The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (2 page)

As these works illustrate, and as anyone can surmise who has ever read anything about him, he was an enigma. Although his complete literary works are now in print with this long-awaited edition, a comprehensive biography about him has yet to be written. A number of people, including scholars, graduate students, and journalists, are attempting this difficult task. In addition, documentary films about his life have been made in the Netherlands and Germany, both using historical footage of Russia during the Revolution to illustrate the confusion of the times. They show huge rebelling crowds, and scenes with Cossacks, Russian workers, Poles, and Jews. It seems easier to show this period of history in film than to draw a written portrait of my father, a man so elusive and contradictory.

So, who was Isaac Emmanuelovich Babel?

Was he a Soviet writer, a Russian writer, or a Jewish writer?

As a Soviet writer, he shows and experiences a profound dichotomy between acceptance of the ideals of the Revolution and repulsion for its methods. As a Russian writer, he expresses both nostalgia for the old world and desire for the new. As a Jewish writer, he was well versed in Hebrew and the Talmud. Yet he wrote in Russian. His work reveals what many have called a “Jewish sensibility.” However, when he used the typical Jewish themes found in Yiddish literature, they were always interwoven with Russian cultural archetypes.

Babels work defies categorization. Simply put, in my personal view, the juxtaposition of compatibles and incompatibles keeps Babels prose in a state of constant tension and gives it its unique character. Approaching Babel with expectations based on traditional Russian literature might lead either to disappointment or to a feeling of discovery. His prose does not merely draw on past themes and forms, but is the forging of a new manner of writing, which reflected new times. Babels readers are not only students of Russian literature and history or of the Russian Revolution. They belong to different cultures, different religions, and different social classes. They have no single national tradition.

Critics have taken various positions and a great deal of research and passion has been invested in solving questions of Babels personal convictions and literary style. Actually, the critical literature on Babels works fills bookcases, compared to the mere half shelf of his own writings. Babel started writing as an adolescent, but he himself considered that his career as a man of letters, writing “clearly and concisely,” began only in 1924. It was then that his stories, which were to become the volumes entitled Red Cavalry and The Odessa Stories started to appear. The young writer burst upon the literary scene and instantly became the rage in Moscow. The tradition in Russia being to worship poets and writers, Babel soon became one of the happy few, a group that included Soviet writers, who enjoyed exceptional status and privileges in an otherwise impoverished and despotic country. He was allowed to travel abroad and to stay in Western Europe for relatively long periods of time. In the late 1930s, he was given a villa in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, outside Moscow. No secret was ever made of his having a wife and daughter in Paris. At the same time, hardly anyone outside of Moscow knew of two other children he had fathered. As a matter of fact, Babel had many secrets, lived with many ambiguities and contradictions, and left many unanswered questions behind him.

During his lifetime, Babel was loved, admired, and respected as a writer. The following entry from the first volume of the second edition of the Small Soviet Encyclopedia of March 1937 provides an insightful description of the man and the writer. I will quote from this article, since I find it well documented, critically sound, and psychologically perceptive. It shows what Babel was striving for and what he in fact achieved. Moreover, it is astonishing to note the date of publication, the year 1937, when the ground was very shaky for Jews and intellectuals. It seems that when the books were already printed in March 1937, the publishers did not have time to revise the contents of the encyclopedia according to the Party’s latest interpretations of Soviet history. They did, however, manage to glue by hand an addendum of “corrections” into each of the sixty-one thousand copies of the first volume before they were distributed, explaining the need for the revision of several of the articles. Fortunately for us, the entry on Babel was neither “corrected” nor removed.

Babel, Isaac Emmanuelovich (born 1894)—Soviet writer; son of an Odessa merchant. His first stories appeared in 1916, although the height of his literary activity occurred during the years 1923-1924. Babels literary output is small in volume. His basic genre was the “novella” or short story, most of which can be grouped into three thematic cycles: “Odessa Stories,” mainly about the exploits of the gangsters of Odessa (the film scenario of “Benya Krik” and the play “Sunset” also fall under this theme); the collection of stories “Red Cavalry”—impressions of the 1920 campaign of the army of Budyonny, in which Babel took part; and autobiographical stories (“The Story of My Dovecote,” etc.). . . .

