica. Ritorna l'estro del migliore Babel, arricchito di un nuovo, fondamentale problema sorto con l'avvento della rivoluzione, ossia il problema (insolvibile) dell'identità: lo scontro tra potere sovietico, con la sua esigenza di progresso e di benessere, e le comunità (ebraica e contadina), con i propri riti, le proprie sacre quanto assurde tradizioni.
June 7, 2018
Ruhu pelteleştiren savaşı, aciz bırakan birtakım fiziksel ve zihinsel şiddetleri akla tek değini darbesiyle çakmak! Bunu ancak farkına varmadan yapabilir bir yazar. Bütün ayrıntılara bulaşmaz. Oradadır, orada değildir. Olayın etrafında boksörce dans eder, hesaplar gibi görünür ama aradığı tesadüfi bir boş bulunmadır. Bir cümle. Bir sözcük. Ve güm! Sert ama uyanıldığında bir türlü anımsanamayan düşün belleğe gömülüşündeki yumuşaklıkla.
Kim nefret etmez ki savaştan? Kurşuna dizilenlerin arkasındaki duvar her zaman delik deşiktir, her zaman.
Kim nefret etmez ki savaştan? Kurşuna dizilenlerin arkasındaki duvar her zaman delik deşiktir, her zaman.
September 20, 2017
The book really consists of 3 parts. The first part, Tales of Odessa as such, is absolute gem: it is a tribute to the fading world of the Jews of Odessa, colourful as paintings by Marc Chagall. His writing is economic and atmospheric. The situations described would feel phantasmagoric and absurd; all the better, because it was the real life of that community before it has been destroyed and faded into the past.
The second part is autobiographic stories, though i doubt they all really happened to Babel. And you would understand my doubts if you read the book - the protagonist constantly makes up stories about himself within the stories. The first one "The story of my dovecote" is the most poignant and shocking. It is devoted to a pogrom in Nikolaev witnessed through the eyes of 11 year old boy. After reading it, one would understand better why so many Jews have supported the revolution and the bolsheviks specifically.
The third part are just sketches from post-revolutionary St Petersburg. They are less impressive.
I've read the book in Russian. I would not know how you can convey the first part in translation. It is full of Jewish and Odessa slang and spirit. But I hope, the translation keeps the original alive. Fantastic expressive short stories.
Наш физик ан уроках цитировал одесские рассказы к месту и ни к месту. Так что, мне очень хорошо знакомы эти сюжеты. Несмотря на прошедшие к тому времени 80 лет с их написания, они были свежи и современны. Вокруг меня было очень много еврейской культуры и быта (так сказать), когда я росла в 70-е в черте оседлости в Украине. Не смотря на ужасы, истребления и притеснения, люди выживали благодаря своему чувству юмора не в последнюю очередь. Жаль, что окончательно это все исчезло в 90-е, когда большинтсво получило возможность и уехало. Но наверное, Бабеля читают сейчас в Нью Йорке и Тел Авиве, и это все живет там, и это здорово.
The second part is autobiographic stories, though i doubt they all really happened to Babel. And you would understand my doubts if you read the book - the protagonist constantly makes up stories about himself within the stories. The first one "The story of my dovecote" is the most poignant and shocking. It is devoted to a pogrom in Nikolaev witnessed through the eyes of 11 year old boy. After reading it, one would understand better why so many Jews have supported the revolution and the bolsheviks specifically.
The third part are just sketches from post-revolutionary St Petersburg. They are less impressive.
I've read the book in Russian. I would not know how you can convey the first part in translation. It is full of Jewish and Odessa slang and spirit. But I hope, the translation keeps the original alive. Fantastic expressive short stories.
Наш физик ан уроках цитировал одесские рассказы к месту и ни к месту. Так что, мне очень хорошо знакомы эти сюжеты. Несмотря на прошедшие к тому времени 80 лет с их написания, они были свежи и современны. Вокруг меня было очень много еврейской культуры и быта (так сказать), когда я росла в 70-е в черте оседлости в Украине. Не смотря на ужасы, истребления и притеснения, люди выживали благодаря своему чувству юмора не в последнюю очередь. Жаль, что окончательно это все исчезло в 90-е, когда большинтсво получило возможность и уехало. Но наверное, Бабеля читают сейчас в Нью Йорке и Тел Авиве, и это все живет там, и это здорово.
