The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (4 page)

That’s when I was sucked in, deeper than I ever expected. The title of this book is borrowed from Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel,
The Demons
, formerly translated as
The Possessed
, which narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways, to my own experiences in graduate school.

When I reemerged into the real world, I thought differently about lots of things. I no longer believed that novels should or could be inspired only by life, and not by other novels. I knew now that this belief was itself a novelistic device—that it was precisely the European novel tradition, after
Don Quixote
, that gave rise to the idea of the falseness and sterility of literature, its disconnect with real life and real education.

In fact, this idea wasn’t unambiguously present in
Don Quixote
. Consider the famous “book inquisition” episode, in which the priest and barber attempt to cure the knight’s madness by purging his library. The received version of this episode is that Quixote’s friends burn most of his books, mirroring the received message of
Don Quixote
that romances are stupid and dangerous. But if you actually keep count, you see that, of thirty books mentioned during the inquisition, only fourteen are consigned to the flames, while another fourteen are officially pardoned. This equivalence reflects the balance between life and literature in the plot—which, as Foucault observed, consists of “a diligent search over the entire surface of the earth for forms that will prove that what the books say is true.” Quixote’s adventures in the world, his friendship with Sancho Panza, his reconciling of sundered lovers, the entertainment he affords to countless bored Spaniards—all this, no less than the damage he causes, comes from his determination to experience life in terms of his favorite books, to bring books into the field.
Don Quixote
could only have been written by someone who really loved chivalric romances, really wanted his life to resemble them more closely, and understood just what it would cost.

Thinking about
Don Quixote
, I began to wonder about other possible methods for bringing one’s life closer to one’s favorite books. From Cervantes onward, the method of the novel has typically been imitation: the characters try to resemble the characters in the books they find meaningful. But
what if you tried something different—what if you tried study instead of imitation, and metonymy instead of metaphor? What if, instead of going out into your neighborhood pretending to be the hero of
Amadís of Gaul
, you instead devoted your life to the mystery of its original author, learned Spanish and Portuguese, tracked down all the scholarly experts, figured out where Gaul is (most scholars think Wales or Brittany)—what if you did it all yourself, instead of inventing a fictional character? What if you wrote a book and it was all true?

What if you read
Lost Illusions
and, instead of moving to New York, living in a garret, self-publishing your poetry, writing book reviews, and having love affairs—instead of living your own version of
Lost Illusions
, in order to someday write the same novel for twenty-first-century America—what if instead you went to Balzac’s house and Madame Hanska’s estate, read every word he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could about him—and
then
started writing?

That is the idea behind this book.

_____________

*
The Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum expresses this idea in
Tolstoy in the Seventies
, characterizing
Anna Karenina
as “a continuation of
Eugene Onegin
,” and Anna as “a kind of reincarnation of Tatyana.”

*
For example: “The morning after her granddaughter’s frantic phone call, Lorraine skipped her usual coffee session at the Limestone Diner and drove out to the accident scene instead”; “Graves had been sick for three days when, on the long, straight highway between Mazar and Kunduz, a dark blue truck coming toward them shed its rear wheel in a spray of orange-yellow sparks.”

†
The
Best American
anthologies of 2004 and 2005 each included one story involving the Islamic world, each with a character called Hassan.

When the Russian Academy of Sciences puts together an author’s
Collected Works
, they aren’t aiming for something you can put in a suitcase and run away with. The “millennium” edition of Tolstoy fills a hundred volumes and weighs as much as a newborn beluga whale. (I brought my bathroom scale to the library and weighed it, ten volumes at a time.) Dostoevsky comes in thirty volumes, Turgenev in twenty-eight, Pushkin in seventeen. Even Lermontov, a lyric poet killed in a duel at age twenty-seven, has four volumes. It’s different in France, where definitive editions are printed on “Bible paper.” The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade manages to fit Balzac’s entire
Human Comedy
in twelve volumes, and his remaining writings in two volumes, for a combined total weight of eighteen pounds.

The Collected Works of Isaac Babel
fills only two small volumes. Comparing Tolstoy’s
Works
to Babel’s is like comparing a long road to a pocket watch. Babel’s best-loved works all fit in the first volume: the Odessa, Childhood, and Petersburg cycles;
Red Cavalry
; and the 1920 diary, on which
Red Cavalry
is based. The compactness makes itself felt all the more acutely, since Babel’s oeuvre is known to be incomplete. When the NKVD came to his dacha in 1939, Babel’s
first words were, “They didn’t let me finish.” The secret police seized and confiscated nine folders from the dacha, and fifteen from Babel’s Moscow apartment. They seized and confiscated Babel himself, on charges of spying for France and even Austria. Neither manuscripts nor writer were seen again.

In the next years, Babel’s published works were removed from circulation. His name was erased from encyclopedias and film credits. Rumors circulated—Babel was in a special camp for writers, he was writing for the camp newspaper—but nobody knew for sure if he was dead or alive. In 1954, the year after Stalin’s death, Babel was officially exonerated, and the dossier of his criminal case made public. Inside was just one page: a certificate attesting to his death, under unknown circumstances, on March 17, 1941. Like Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” Babel had vanished, leaving behind a single sheet of paper.

