The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (3 page)

His inability to imagine himself as anything but a writer played a critical role in his refusal to leave the USSR. His stays abroad made him understand that he could not make a comfortable living as an emigre writer.

As Cynthia Ozick observed in a review of Babels 1920 Diary
:
“By remaining in the Soviet Union and refusing finally to bend his art to Soviet directives, Babel sacrificed his life to his language.”

Souvarine remembers what he called Babels leitmotiv, “I am a Russian writer. If I did not live with the Russian people, I would cease being a writer. I would be like a fish out of water.”
⁸
Actually, my mother would use these words almost verbatim to explain my father’s absence and why I had no brothers and sisters, whom I had always wanted. This romantic ideal of the writer, which was only part of the story, stayed with me for a very long part of my life. It took many years to let it go.

For Babel, it is clear that there was no one ideal solution. In the end, a mans destiny is his own.

In 1954, after many years of official silence, Babels name was heard again. A typed half sheet of ordinary paper, accepted as an official document, declared, “The sentence of the Military College dated 26 January 1940 concerning Babel I. E. is revoked on the basis of newly discovered circumstances and the case against him is terminated in the absence of elements of a crime.” The news took a couple of years to leak out of Moscow to the rest of Europe. Several decades later in the early 1990s, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, some brave souls were able to get access to the KGBs archives on Babel. Minute records had been kept about the arrest and interrogations of the accused.

As we now know, his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria’s private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately Babel had been accused and convicted of “active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization” and of “being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments.”

Babel's last recorded words in the proceedings were, “I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others. ... I am asking for only one thing— let me finish my work.” He was shot the next day and his body was thrown into a communal grave. All of this horrific information was revealed in the early 1990s, a relatively short time ago.

Considering that revelations about my father have been coming to light for almost fifty years, a large portion of my life, I understand why it has never been possible to put an end to grieving. In this edition, I have also included in the afterword a few of my own memoirs, which illustrate how his absence affected me personally. For many years now, I have been involved with attempting to bring together and to light what is recognized as the body of Babels work. I hope the present ambitious project will provide further insights into his personality, as well as a greater knowledge and appreciation of his literary legacy.

Nathalie Babel

Washington, D. C.

March 2001

One of the great tragedies of twentieth century literature took place in the early morning hours of May 15,1939, when a cadre of agents from the Soviet secret police burst into the house of Isaac Babel in Peredelkino, arrested him, and gathered up the many stacks of unpublished manuscripts in his office. From that day on, Babel, one of the foremost writers of his time, became a nonperson in the Soviet Union. His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi. He became unmentionable in any public venue. When the film director Mark Donskoi’s famous Gorky trilogy premiered the following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplay, had been removed from the credits.

Babel was executed in 1940. It was only in 1954, fourteen years later, that he was officially exonerated, but his books were only warily republished in the Soviet Union, and in censored form. And yet today, sixty-two years after his arrest and the subsequent silence surrounding his name, Babel is considered, both inside and outside Russia, to be among the most exciting—and at times unsettling—writers of the twentieth century.

Babel is one of the great masters of the short story, and for the translator a great and challenging master of style. It has been fascinating to see his style change from work to work. We are familiar with terms such as Proustian, Chekhovian, and Nabokovian, but, as I soon realized, the term “B abelian” is harder to define.

Babel burst onto the literary scene after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, becoming within a few years one of Russia’s most original and highly regarded authors—“the best Russia has to offer,” as Maxim Gorky wrote to Andre Malraux in 1926. Babel began his career during a time when Russian culture, society, and language were in total upheaval. World War I, the February and October Revolutions of 1917, and the Civil War left in their wake poverty, hunger, and social instability. At the same time, the promise of limitless change was in the air. The people of Russia felt that they were being given the opportunity to participate in an exhilarating and unprecedented social experiment which, if World Communism was to have its way, would be a global one.