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March 24, 2022Really liked The Story of My Dovecote, My First Goose, The Story of a Horse, The Tachanka Doctrine, Salt, the one about the icon painter, but ultimately didn't finish this one.
I don't know if it was the translation, or just my lack of knowledge of the time period, but a lot of this remained quite obscure to me. I have the Penguin translation but I'm told the Pushkin Press one is better. Might come back and finish this at a later date.
Collection included Babel's early Jewish stories, autobiographical stories, and Odessa Tales as well as Red Cavalry.
I don't know if it was the translation, or just my lack of knowledge of the time period, but a lot of this remained quite obscure to me. I have the Penguin translation but I'm told the Pushkin Press one is better. Might come back and finish this at a later date.
Collection included Babel's early Jewish stories, autobiographical stories, and Odessa Tales as well as Red Cavalry.
January 18, 2020
‘Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the noonday wind is playing in the yellowing rye, the virginal buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn is curving. The Volyn is withdrawing from us into a pearly mist of birch groves, it is creeping away into flowery knolls and entangling itself with enfeebled arms in thickets of hops. An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, a gentle radiance glows in the ravines of the thunderclouds and the standards of the sunset float above our heads.’
September 12, 2018
Çocukluğunun geçtiği Odesa'da tanık olduğu pogrom, arka mahalleler, çocukluk hayalleri, bir çocuğun ilk aşkı, Gorky'ye adanmış "Güvercinliğimin Öyküsü", "Benya Krik" ismiyle sessiz filmi de çekilen haydut, "Kral" lakaplı Benya Krik'in öyküleri ve bence kitabın en güzel öyküleri olan "Buğday Seferi", "Öpüş", "Karl-Yankel", "İhtiyarlar Evinin Sonu" ve "Ermiş Hipatius'un Sonu"...
"Önce bakmayı öğreneceksin. Hep belli bir yöne bakıyorsun; başka yerler içinse, gözlerin yok sanki."
"Önce bakmayı öğreneceksin. Hep belli bir yöne bakıyorsun; başka yerler içinse, gözlerin yok sanki."
October 12, 2015
Red Cavalry: 5/5
The other two collections: 3.5/5
The other two collections: 3.5/5
June 6, 2015
This collection of short stories about life among Jewish traders, workers and robbers in early-20th century Odessa, leading up to the revolution, almost packs the same punch as Red Cavalry. That's high praise. Yes, it's a bit uneven, but the best stories here are astounding, switching from jovial tales of childhood that never forget the darkness underneath, to brutally violent stories of antisemitism and crime, all with a language that wants to squeeze out evey possibility carbonated with a dark sense of humour.
Take "The Story of My Dovecot", for instance, which starts out as a hopeful story about how the narrator has saved for years to buy the pigeons he wants to raise, then suddenly out of nowhere the bright market day careens into bloody surrealism -
My world was tiny, and it was awful. I closed my eyes so as not to see it, and pressed myself tight into the ground that lay beneath me in soothing dumbness. This trampled earth in no way resembled real life, waiting for exams in real life. Somewhere far away Woe rode across it on a great steed, but the noise of the hoofbeats grew weaker and died away, and silence, the bitter silence that sometimes overwhelms children in their sorrow, suddenly deleted the boundary between body and the earth that was moving nowhither. The earth smelled of raw depths, of the tomb, of flowers. I smelled its smell and started crying, unafraid. I was walking along an unknown street set on either side with white boxes, walking in a getup of bloodstained feathers, alone between the pavements swept clean as on Sunday, weeping bitterly, fully and happily as I never wept again in all my life.
- until at the end, we understand what this child is experiencing.
And so with Kuzma I went to the home of the tax-inspector, where my parents, escaping the pogrom, had sought refuge.
The irony only gets bleaker when I look at the foreword of my 1960 edition: "Isaac Babel, 1894-1941(?)". That a writer capable of captuing the wold's messiness like this was not only denied the right to live, but even the right to a proper death, instead was swallowed in silence up by a dictator's prison camps, is beyond criminal.
