The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (59 page)
Authors: Peter Constantine Isaac Babel Nathalie Babel
September 11, 1920. Kovel
The town has kept traces of European-Jewish culture. They wont accept Soviet money, a glass of coffee without sugar: fifty rubles. A disgusting meal at the train station: 600 rubles.
Sun, I go from doctor to doctor, have my ear treated, itching.
I visit Yakovlev,
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quiet little houses, meadows, Jewish alleys, a quiet hearty life, Jewish girls, youths, old men at the synagogues, perhaps wigs. Soviet power does not seem to have ruffled the surface, these quarters are across the bridge.
Dirt and hunger in the train. Everyone’s emaciated, louse-ridden, with sallow faces, they all hate one another, sit locked up in their cubicles, even the cook is emaciated. A striking change. They are living in a cage. Khelemskaya, dirty, puttering about in the kitchen, her connection to the kitchen, she feeds Volodya, a Jewish wife “from a good home.”
All day I look for food.
The district in which the Twelfth Army is located. Luxurious establishments: clubs, gramophones, conscientious Red Army fighters, cheerful, life is bubbling up, the newspapers of the Twelfth Army, Central Military News Service, Army Commander Kuzmin^ who writes articles. As far as work goes, the Polit-otdel seems to be doing well.
The life of the Jews, crowds in the streets, the main street is Lutskaya Street, I walk around on my shattered feet, I drink an incredible amount of tea and coffee. Ice cream: 500 rubles. They have no shame. Sabbath, all the stores are closed. Medicine: five rubles.
I spend the night at the radio station. Blinding light, sassy radiotelegraphers, one of them is struggling to play a mandolin. Both read avidly.
September 12, 1920. Kivertsy
In the morning, panic at the train station. Artillery fire. The Poles are in town. Unimaginably pitiful flight, carts in five rows, the pitiful, dirty, gasping infantry, cavemen, they run over meadows, throw away their rifles, Borodin the orderly already sees the butchering Poles. The train moves out quickly, soldiers and carts come dashing, the wounded, their faces contorted, jump up into our train cars, a gasping political worker, his pants have fallen down, a Jew with a thin, translucent face, possibly a cunning Jew, deserters with broken arms jump on, sick men from the field hospital.
The institution that calls itself the Twelfth Army. For every fighter there are four rear-line men, two ladies, two trunks filled with things—and even the actual fighter doesn’t fight. The Twelfth Army is ruining the front and the Red Cavalry, it exposes our flanks and then sends us to stop up those holes with ourselves. One of their units, the Urals Regiment or the Bashkir Brigade, surrendered, leaving the front open. Disgraceful panic, the army is unfit for combat. The soldier types: The Russian Red Army infantryman is barefoot, not only not modernized, but the embodiment of “wretched Russia,” hungry and squat muzhiks, tramps, bloated, louse-ridden.
At Goloby all the sick, the wounded, and the deserters are thrown off the train. Rumors, and then facts: the Provision Unit of the First Cavalry sent into the cul-de-sac of Vladimir-Volynsk has been captured by the enemy, our headquarters has moved to Lutsk, a mass of fighters and equipment of the Twelfth Army has been captured, the army is fleeing.
In the evening we arrive in Kivertsy.
Life in the railway car is hard. The radio-telegraphers keep plotting to get rid of me, one of them still has an upset stomach, he plays the mandolin, the other keeps taunting him because he is an idiot.
Life in the railway car, dirty, malicious, hungry, animosity toward one another, unhealthy. Moscow women smoking, eating like pigs, faceless, many pitiful people, coughing Muscovites, everyone wants to eat, everyone is angry, everyone has an upset stomach.
September 13, 1920. Kivertsy
A bright morning, the forest. The Jewish New Year. Hungry. I go into the shtetl. Boys wearing white collars. Ishas Khaki offers me bread and butter. She earns her money “herself,” a hardy woman, a silk dress, she has tidied up the house. I am moved to tears, here the only thing that helped was talking things through, we spoke for a long time, her husband is in America, a shrewd, unhurried Jewess.
A long stop at the station. Dejection, like before. We get books from the club, we read avidly.