The abrupt social changes on all levels, the abolition of imperial censorship, and the new feeling of liberty drove writers of Babels generation—Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Zamyatin, Bulgakov—to write in new ways about new topics with an unprecedented vigor. Babel did this with a vengeance. His themes were steeped in the brutal realism of the times: In the arctic night of Petersburg a Chinese man, seeing a desperate prostitute, holds up a loaf of bread—“With his blue fingernail he draws a line across the crust. One pound. Glafira [the prostitute] raises two fingers. Two pounds.” A teenage girl tries to help her younger sister abort her baby with a clothes hanger—their mother walks in on them just in time. The morgues of Petersburg are filled with corpses— the narrator gazes at a dead aristocratic couple and, looking at the noblewoman, thinks, “In death she keeps a stamp of beauty and impudence. She sobs and laughs disdainfully at her murderers.” Starving wet nurses feeding undersized infants in state-run maternity wards beg the narrator for a crust of bread.

These were contemporary topics that before Babel nobody had dared touch. When the valiant Red Cavalry rode into Poland, in what was intended to be the first step that would carry the glories of Communism to Europe and the world, Babel rode along. He brought back with him a series of stories that presented a literary portrait of war that has awed and haunted readers for almost eighty years.

One apt definition of “Babelian” might be: a trenchant and unrelenting literary re-creation of a world in war and turmoil. And yet this is a limited definition, for it leaves out Babels irrepressible sense of humor in his stories, plays, and screenplays. In the screenplay Roaming Stars, Babel describes a production of King Lear in the hinterlands of Volhynia, where Lears daughters appear onstage as “[two] stout, mid-dle-aged Jewish women, the third is a girl of about six . . . the actresses are also wearing lacquered officers boots with spurs.” In the play Sunset, Babel portrays a synagogue scene that the Moscow Arts Theater cut out of its 1928 production of the play because the scene was deemed too irreverent toward Judaism. As the carters chant and pray, Arye-Leib, the synagogue shamas, discusses market prices with them:

ARYE-LEIB (serenely): Lifnei adonai ki vo, ki vo... Oy, I am standing, oy, I am standing before God . . . where do oats stand?

SECOND JEW (without interrupting his prayer): A ruble and four, a ruble and four!

ARYE-LEIB: Im going crazy!

In translating
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
, I was constantly struck by the different registers of Babels voice in different stories. The minute I thought I had pinned down Babels style, it transformed itself into something very different in the next story. Babels first published piece, “Old Shloyme,” which opens this volume, has absolutely nothing in common with the style, content, language, or rhythm of the second story, “At Grandmother s,” or with the story after that, or with any of the other stories. The Odessa stories, traditionally thought of as a stylistic unit threaded through with feisty B abelian color, are, on closer scrutiny, just as disparate. In the first Odessa story, “The King,” the author-narrator draws us into the wild gangster world of Odessa with his elegant and surprising prose: “The tables, draped in velvet, coiled through the yard like a snake on whose belly patches of every color had been daubed, and these orange and red velvet patches sang in deep voices.” The second Odessa story, “Justice in Parentheses,” begins on a very different note: “My first run-in was with Benya Krik, my second with Lyubka Shneiweis. Do you understand the meaning of these words? Can you drink in their full essence?” Here the narrator Zudechkis, a small-time wheeler-dealer who operates on the fringes of Odessa’s Jewish underworld, suddenly steps into the foreground. The story is told from his perspective and in his subtly Yiddling words, “At five o’clock in the morning—or no, it must have been four, and then again, maybe it wasn’t even four yet—the King entered my bedroom, grabbed me, if you will pardon the expression, by my back, dragged me out of bed....” In the next story, “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” the primary narrator is an unworldly Jew, described as having glasses on his nose and autumn in his heart.