Take "The Story of My Dovecot", for instance, which starts out as a hopeful story about how the narrator has saved for years to buy the pigeons he wants to raise, then suddenly out of nowhere the bright market day careens into bloody surrealism -
My world was tiny, and it was awful. I closed my eyes so as not to see it, and pressed myself tight into the ground that lay beneath me in soothing dumbness. This trampled earth in no way resembled real life, waiting for exams in real life. Somewhere far away Woe rode across it on a great steed, but the noise of the hoofbeats grew weaker and died away, and silence, the bitter silence that sometimes overwhelms children in their sorrow, suddenly deleted the boundary between body and the earth that was moving nowhither. The earth smelled of raw depths, of the tomb, of flowers. I smelled its smell and started crying, unafraid. I was walking along an unknown street set on either side with white boxes, walking in a getup of bloodstained feathers, alone between the pavements swept clean as on Sunday, weeping bitterly, fully and happily as I never wept again in all my life.
- until at the end, we understand what this child is experiencing.
And so with Kuzma I went to the home of the tax-inspector, where my parents, escaping the pogrom, had sought refuge.
The irony only gets bleaker when I look at the foreword of my 1960 edition: "Isaac Babel, 1894-1941(?)". That a writer capable of captuing the wold's messiness like this was not only denied the right to live, but even the right to a proper death, instead was swallowed in silence up by a dictator's prison camps, is beyond criminal.
May 24, 2021
Talentat. Toxic, obscen, bolșevic. Rusia evreimii marginale, dar și a celei omnipotente, a despotismului țarist și a turbării comuniste. Rusia iconoclastă și blasfemică. Puterea Sovietică în marș distrugător, peste așezări, moravuri și credințe, în extazul unui scriitor inconștient. Un înșelător înșelat, ucis în și de propriile himere.
February 25, 2014
I haven't read Babel in ten years. So now I've found this book and decided to give it a go because of its title.
Tales of Odessa is a cycle set in Southern Ukraine, in Odessa, and explores the culture of Odesskaya Jewry. These stories are fun, if a little violent (if anyone minds), for it deals with gangsters and other misfits. Violence isn't explicit, though, and it doesn't inhabit every page of the book.
Babel's language is straightforward, somewhat raw. I wouldn't call him polished, although it possesses poetic qualities here and there. But it isn't poetry of Nabokov, Bunin, Pushkin, if you know what I mean. Say, you have a dirty, crime-ridden place and you describe it accordingly––not one bit of sentimentalism takes place. Whether you enjoy it is up to you. I do. These stories are lively. Moreover, I needed a few laughs, and Babel delivered.
The use of humour in this book is typical Odessa's humour, in my opinion. That is black, sprinkled with something improbable(?). Think: Ilf and Petrov. Dialogues are excellent and very true to life; you could go to Odessa and see people speak this way even today.
Of course, there is one BUT. The book is culturally dense, it features many locations, thus a reader might feel a little lost. And it makes it difficult to recommend. If you don't mind the foreignness factor then, please, go for it. If anything, Babel needs more recognition. He is a superb short story writer.
Tales of Odessa is a cycle set in Southern Ukraine, in Odessa, and explores the culture of Odesskaya Jewry. These stories are fun, if a little violent (if anyone minds), for it deals with gangsters and other misfits. Violence isn't explicit, though, and it doesn't inhabit every page of the book.
Babel's language is straightforward, somewhat raw. I wouldn't call him polished, although it possesses poetic qualities here and there. But it isn't poetry of Nabokov, Bunin, Pushkin, if you know what I mean. Say, you have a dirty, crime-ridden place and you describe it accordingly––not one bit of sentimentalism takes place. Whether you enjoy it is up to you. I do. These stories are lively. Moreover, I needed a few laughs, and Babel delivered.
The use of humour in this book is typical Odessa's humour, in my opinion. That is black, sprinkled with something improbable(?). Think: Ilf and Petrov. Dialogues are excellent and very true to life; you could go to Odessa and see people speak this way even today.
Of course, there is one BUT. The book is culturally dense, it features many locations, thus a reader might feel a little lost. And it makes it difficult to recommend. If you don't mind the foreignness factor then, please, go for it. If anything, Babel needs more recognition. He is a superb short story writer.