September 14, 1920. Klevan
We stop in Kievan for a day and a night, the whole time at the station. Hunger, dejection. The town of Rovno wont allow us passage. A railroad worker. We bake shortbread and potatoes at his place. A railroad watchman. They eat, say kind things, dont give us anything. I am with Borodin, his light gait. All day long we look for food, from one watchman to the next. I spend the night in the radio station in the blinding light.
September 15, 1920. Klevan
The third day of our agonizing stop in Klevan begins, the same hunt for food, in the morning we had a lot of tea with shortbread. In the evening I rode to Rovno on a cart of the First Cavalry’s Air Force Department. A conversation about our air force, it doesn’t exist, all the machines are broken, the pilots don’t know how to fly, the planes are old, patched up, completely worthless. The Red Army fighter with a swollen throat—quite a type. He can barely speak, his throat must be completely blocked, inflamed, sticks in his fingers to scrape away the film in his gullet, they told him salt might help, he pours salt down his throat, he hasn’t eaten for four days, he drinks cold water because nobody will give him hot. His talk is garbled, about the attack, about the commander, about the fact that they were barefoot, some advanced, others didnt, he beckons with his finger.
Supper at Gasnikova’s.
Timoshenko had been the commander of the Sixth Cavalry Division from November 1919 to August 1920, and Apanasenko from August to October 1920.
t R. P. Khmelnitsky, Voroshilovs aide-de-camp, was a Jew, who happened to have the same name as Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the legendary seventeenth-century Cossack leader.
Bakhturov, the military commissar of the Sixth Cavalry Division, was to be relieved of his duties the following day.
^ Timoshenkos tenure as commander of the Sixth Cavalry Division ended with the battle near Brody. He was held responsible for the battles failure.
Lepin, as a staff officer, now had to report to Sheko, the new chief of staff.
Now that Bakhturov, their former “master,” has lost his tenure.
The new chief of staff of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
^ The former commander of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
Henryk Sienkiewicz, 1846-1916, Polish novelist, author of Quo Vadis?.
^ French: “our little hero is already seven weeks old.”
Gerhart Hauptmann, 1862-1946, German dramatist. His play Elga was first performed in 1905.
t Aleksander Nikolayevich Vinokurov was the military commissar of the Sixth Cavalry Division. He replaced Bakhturov.
D. D. Korotchayev had been the provisional commander of the Fourth Cavalry Division from May 1 to June 20,1920.
^ The new commander of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
Boris Mokeyevich Dumenko had been the legendary commander of the Fourth Cavalry Divison in 1918, and fought with Stalin, Budyonny, and Voroshilov at the Battle of Tsaritsyn.
The political commissar of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
^ Sergey Utochkin, a celebrated Russian aviation pioneer from Odessa.
Vasily Ivanovich Kniga, commander of the First Brigade of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
Ukrainian: “language.”
^ The military commissar of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
Kolesov, commander of the Third Brigade.
^ The chief of staff of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
Revvoensoviet, founded in 1918, were councils in which military commanders and political representatives of the Bolshevik government conferred on military tactics.
Lepiris orderly.
Vasily Ivanovich Kniga, commander of the First Brigade of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
^ The chief of staff of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
Zapfront (Zapadnii Front), February 1919 to January 1921, was the central Red Army command of western and northwestern strategic points in Soviet Russia.
^ The chief of staff of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
Manuilov was the adjutant to Sheko, the divisional chief of staff, and Boguslavsky was staff secretary.
^ Mikhail Artemevich Muravyov, a legendary figure who in 1918, during his tenure as commander of the Western Front, instigated the counterrevolutionary Muravyov Revolt for which he was executed.
Now demoted to the rank of squadron commander.
^ German: “a vehement nationalist.”
Manuilov was the divisional chief of staff s adjutant, and Sheko, his boss, was the divisional chief of staff.
^ German: “Polish ones, Jews.”
A reference to Maxim Gorky’s story, “Twenty-six Men and One Woman.”
Pavel Vasilevich Bakhturov, the former military commissar of the Sixth Cavalry Division, had become the military commissar of the Eleventh Division on August 8.
A Cossack captain fighting on the Polish side.
The Polish Parliament.
