This Savage Glory
REEVE, F. D.
This Savage Glory The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel. Edited by Walter Morison. Meridian Paperbacks. 381 pp. $1.55. Reviewed by F. D. Reeve Assistant Professor of Russian, Columbia...
...To turn his work into an apologia pro Iudaeis is to reduce it to the constrictions of a politics it only incidentally represents...
...His personal tragedy, which has, in part, created a notion of him as a flamboyant, long-suffering figure, followed not from his being "Jewish" but from his being politically independent...
...Thus the absurd apprenticeship of a Bouvard and a Pecuchet becomes the study of selfhood of the deracinated intellectual, and the deformity of a Hippolyte becomes the brutal murder of an old Jew...
...From my window I could see the estate of the Counts Raciborski—meadows and hopfields, obscured by the watery ribbon of the twilight...
...We have somewhat romanticized Babel beyond his own romanticism, but all the same his excellence remains, encased in its uniform...
...For him, they are the only and twin characteristics of our world...
...But I think that we more closely perceive what Babel was after by understanding Trilling's reminder that "the artist in our time is perhaps more overtly concerned with the apprehension of reality than the philosopher is," for it is the artist who can jam together the beautiful and the violent, the trademarks, for the time being, of what we most admire...
...This is what Babel did...
...We are grateful for this well-done, thorough collection of his stories, and we salute the memory of one of the most skillful, most important modern writers...
...In the following years he published more stories and became involved in the bureaucratic politics of the Government—I think especially of his speech at the 1934 Soviet Writers' Congress, the contradictions and confusions of which Lionel Trilling deftly points up in his introduction to this collection—but suddenly disappeared in 1937 and presumably died in a concentration camp before 1940...
...It is in this world that the Commissar shouts, "I now proceed to the election of the Revolutionary Committee...
...Go and cook it for me, landlady.'"—or the ending of "Di Grasso"—"[I] saw for the first time the things surrounding me as they really were: frozen in silence and ineffably beautiful...
...Isaac Babel is one of them—a resourceful, imaginative, off-beat story-teller who turned his provenance and the whole Russian Civil War into the badge of his own excellence...
...The semblance of naturalism has excited readers—as it provoked strong protest from Budenny, the real-life cavalry commander...
...Famous as the author of stories of Budenny's cavalrymen — Konarmiia (Red Cavalry, 1926) — Babel first published (1916, in Gorky's Letopis) stories so erotic he was prosecuted for pornography...
...Babel started with a deep affection for the realism and craftsmanship of Flaubert and Maupassant (he used to write stories in French, especially when he was at the gymnasia), but he altered their sort of 19th-century romantic realism greatly, both by the material he picked and by the attitude he adopted toward it...
...The moon, green as a lizard, rose over the pond...
...then the Civil War, and he fought with the Reds against the Poles...
...Reviewed by F. D. Reeve Assistant Professor of Russian, Columbia University NOT ONLY POETS are "encased in talent like a uniform...
...His name was made...
...The background against which everything happens is made of fantastic, Gogol-like, hyperbolic images that come from conventions of literature but seem to apply to life: "The stilly dusk turned to blue the grass around the castle...
...It is a cliche of Babel commentary that his method is one of "contrast and paradox...
...The war came...
...Their success encouraged him to publish his stories of life with the cavalry army, Red Cavalry, which came out in 1926 and included a number of the Odessa stories...
...The spirituality of violence and the eroticism of beauty are the elements of Babel's work which allure us and which we can never understand...
...We must remember that, as Trilling says, he "never for a moment forgets what the actualities of this savage glory are...
...People have emphasized the sensuality, the coarseness, the exoticism and the romanticism in all Babel's stories...
...Babel sees, feels, hears and reports the incongruities of our world—the horror among the platitudes of humanism, the exquisite detail in the pile of barbarisms...
...No man is completely independent, of course, and certainly not in literature...
...some prose writers are too...
...Violence has changed the world since the 19th century, and part of Babel's success is his skill in transforming, in such stories as "The Letter" or "Berestechko," the stupidity of the violence among the soldiers into a poignant and purposeful expose...
...It is wrong-headed to regard Babel as a "Jewish" writer: Though he came from a middle-class Jewish family in Odessa, he was a Russian intellectual and was accepted as such in the 1920s...
...All his stories take shape by a sudden turn from one to the other, whether it be the ending of "My First Goose"— " 'Christ!' I said, digging into the goose with my sword...
...In 1923-25 he published a couple of collections of short stories of Odessa "life...
...The wonderful "king," Benya Krik, is not so much a Jewish gangster in Odessa as he is an enduring symbol of the perverse and beautiful force by which we now live and by which art moves...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 49