An aesthete with a heightened interest in all the colorful revelations of the human character, inclined towards the abstract intellectual humanism and to romanticism, expressing through his whole life and work the agonizing sensation of his own dilettante weaknesses, Babel admired the heroic spirit of the Revolutionary and saw the Revolution as essentially elemental, accepting it without fear.

In his portrayal of Red Cavalry soldiers, as with the gangsters of Odessa, Babel expresses both admiration and horror of their strength and natural daring, through his own intellectuals skeptical irony. This creates an original combination of heroics and humor. Characteristically, in his book “Red Cavalry,” Babel focuses his attention less on the colorful episodes of military life, and more on the wild escapades of the partisans.

Typical for Babel is his primordial florid imagery, his original synthesis of romanticism and sharp naturalism, of the physiological and the erotic, which at times becomes pathological. His great mastery is in his concise picturesque story telling, his bright and witty communication of local color and life (for example—the subtly humorous depiction of Jewish life in “Odessa Stories”).

The stories which he published after his long silence in 1931-1932, including the fragment “Gapa Guzhva”—which touches separately on the theme of collectivization, are similar in nature to his earlier literary work.

Indeed, the author of this “politically incorrect” article was on dangerous ground. One wonders whatever happened to Mr. Kagan.

By this time, the Great Purges were in full swing. Stalin held the country in his fist. His Revolutionary comrades, his generals, writers, anarchists, so-called Trotskyites, and their associates were arrested, tortured, and shot. The political terror penetrated all spheres of life, including literary and cultural circles. It was only a matter of time before my fathers turn would come. He surely must have known that he himself had been under the vigilant surveillance of the secret police for some years.

On May 15, 1939, Babel was arrested. He disappeared. Not a trace, not a word. He vanished. His lodgings were searched and every scrap of paper was confiscated—correspondence, drafts, manuscripts, everything. None of it has ever resurfaced. His name, his works, were officially erased as though he had never existed. There was only silence. How could a man so friendly, so socially astute, so famous, not be able to pass a word to the outside? And so the guessing began, and slowly, a sort of myth emerged. He never existed, but by his nonexistence, he became famous. I have been asked many times in my life, “Do you know how he died? Do you know where? Do you know why?” There is another question also often asked. “Why did he go back to the Soviet Union? The times were already bad. Didn’t he know it? Why didnt he stay in Paris with his family?” Babel came to Paris in the summer of 1935, as part the delegation of Soviet writers to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace. He probably knew this would have been his last chance to remain in Europe. As he had done numerous times for some ten years, he asked my mother to return with him to Moscow. Although he knew the general situation was bad, he nevertheless described to her the comfortable life that the family could have there together. It was the last opportunity my mother had to give a negative answer, and she never forgot it. Perhaps it helped her later on to be proven completely right in her fears and her total lack of confidence in the Soviet Union.

My mother described to me these last conversations with my father many times.

So, why did he go back to Moscow in 1935? For many years, Babel had battled with the dilemma of his life situation. During his lengthy visits to Paris dating from 1926, he could express his thoughts without fear of possible betrayal. According to his close friend Boris Souvarine,
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for example, Babel had a great knowledge of high political spheres in the Soviet Union, of its plots, manipulations and daily practices. He knew very well the nature of Stalins character and private life, and had no illusions about Stalins monstrous intentions and crimes.

Another person with intimate knowledge of Babels political views at the time was Yuri Annenkov. In his memoirs, Annenkov wrote of his many encounters with Babel in Paris and of the letters he received from him through the early 1930s. In 1932, Babel returned to Paris to visit his family, after an absence of three years. Annenkov wrote, “Babels moods had changed significantly in the past months. It’s true, he was still a big joker, but his topics of conversation were different. The last stay in the Soviet Union and the growing repression of creative art through the demands and instructions of the State had completely disillusioned him. To write within the framework of'the barrack mentality of Soviet ideology’ was intolerable for him, yet he didn’t know how he could manage to live otherwise.”
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Annenkov described another visit with Babel in 1932, noting that the conversation had just one subject: how to manage to live further.