September 8, 2025
No es un libro que se pueda apreciar totalmente con una sola lectura. Y el hecho de haber conseguido todos los relatos y la necesidad de analizarlos para un trabajo fue de mucha ayuda ( pero me voy a limitar a hacer una reseña, por supuesto). Cuentos de Odessa (tengo una versión en español) es una reescritura de la infancia de un autor que no fue ajeno al momento histórico en el que vivió. No se sabe en dónde empieza la biografía y dónde empieza la ficción, lo cual lo hace complejo. Muchos de los cuentos son entretenidos y otros son simplemente angustiantes, sobre todo los que están narrados por un niño afectado por el antisemitismo imperante. La escritura es concisa, breve, disruptiva y no flamea la bandera de "no confío en tu interpretación así que, por las dudas, te lo explico todo". Vale la pena.
August 28, 2020
"Беня говорит мало. но он говорит смачно"- сказав один з героїв цих оповідань, Фроїм Грач про свого колегу, знаменитого одеського бандита Беню Кріка( він же Мішка Япончик), теж герой оповідань.
Ці оповідання написані так смачно. що ви не зможете відірватися від цього тексту, багатого одеського колориту, світу Молдаванки. Пересипі та Привозу, лихих нальотчиків, які напамять могли цитувати блока, Бальмонта та Мандельштама і "чистити каси".
Тому "Кладите себе в уши мои слова" - ця книга варта прочитання, а звідси висновок "перестанем размазывать белую кашу по чистому столу" і почнемо читати
Ці оповідання написані так смачно. що ви не зможете відірватися від цього тексту, багатого одеського колориту, світу Молдаванки. Пересипі та Привозу, лихих нальотчиків, які напамять могли цитувати блока, Бальмонта та Мандельштама і "чистити каси".
Тому "Кладите себе в уши мои слова" - ця книга варта прочитання, а звідси висновок "перестанем размазывать белую кашу по чистому столу" і почнемо читати
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July 19, 2022Short stories have always been difficult for me to enjoy. No sooner do I just begin to appreciate the characters than the story ends, another to begin, a memory bank reset. Then, when I finish the volume, I wonder, “What did I just read?” Such was the case with these stories, alas. Mr. Babel spins tales of Russians engaged in the Polish-Soviet War as well as the lives of citizens, mostly repressed and Jewish, in that country we now know as Ukraine, or what remains of it as of this writing. My thoughts turned to memories of Pushkin. I think I recall a short story where an owner drowned his litter of puppies in a stream without much fuss. There’s a recurrent brutality to the Russian experience that may be unfairly placed, yet seems firmly cemented in my mind, set long before I happened upon Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. Of course, therefore, the Russians commit unprovoked atrocities and barbarities when unleashed on the battlefield. Of course they commit gross injustices upon their unfortunates and unwelcomed. What Russian writer would cause us to believe otherwise? Not Mr. Babel, especially since his life ended in the way it did.
December 6, 2017
Benja Krik, koji nije bio slavnoga roda postao je Benja Kralj. Jer je nasrnuo na Ruvima Osipoviča Tartakovskog kojeg su oni drugi krstili u Jervrejina i po i "devet nasrtaja". Rečeno je da je postava debelog novčanika sašivena suzama, a oni drugi su videli Forima Grača kao taljigaša, a on je bio i to i još nešto drugo. Daleko od Rotšilda i Mozesa Montefiorea, bankarskih hulja, na Sabornom trgu ili negde tu okolo, u Odesi, Cudečkis je bio dečak tada, i držao je golubove na svom srcu i onda je bogalj Makarenko - "Udario me besno, stisnutom pesnicom i razmrskao goluba na mojoj slepoočnici. ... Ležao sam na zemlji a utroba razmrskane ptice klizila mi je niz slepoočnicu. Lepila se niz obraze, prskala me krvlju i zaslepljivala me. Nežna golubova utroba lepila se na čelu i ja sklopih poslednje nezatvoreno oko da ne gledam svet koji se pružio preda mnom. Svet taj beše malen i grozan. ... Malen i grozan beše svet moj".
July 30, 2022
My uncle grew up in Siberia and recommended the Odessa stories. Growing up, the protagonist was a hero for my uncle and his Jewish friends. They would quote him and pretend to be him, gaining strength from the writing. A Jew who stood up to oppression and maintained power.
