The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (133 page)

I remember in particular a seminar on English romantic poetry, about which I knew almost nothing, which was taught with a heavy dose of Freudian theory. I understood very little, but enjoyed it very much. I found the discussions in class on hidden images, double entendres, and erotic metaphors immensely challenging. My bliss began to evaporate when my professors started to ask about my midterm essays. “Midterm” was a new concept for me, yet I learned its meaning quickly after I discovered the nonexistence of the status of auditeur libre at Columbia. My transcript still bears witness to my prompt retreat from most of these courses. I appeared, as I was later told, “to be very nice and very lost.”

While I enjoyed campus life, I was shocked on several occasions when a total stranger would approach me and ask abruptly, “Can you tell me where and how your father died?”

I became a regular student, first for an American MA in the Department of Slavic Studies, then for a doctoral program in English and comparative literature. I was readily admitted, because I already had earned degrees from the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Langues Orientales. I chose the English Department so as not to become a pure Slavicist, and certainly not to become an expert on Babel, a role for which many people thought I was predestined. My specialty areas were nineteenth century French and Russian prose—an ambitious choice, considering the number and normal output of important writers of that time. The English Department had never had a Ph.D. student without English literature as a major area of study, and few professors in the department spoke French or Russian, let alone both. This situation led to many farcical episodes, or at least they seem so in retrospect. For example, the department was not ready to consider that English could serve as one of the two foreign language requirements. The consternation was general when I refused adamantly to study Chaucer and Spencer, which were always required courses for all students in the English Department. I made another error when I answered glibly to the Professor of Italian Renaissance that I already had a passable culture generate of his sacred field. He countered with an eight-page, singlespaced mandatory reading list. I countered with hysterics in the office of the chairman, while he stood slightly agog, being himself a self-controlled New England gentleman. The requirement for the Italian Renaissance was waived.

My dissertation examined some of the psychological and literary affinities between Hugo and Dostoyevsky. In the end, everybody had fun with it, I think, and discovered something new. I went on to become a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas and later at the University of California, also teaching American southern writers as well as Latin American literature. But the Russian novel kept tugging at my coat. Little by little, I found myself becoming a Slavicist and also a Babel scholar. In spite of my reluctance, and even a pathological resistance, my father finally caught up with me! Some of his correspondence was being translated, and I ended up being the only one who could identify all the people mentioned in those letters.

This knowledge led me to becoming in 1964 the editor of The Lonely Years: 1925-1939, a collection of almost four hundred letters that Babel wrote to my aunt and grandmother (his sister and mother), whom I knew very well. This volume revealed many facets of Babels character, as well as his whereabouts during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1966,1 edited You Must Know Everything, which brought a number of new and forgotten stories to the public.

That is how I started doing Babel scholarship, which I have continued sporadically for over three decades. After a long silence, here I am at it again.

Nathalie Babel

Washington, D. C.

March 2001

ISAAC EMMANUELOVICH BABEL

 By Gregory Fr&idin

1894    Isaac Babel is born (June 30) in Moldavanka, a poor district near the harbor

of Odessa, to Feiga and Man Yitzkhovich    Bobel, a dealer in agricultural

machinery. Soon after, the family, now under the name Babel, relocates to Nikolayev (150 kilometers from Odessa). Babel studies English, French, and German; private Hebrew lessons.

1899    Babels sister, Meriam, born on July 16.

1905    The October Manifesto of Czar Nicholas    II establishes a constitutional

monarchy. Pogroms in southern Russia, including Nikolayev, witnessed by Babel. But the family is untouched.

1906    Babels family, now considerably more prosperous, moves back to Odessa and

settles in the residential center of the city. Babel enrolls in the Nicholas I Commercial School in Odessa; begins writing stories in French.

1911    After an unsuccessful attempt to enroll at the University of Odessa (due to

the restrictions on Jews), Babel enters the Institute of Finance and Business Studies in Kiev. Meets Evgenia Borisovna Gronfein, his future wife.