See the stories “And Then There Were Nine” and “And Then There Were Ten,” in which the Cossacks capture Polish prisoners at the Zavadi Station. Babel and Lepin arrive too late to stop the Cossacks from murdering one of the prisoners.
Kniga was the commander of the First Brigade of the Sixth Cavalry Division, and Levda was commander of the Third Brigade of the Fourteenth Cavalry Division.
The chief of staff of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
^ Commander of the Second Squadron of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
The infantry, the main force in the Russian-Polish campaign.
^ The military commissar of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
The adjutant of the chief of staff of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
A train for the ideological education of the troops, equipped with a printing press and radio station.
^ V. Zdanevich, the editor-in-chief of the Red Cavalry newspaper Krasny Kavalerist, for which Babel wrote articles. See “Dispatch Office, Shape Up!”
The political commissar of the Sixth Cavalry Division.
^ Nikolai Nikolayevich Kuzmin was the provisional commander of the Twelfth Army from August to November 1920.
Sketches for the Red Cavalry Stories
The notebooks that Isaac Babel kept while he worked as a war correspondent in the Russian-Polish Campaign of 1920 are the most significant documentation of his writing process. They are terse; quick jottings of incidents and impressions that he wished to use and develop, first in his diary and later in the Red Cavalry stories. Like his diary, his drafts and sketches are reminders of how he wished to present incidents: “Very simple, A factual account, no superfluous descriptions. . . . Pay no attention to continuity in the story.” Babel was very interested in keeping an accurate account of specific details, such as an individual5 military rank or the dates and tactical implications of incidents—so much so, that he made the dangerous choice of threading real figures and incidents into his stories, not always showing them in a favorable light. Commander Budyonny was to become Marshal of the Soviet Union, Voroshilov was Stalins right-hand man, and Timoshenko became a Marshal of the Soviet Union and Commissar of Defense.
As becomes clear from these jottings, Babel's ultimate aim in the stories he intended to write about the Polish Campaign was literary effect. As he experienced these events) he was already arranging them as they were to appear, first in his diary, and later in finished prose: "The sequence: Jews. Airplane. Grave. Timoshenko. The letter Trunov’s burial, the salute
The battle near Br[ody]
Pil[sudski’s] proclamations] 2.
Killed, butchered men, sun, wheat, military booklets, Bible pages. Pilsudski’s proclamation?
The battle near Br[ody]
No discussions.—Painstaking choice of words.—Konkin— proverbs: If the Lord does not decree, the bladder will not burst.—His beard is that of Abraham, his deeds are those of an evil man—we’re covered in vice like yard dogs with lice.—Gnats will chew at you till their dying breath.—To save his own goods and chattels a man will gladly set fire to another mans hide.
The battle near Br[ody]
1. Decamp from Bielavtsy. The battle by Brody.—I bandage men.— Description of the battle.—Korotchayev.
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The death of a wounded man in my arms. Radzivillov. Ivan shoots a horse, the horseman runs away.—On the bridge.—It’s a pity about the buttermilk.
2. Departure from Brody. An untouched steam contraption. Farm. I go to answer the call of nature ... A corpse. A sparkling day. The place is littered with corpses, completely unnoticeable in the rye. Pilsudski’s proclamations. Battle, butchery in silence.—The division commander.—I move away. Why? I don’t have the strength to bear this.
3. Going around in circles. First I went to ... [written over: Konkin]. Konyushkovo.—The nurse.
4. Radzivillov.
The battle near Br[ody]
1. On the Radzivillov high road. Battle. In Radzivillov. Night. The movement of the horses is the main thing.
2. Night in Brody. The synagogue is next door.
3. (Briefly). Departure from Brody. A corpse. A field littered with corpses. Pilsudski’s proclamations. Battle. Kolesnikov and Grishin. I go away.—The wounded platoon commander. A special insert.
4. Konkin. We re going around in circles.—Anti-Semites.
5. The nurse. Night. Desperation. Dawn.
The length of the episodes—half a page each.
Battle.
1. Wounded men in the tachanka. The heroism of the Cossack. I will shoot him. The death of the wounded man.
2. Night, horses are moving.
3. Brody. Next door.
4. Departure from Brody. Corpses. Pilsudski’s proclamations. The battle begins. Kolesnikov and Grishin. The beginning of wandering in circles.