The King is a quotable hero: "Since I was blessed with being born a Jew, I became a broker", "My honor is dearer to me than my happiness", etc. Unfortunately, the translation I got doesn't seem to let the characters shine through. I found the stories garbled and the in-jokes lacking. There is some spirit in the writing, but I was more confused than anything.
The King is a quotable hero: "Since I was blessed with being born a Jew, I became a broker", "My honor is dearer to me than my happiness", etc. Unfortunately, the translation I got doesn't seem to let the characters shine through. I found the stories garbled and the in-jokes lacking. There is some spirit in the writing, but I was more confused than anything.
October 29, 2023
EDIT grabbing the 5 here too. It’s a great day to be one of my reviews
Absolute winner, actually.
Murky, disparate scenes of battle and the times between battle. The characters are idiosyncratic such that they’d be funny if they weren’t so steeped in blood and violence.
The language is consistently excellent, poetic but with complete economy; there are no wasted words. I was often caught between admiration of the poetry and a lip-scrunching revulsion at horrors so precisely described.
Absolute winner, actually.
Murky, disparate scenes of battle and the times between battle. The characters are idiosyncratic such that they’d be funny if they weren’t so steeped in blood and violence.
The language is consistently excellent, poetic but with complete economy; there are no wasted words. I was often caught between admiration of the poetry and a lip-scrunching revulsion at horrors so precisely described.
August 1, 2021
A masterpiece in blood and savageries. Earlier than Curzio Malaparte, it was Babel before.
January 28, 2024
Reread pod wpływem wydanej niedawno biografii Babla.
Nic się nie zmieniło, wciąż uważam, że Babel jest mistrzem.
Nic się nie zmieniło, wciąż uważam, że Babel jest mistrzem.
April 7, 2020
Preporuke...
September 5, 2020
After reading that this oft overlooked and grim collection of short stories by one of Russia’s most ill-fated literary talents, Isaac Babel, a Jewish prose and screenplay writer who was the at mercy of various pogroms throughout his early life, and a victim of Stalin’s reign of terror which tragically ended it. He was also a journalist on the frontlines of the Russian Revolution and the resultant Russo-Polish war, where he experienced the full frontal assault of the human condition in all its wretchedness…Thus after reading Babel…I’m left with a series scenes and images, each more gruesome and disturbed than the last, all of them disconnected from their respective chains of causality. These stories and the history of bloodshed which they are built upon, refuse to be molded into tight and easily recounted narratives, rather they sit and hover in the corners of my mind like figments from a nightmare that refuses to recede into forgetfulness.
Whether it be the old man in the opening story Old Shloyme, who decides, upon facing the prospect of eviction at eighty-seven and the decades of calcified neglect from his family, to hang himself and end his life in the house which he was born and lived. Or the Jewish newly wedded couple, warmly embraced in sleep on a night train to St Petersburg. Which is abruptly halted and searched by a rogue band of Bolshevik fighters searching for Jews. The commandant thus finds the couple asleep. He promptly shoots the man in the head and castrates him, and stuffs his severed penis into the wife’s mouth before shooting her as well....
As I said before this isn’t light reading. And it to top it all off its buttressed by some of the most fetid and impressionistic prose I’ve ever read from within the Russian tradition. Think Gogol or Bulgakov but perhaps more extreme and hellish. There’s a clear influence from the French symbolists. Though the collection (or rather the three collections bound within this volume) are not without their faults. This is perhaps the most lopsided grouping of stories I’ve ever read. The first collection, the autobiographical stories, which recount Babel’s tormented youth are some the greatest things ever written, truly. They each feature a stark and central image that consumes you and refuses to leave. Though this effect is gradually diminished in the succeeding volume, the titular Red Calvary…It starts off strong but I found the increasing and fragmentary nature of the stories and their bizarre use of recurring characters to be a bit tiring, it’s almost like a novel with chapters stripped away at random, so you’re left with this piecemeal heap. Though there are some standouts like the story Salt etc etc.