1913    First publication: the story “Old Shloyme.”

1914    World War I begins.

1915    Babel follows his institute’s evacuation from Kiev    to    Saratov.

1916    After graduating from the institute, moves    to    St.    Petersburg, meets Maxim

Gorky, and begins to contribute stories and sketches to Gorky’s journal Letopis and other periodicals (stories: “Mama, Rimma, and Alla,” “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna”). Babel’s stories receive a favorable response from reviewers.

1917    Charged with writing pornography (story “The Bathroom Window”), but the charge is made moot by the political turmoil.

The February Revolution.* Czar Nicholas II abdicates. Russia is ruled by the provisional government. Babel briefly volunteers for the Rumanian front.

Bolshevik coup d’etat in October. ^

Babel abandons the disintegrating front in November, returns to Odessa, and takes a dangerous journey to Petrograd** (his story “The Road,” 1932). Reaches Petrograd in December 1917 and joins the newly organized Cheka for a brief stint as a translator for the counterintelligence department.

1918    In March, Babel becomes a regular contributor of sketches about life in the city to Maxim Gorky’s anti-Leninist newspaper Novaya zhizn until the publication is shut down by the Bolsheviks on July 6 (Babel’s last contribution is in the July 2 issue).

Contributes stories to newspaper Zhizn iskusstva (Petrograd) in November.

1918-19 Serves in the food requisitioning detachments during the Civil War; returns to Odessa. Marries Evgenia Gronfein (August 9, 1919).

1920    Odessa Party Committee issues Babel the credentials of a war correspondent under the name of Kiril Vasilievich Lyutov, assigned to Budyonny’s Cavalry Army on the Polish front. Babel spends June through September with the Budyonny Cavalry.^

Returns to Odessa severely ill (lifelong asthma). Travels with his wife in Georgia and the Caucasus, contributes to local periodicals.

1921    End of the Civil War. The tolerant New Economic Policy replaces War Communism.

Babel does editorial work for a publishing house, contributing stories and essays to Odessa periodicals.

* March, according to the Gregorian calandar, adopted subsequently.

^ November 7, according to the Gregorian calandar.

** Formerly St. Petersburg.

^In August 1920, the Red Army reaches the outskirts of Warsaw but is soon after repelled and

by September defeated by Pilsudski’s troops, aided by the Western powers; an armistice is signed

in October 1921; the Treaty of Riga, finalizing the Russian-Polish border and ceding parts of the

Ukraine and Belarus to Poland, is signed on March 18,1921.

1923 Most of the Benya Krik stories (the Odessa stories) written and published in Odessa.

Father dies (July 13).

1923-24 After finishing the Odessa stories, Babel begins work on the Red Cavalry stories (June 1923), the publication of his stories in the avant-garde Lefand the fellow traveler Krasnaya Nov; the beginning of Babel’s fame.

1924    Lenin dies on January 21; Stalin, the Communist Party’s General Secretary since 1922, begins his ascent to power.

Budyonny’s first attack on Red Cavalry stories (March).

Babel publication in the first issue of Evgeny Zamiatin’s independent journal Russkii sovremennik.

Meriam Chapochnikoff (Babel’s sister) emigrates to Brussels.

1925    First two childhood stories (the cycle The Story of My Dovecote) are published with a dedication to Maxim Gorky.

Evgenia Babel (Gronfein), Babel’s wife, emigrates to Paris.

1926    Red Cavalry is published as a book. Babel’s mother emigrates to Brussels. Babel is Russia’s “most famous writer.”

1925-27 Babel’s liaison with Tamara Kashirina (later, Mrs. Vsevolod Ivanov).

1926    Mikhail (Ivanov) is born to Babel and Tamara Kashirina in July.

Babel finishes his play Sunset in August.

Works on the film script of Benya Krik; the beginning of Babel’s career as a screenwriter (script based on Shalom Aleichem’s Roaming Stars and others).

1927    The film Benya Krik is released and soon taken out of circulation. In subsequent publications of the script, Babel disowns the film.

Babel is in Kiev on family business; possibly works on The Jewess (a novel) of which only the beginning is extant. Plans a work on the French Revolution, hints that he is working on a novel about the Cheka; continues work on the “childhood” story cycle (referred to by Babel as “my true legacy”).

Babel leaves Russia for Paris in July; a brief affair with E. Khaiutina (future Mrs. Nikolai Yezhov) in Berlin; rejoins his wife in Paris.