The Red Cavalry
stories are, stylistically speaking, just as varied. There is the “I” of Isaac Babel and the “I” of Kiril Lyutov, the very Russian war correspondent (who might go as far as admitting that his mother is Jewish). “Lyutov” was also the identity that Babel assumed in real life as a way of surviving among the fiercely anti-Semitic Cossacks of the Red Cavalry. There are also other narrators, such as the murderous Cossack Balmashov. When these characters are the narrators, the tone, style, and grammar in the stories begin to go awry. Babel is a master at re-creating the Cossacks’ wild, ungrammatical speech filled with skewed and half-understood Communist doctrine. In “Salt,” for instance, the entire story is narrated in the voice of a Cossack whose ranting jumble ranges from Communist jargon to folk verse:

I want to tell you of some ignorant women who are harmful to us. I set my hopes on you, that you who travel around our nations fronts have not overlooked the far-flung station of Fastov, lying afar beyond the mountains grand, in a distant province of a distant land, where many a jug of home-brewed beer we drank with merriment and cheer.

Babel is one of the few writers who goes out of his way never to repeat himself. Each of his many reports from Petersburg, Georgia, or France is original, almost as if more than one reporter were at work. The two plays sound and feel completely different from each other, and the screenplays are so different from one another in style and presentation—that it is hard to believe (even for the translator who has pored over every word and comma) that they were written by the same writer.

I have found in translating other authors, such as Anton Chekhov and Thomas Mann, that after a few stories I was steering toward a Chekhovian or Mannian style I felt worked in English. Not so with Babel. Each of the 147 texts in this volume, from the shortest story to the longest play, had to be treated on its own terms. Babel is not only one of the greatest storytellers of European literature, but also one of its greatest stylists.

Peter Constantine New York March 2001

The purpose of this volume is to present in one edition everything  known to have been written by Isaac Babel. In this light, we call the volume Complete Works, even though this term may not include all of Babels literary heritage, since his files of manuscripts were seized by the police upon his arrest. But as there is little hope that any of that material survives or can be recovered, we use the word “complete.”

The realization of this volume has been a long-term dream and struggle. The struggle has been made easier by my good fortune in working with Peter Constantine, who took it upon himself to translate anew all available original manuscripts and the first publications in Russian—a long and arduous task. As this is the first time that a single person has translated all of Babels work into English, this volume has a unique coherence and consistency that I believe is true to Babels voice in Russian. Peter was not only meticulous in his choice of words and phrasing, but also in his research in order to clarify the text and provide notes where necessary. He also was of great help to me in organizing and editing this large and unwieldy collection of materials, and in supporting me with frequent practical advice and unflagging enthusiasm.

I approached Gregory Freidin without warning to request that he prepare a biographical and literary chronology of Babels life and works. Gregory s exceptional knowledge allowed us to sort out many conflicting or incomplete items of information. I thank him for his graciousness in completing this task.

Special thanks are also due to Robert Weil, my editor at W. W. Norton, who embraced the challenge of giving new life to Babels work through what he knew would be a difficult project. His editorial advice and his steadfast guidance have earned my heartfelt gratitude. Without the professional perseverance and affectionate encouragement of my friend and literary agent, Jennifer Lyons, this work would not have been completed. I thank her warmly.

When it came to my own contribution, I chose to forego writing a traditional introduction in favor of speaking of the connections between Babel and myself, connections that have not been obvious despite his being my father. No research or scholar could help me there. I had only myself, the blank page, and the past. Enter my friend Christine Galitzine. I cannot hope to acquit my debt merely with thanks, or even the feelings of profound gratitude and affection that I feel for her. As she became more and more interested in this project, she also became more indispensable to my being able to advance it. Through her knowledge of English, French, and Russian, as well as her own literary and administrative gifts, she was able to understand my thoughts and sentiments deeply and to help me render them onto the printed page. Indeed, her involvement in this work led her to make a detour while traveling in France, to visit the town of Niort, which occupies a large place in my life and my recollections. Upon arrival there, she went immediately to the information office to ask whether the old jail still existed. Unfazed, the French lady in charge told her that the jail remained in the same location that it had been for the last three hundred years. Christine came back with photos, brochures, maps, and historic and geographic information—an act which moved me deeply and helped me to confront more peacefully these difficult episodes of my life.