This feeling of fragmentation continues with the final collection, Odessa Stories, which are about lives of a various group of Jewish gangsters from the titular city. Many of these pieces I resorted to skimming and it was a rather crushingly disappointing end to a book that had started with so much promise. I was actually considering this throughout its first 100 pages as a potential book of the year candidate. But this final grouping of stories and their recount of various marriages and the intricate relations between the otherwise dull and clichéd characters, just didn’t do it for me. I also found the prose a bit overloaded under its own trappings for my taste, and the circuitous ways Babel goes about building his narratives just fell flat here and became patience testing endeavors.
Though the book is worth the price of admission alone just for the first collection and the first half of Red Calvary. Isaac Babel truly had the potential to be the greatest Russian prose writer of the 20th century, his arrest and false conviction and eventual execution at the hands of the Soviet state…Only reaffirms my disgust and dismay at the Stalinist system which decimated an entire culture, all for the sake of totalitarian control.
Recommended to those not afraid of the darker aspects of the human animal, and of course Russian lit aficionados.
4/5
Whether it be the old man in the opening story Old Shloyme, who decides, upon facing the prospect of eviction at eighty-seven and the decades of calcified neglect from his family, to hang himself and end his life in the house which he was born and lived. Or the Jewish newly wedded couple, warmly embraced in sleep on a night train to St Petersburg. Which is abruptly halted and searched by a rogue band of Bolshevik fighters searching for Jews. The commandant thus finds the couple asleep. He promptly shoots the man in the head and castrates him, and stuffs his severed penis into the wife’s mouth before shooting her as well....
As I said before this isn’t light reading. And it to top it all off its buttressed by some of the most fetid and impressionistic prose I’ve ever read from within the Russian tradition. Think Gogol or Bulgakov but perhaps more extreme and hellish. There’s a clear influence from the French symbolists. Though the collection (or rather the three collections bound within this volume) are not without their faults. This is perhaps the most lopsided grouping of stories I’ve ever read. The first collection, the autobiographical stories, which recount Babel’s tormented youth are some the greatest things ever written, truly. They each feature a stark and central image that consumes you and refuses to leave. Though this effect is gradually diminished in the succeeding volume, the titular Red Calvary…It starts off strong but I found the increasing and fragmentary nature of the stories and their bizarre use of recurring characters to be a bit tiring, it’s almost like a novel with chapters stripped away at random, so you’re left with this piecemeal heap. Though there are some standouts like the story Salt etc etc.
This feeling of fragmentation continues with the final collection, Odessa Stories, which are about lives of a various group of Jewish gangsters from the titular city. Many of these pieces I resorted to skimming and it was a rather crushingly disappointing end to a book that had started with so much promise. I was actually considering this throughout its first 100 pages as a potential book of the year candidate. But this final grouping of stories and their recount of various marriages and the intricate relations between the otherwise dull and clichéd characters, just didn’t do it for me. I also found the prose a bit overloaded under its own trappings for my taste, and the circuitous ways Babel goes about building his narratives just fell flat here and became patience testing endeavors.
Though the book is worth the price of admission alone just for the first collection and the first half of Red Calvary. Isaac Babel truly had the potential to be the greatest Russian prose writer of the 20th century, his arrest and false conviction and eventual execution at the hands of the Soviet state…Only reaffirms my disgust and dismay at the Stalinist system which decimated an entire culture, all for the sake of totalitarian control.
Recommended to those not afraid of the darker aspects of the human animal, and of course Russian lit aficionados.
4/5
May 1, 2012
I actually read this in the Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, and will probably return to the rest of the stories. Babel is touted as a master short story writer of Russia. These stories in particular were rather violent, not surprising since it tells the stories of Russian gangsters, ironically Jewish gangsters. They weren't really my cup of tea but they were ok. I did enjoy reading about some of the effects of the Russian revolution on the community.
April 25, 2013
Разкази за това как живее, мисли, оцелява, пие, пее и се умножава едно, изтикано в дълбините на града, в покрайнините на света и на общаството, парченце от народ, във времето на грандиозен политически и социален катаклизъм. Книгата е мнага еврейска, много руска, но и много просто човешка. Езикът, хуморът, метафорите, сатирата са много специфични и правят четенето на разказите неповторимо преживяване за читатели с настроени сетива.
February 20, 2016
I heard about "Red Cavalry" some years ago, and got the book in order to read it. However, while I enjoyed that portion, I liked the tales of the gangsters and characters of Odessa's Jewish slum even more.
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