Sunset staged successfully in Baku (October 23), in two theaters in Odessa (October 25 and December 1).

1928 Moscow production of Sunset at the Moscow Art Theater II (February 28) fails.

The Shakhty Trial. End of the liberal New Economic Policy era and beginning of the Stalin Revolution.

Babel returns to Russia in October. General Budyonny resumes attacks on the Red Cavalry stories. Gorky comes to Babel’s defense.

The Chinese Mill, a film comedy based on a script by Babel, premieres in July.

Continues work on the childhood story cycle (according to Babel, “part of a larger whole”).

Critic Alexander Voronsky, an early patron and admirer of Babel, chides him in print for his low productivity, or “silence.”

Completes the story “My First Fee” (1922-28); plans Kolya Topuz, a long narrative about an Odessa bandit who is reformed during the period of socialist construction (late 1920s-early 1930s).

1929    Trotsky is exiled from Soviet Russia in January.

Babel’s daughter, Nathalie, born in Paris to Evgenia Borisovna Babel on July 17.

Red Cavalry is published in English translation in the United States (following German and French editions), preceded by the appearance of some stories in literary magazines.

1929-30 “In search of new material,” Babel, like many other Soviet writers, travels in the industrial heartland to observe “socialist construction”; witnesses the brutal collectivization and famine in the Ukraine (February-summer 1930).

1930    Babel is publicly accused of granting an anti-Soviet interview to a Polish newspaper while on the French Riviera. He insists, apparently successfully, that the interview was a fabrication. Attempts to receive permission to return to Paris fail in part due to the author’s continued “silence.”

1931    Resumes contacts with Khaiutina.

Spends early spring in the Ukraine.

Publishes two more childhood stories (the Dovecote cycle) and a “collectivization” story, “Gapa Guzhva.”

Impending publication of a series of stories is announced at the end of the year, only one of them subsequently published.

1932    Publication of the story “Guy de Maupassant.” Babel lives in Molodenovo, a village outside Moscow, close to Gorky’s summer estate.

Babel meets Antonina Nikolayevna Pirozhkova, a young engineer.

After many pleas, Babel finally is allowed to return to his family in France.

1932-33 In Paris, Babel sees his daughter for the first time. Collaborates on a script about a famous socialist-revolutionary double agent, Yevno Azef, for a French movie studio (continues this work later in Russia). Close friendship with Ilya Ehrenburg, who introduces Babel to Andre Malraux. Babel visits Gorky in Sorrento. Travels through France, Italy, Germany.

Returns to Moscow in August in response to Gorky’s request for assistance in organizing the First Congress of Soviet Writers.

In the fall, Babel travels, with Antonina Pirozhkova, through the Caucasus on the way to Kabardino-Balkaria (a small Caucasus republic).

1934    Babel travels to the Donbass region (January).

During the 17th Communist Party Congress, “The Congress of Victors,” opposition to Stalin becomes manifest, but is ultimately defeated.

Publication of Babel’s story “Dante Street.”

Osip Mandelstam recites his anti-Stalin verses to his friends and is arrested in May.

At the First Congress of Soviet Writers (August), Babel obliquely criticizes the cult of Stalin. Speaking about his modest output, Babel calls himself “a great master of the genre [of literary silence].” He is grateful to the Soviet establishment for being able to enjoy the high status of a writer despite his “silence,” which, in the West, would have forced him to abandon writing and “sell haberdashery.” Babel spends time with Andre Malraux, who attended the congress.

Assassination of Sergei Kirov on December 1. Beginning of the great purges.

1935 Babel attends the Congress of Soviets in Moscow (February).

Babel completes Maria, his second play, which is published in March.

Babel and Pasternak are dispatched, on the insistence of Andre Malraux and Andre Gide, to the anti-Fascist International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace in Paris (June).

On July 14, Babel witnesses huge demonstrations in Paris (Popular Front and the pro-Fascist Croix de Feu*), seeing in them the signs of an impending revolution.

Along with his wife and daughter, Babel visits his mother and sister in Brussels (July). Babel makes plans to bring his entire family back to the Soviet Union. These plans do not materialize.