“I have a family: a wife and daughter,” said Babel, “I love them and have to provide for them. Under no circumstances do I want them to return to Sovietland. They must remain here in freedom. But what about myself? Should I stay here and become taxi driver, like the heroic Gaito Gazdanov? But you see, he has no children! Should I return to our proletarian revolution? Revolution indeed! Its disappeared! The proletariat? It flew off, like an old buggy with a leaky roof, thats lost its wheels. And it stayed wheelless. Now, dear brother, its the Central Committees that are pushing forward—they’ll be more effective. They don’t need wheels—they have machine guns instead. All the rest is clear and needs no further commentary, as they say in polite society. . . . Maybe I won’t become a taxi driver after all, although, as you know, I passed the driving test long ago. Here a taxi driver has more freedom than the rector of a Soviet university. . . . Driver or no driver, I’m going to become a free man.
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On July 27,1933, Babel wrote to Annenkov that he had received a strange summons from Moscow and was departing immediately, “in the most dramatic conditions and no money and a lot of debts everywhere. . . . Live well without me. Don’t forget Evgenia Borisovna^ while I’m gone. ... I kiss you. I’m glad that I’m going to Moscow. All the rest is bitter and uncertain.”
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This turned out to be the last letter Yuri Annenkov ever received from my father. In their correspondence, Babel sounds to me like a man divided in his heart, a man pulled with equal force in two different directions.

In 1933, Babel still had a powerful political protector, his beloved mentor Alexei Maximovich Gorky. Gorky had played a critical and irreplaceable role in Babel’s life. Babel wrote in 1924, “At the end of 1916,1 happened to meet Gorky. I owe everything to this meeting and to this day speak the name of Alexei Maximovich with love and reverence. He published my first stories in the November 1916 issue of Letopis. Alexei Maximovich taught me extremely important things and sent me into the world, at a time when it was clear that my two or three tolerable attempts as a young man were at best successful by accident, that I would not get anywhere with literature, and that I wrote amazingly badly.”
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During a trip to Italy in the spring of 1933, shortly before returning to the Soviet Union, my father visited Gorky in Sorrento. His death in 1936 was a great personal loss for Babel and signaled the inevitable coming tragedy.

One of Babels main preoccupations was money. All his adult life, Babel had money problems and worried about them. Not that he did not make money. On the contrary, he made a lot of money. In the 1920s, his stories were published and republished in book form. In one year (1924-1925), four collections of stories and two screenplays were published. He also received payment for foreign editions. In the 1930s, he worked for film studios in Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad and was extremely well paid for his efforts. He not only wrote original scripts, but also revised the screenplays of others, without attribution to himself. Apparently, he was the main author of The Gorky Trilogy, which appeared only after his arrest and without his name in the film credits.

Babel's problem was not the absence of money, but his inability to manage it. Above all, he felt the obligation to take care of his relatives abroad. His sister Meri Emmanuelovna Chapochnikoff had left in 1924 to join her fiance, who was studying medicine in Belgium; my mother Evgenia Borisovna had left in 1925, taking with her a lifelong hatred of the Bolsheviks; and his mother, the last one to leave, joined her daughter in Brussels in 1926.

As I noted in my introduction to The Lonely Years, “Money matters tormented him. To make more money, he had to work under increasingly difficult conditions. Moreover, the impractical Babel would let his generosity run away with him. Whether he was in Moscow or in Paris, distant relatives, friends and friends of friends were continually imploring him for financial assistance. A few weeks after his return to the Soviet Union from a trip abroad, he would find himself totally impoverished, his Soviet friends having finished the job that had begun in Paris. Above all, Babel feared that his economic position would affect his work. His life centered on writing.”
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