Nobody really knows why Babel was arrested when he was. He had made powerful enemies early in his career with the publication of the
Red Cavalry
stories, which immortalize the botched Russo-Polish military campaign of 1920. In 1924, Commander Semyon Budyonny of the First Cavalry publicly accused Babel of “counterrevolutionary lies” and character assassination. In later years, as Budyonny rose in the Party system, from marshal of the Soviet Union to first deputy commissar for defense and Hero of the Soviet Union, Babel found himself on increasingly thin ice—especially after the death of his protector, Maxim Gorky, in 1936. Nonetheless, he survived the height of the Great Purge in 1937–38, and was arrested only in 1939, when World War II was just around the corner and Stalin presumably had bigger fish to fry. What tipped the scale?

The Nazi-Soviet pact might have played a role: because of Babel’s close ties with the French Left, his continued existence was necessary to maintain Soviet-French diplomatic relations—which
became a moot point once Stalin sided with Hitler. Some evidence suggests that Babel was arrested in preparation for one last show trial that was to accuse the entire intellectual elite, from the film legend Sergei Eisenstein to the polar explorer Otto Schmidt, but which was called off in September when Hitler invaded Poland.

Some scholars attribute Babel’s arrest to his bizarre relationship with the former people’s commissar Nikolai Yezhov: Babel had had an affair in the 1920s with Evgeniya Gladun-Khayutina, Yezhov’s future wife, and it was said that, even in the 1930s, Babel would visit the couple at home where they would all play ninepins and listen to Yezhov tell gruesome stories about the gulag. When Lavrenty (“Stalin’s Butcher”) Beria came to power in 1938, he made a point of exterminating anyone who had ever had anything to do with Yezhov.

Others insist that Babel was arrested “for no reason at all,” and that to say otherwise is to commit the sin of attributing logic to the totalitarian machine.

When Babel’s box in the KGB archives was declassified in the 1990s, it became known that the warrant for his arrest had been issued thirty-five days after the fact. Following seventy-two hours of continuous interrogation and probably torture, Babel had signed a confession testifying that he had been recruited into a spy network in 1927 by Ilya Ehrenburg and for years systematically supplied André Malraux with the secrets of Soviet aviation—the last detail apparently borrowed from Babel’s late screenplay,
Number 4 Staraya Square
(1939), which chronicles the byzantine intrigues among scientists in a plant devoted to the construction of Soviet dirigibles.

“I am innocent. I have never been a spy,” Babel says in the transcript of his twenty-minute “trial,” which took place in Beria’s chambers. “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.” Babel was executed by firing squad in the basement of the Lubyanka on January 26, 1940, and his body was dumped in a communal grave. Nineteen forty, not 1941: even the death certificate had been a lie.

The first time I read Isaac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with a Jesus-like beard, an affinity for Russian literature, and a melancholy sense of humor, such that one afternoon he even “realized” the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: “
You’re
going to die. And
you’re
going to die. And
you’re
going to die.” I still remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused.

In this class we were assigned to read “My First Goose,” the story of a Jewish intellectual’s first night at a new Red Army billet during the 1920 campaign. Immediately upon his arrival, his new comrades, illiterate Cossacks, greet him by throwing his suitcase in the street. The intellectual, noticing a goose waddling around the billet, steps on its neck, impales it on a saber, and orders the landlady to cook it for his dinner. The Cossacks then accept him as one of their own and make room for him at the fireside, where he reads them one of Lenin’s speeches from a recent issue of
Pravda
.

When I first read this story in college, it made absolutely no sense to me. Why did he have to kill that goose? What was so great about sitting around a campfire, reading Lenin? Among the stories we read in that class, Chekhov’s “Lady with
Lapdog” moved me much more deeply. I especially remember the passage about how everyone has two lives—one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other “running its course in secret”—and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything you hold most important, interesting, and meaningful is somehow in the second life, the secret one. In fact, this theme of a second, secret life is extremely important to Babel, but I didn’t figure that out until later.

The second time I read Babel was in graduate school, for a seminar on literary biography. I read the 1920 diary and the entire
Red Cavalry
cycle in one sitting, on a rainy Saturday in February, while baking a Black Forest cake. As Babel immortalized for posterity the military embarrassment of the botched 1920 Russo-Polish campaign, so he immortalized for me the culinary embarrassment of this cake, which came out of the oven looking like an old hat and which, after I had optimistically treated it with half a two-dollar bottle of Kirschwasser, produced the final pansensory impression of an old hat soaked in cough syrup.

There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover. Often, it’s the material circumstances themselves that make you remember a book that way—but sometimes it’s the other way around. I’m sure that my memory of that afternoon—the smell of rain and baking chocolate, the depressing apartment with its inflatable sofa, the sliding glass door that overlooked rainy palm trees and a Safeway parking lot—is due to the precious, almost-lost quality of Babel’s 1920 diary.

The diary starts on page fifty-five—Babel lost the first
fifty-four pages. Three days later, another twenty-one pages go missing—a month’s worth of entries. “Slept badly, thinking of the manuscripts,” Babel writes. “Dejection, loss of energy, I know I will get over it, but when?” For the next couple of days, despite all his efforts, everything reminds him of the lost pages: “A peasant (Parfenty Melnik, the one who did his military service in Elisavetpol) complains that his horse is swollen with milk, they took away her foal, sadness, the manuscripts, the manuscripts . . .”

The diary isn’t about war, but about a writer during a war—about a writer voraciously experiencing war as a source of material. Viktor Shklovsky, who invented the theory that literary subject material is always secondary to literary form, was a great admirer of Babel. “He wasn’t alienated from life,” Shklovsky wrote. “But it always seemed to me that Babel, when he went to bed every night, appended his signature to the day he had just lived, as if it were a story.” Babel wasn’t alienated from life—to the contrary, he sought it out—but he was incapable of living it otherwise than as the material for literature.