Centuries in Collision

...Babel needed no mysticism...

...blinded in the course of action, was intended by Pasternak to be "symbolic of Russia, oblivious for so long of its own beauties, its own destinies...

...The house seems less and less shut off from the country outside...

...He was a modern through and through, and thus understood that social chaos, senseless violence, isolation, and sudden death are not merely regrettable, transient deviations from the norm, but the very condition of mankind...

...This kind of conscious symbolism usually bodes ill, and The Blind Beauty is no exception...

...Eventually Grishchuk is repatriated, and the two men part in an unforgettable scene: "His master saw him off as far as the edge of the village...

...The present volume also includes a 1937 interview...

...The lights go out, the windows are flung open, and in Pasternak's stage direction...

...No wonder the "intensity, irony and ambiguousness" of his writing gave Lionel Trilling such a turn back in 1929, when the "Red Cavalry" stories first started appearing in English...

...Babel on the other hand believed, with Lennie Bruce, that "there is only what is," which he explored with the despairing pragmatism that is the handmaiden to art in our time...

...But what is extraordinary about Babel, what I believe puts him in a class with Kafka and Beckett, is his understanding that all situations are extreme...

...For it betokened a knowledge of the human heart in ill accord with Marxist utopianism, not to mention "Socialist realism...

...More important, however, was the repressive political climate of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, which reduced him to near silence during what would surely have been his most productive years...

...a discussion on the nature of art between Dumas and the serf actor Agafonov which would have given Pasternak an opportunity to outline his own views on the subject...

...To begin with, it is very curiously structured, even allowing for the fact that it is only a half or two-thirds finished...

...The story, dated 1934, is perhaps Babel's best work: Its strong spare writing moves and gladdens the heart, and restores one's faith in the power of words...

...Zhivago was dreadful, but it did convey the sentimentality, the vaguely inspirational tone...

...The first and higher order is that which exists in eternity and is represented by poetry (or art), through which it may be glimpsed...

...As if this were not enough, in Scene Two of The Prologue the Countess and her former lover, now an officer in the Swedish Army, meet 15 years later in a wood to discuss the aftermath of their affair—and more particularly to tell the audience about their love-child, Agafonov, who is ultimately to be the hero of the play...

...All ends in darkness, with the whispering of treacherous serfs plotting further downfalls...

...His war stories, untainted by the pornography of violence, are strongly reminiscent of The Red and the White, a recent Hungarian film about the Civil War and the only movie I have seen that conveys so effectively the almost accidental quality of war...

...Zhivago, no matter how lavishly described, never seems more than backstage thunder...

...He rested his gray, disheveled, and demented head on Grishchuk's shoulder...

...Babel early established himself as a master of the colorful-ethnic-villainy genre, with his tall tales of Benya Krik and a sort of Jewish Mafia that ran Odessa's Moldavanka quarter...

...Sunset," a miniature epic telling how Benya overthrew his patriarch of a father and became Benya the King, is a resounding addition to the repertoire...

...The volume under review, subtitled "Stories 1915-1937," covers the whole of Babel's writing career...

...Pasternak was a visionary, with ideas about the redemptive function of the artist...

...He planned the play as a trilogy that was to span fully 50 years and encompass a wide range of characters...

...Babel Answers Questions About His Work...

...They stopped at the highway...

...Miss Babel has also included six journalistic pieces from 1918, originally published in Maxim Gorky's magazine New Life, in which some welfare institutions hastily thrown up by the Revolution are described—a home for blind veterans, a Socialist maternity ward, a home for juvenile delinquents...

...By presenting the terrifying and unpredictable without comment, as if it were perfectly reasonable, he breaks down the artificial barrier between civilization-as-we-know-it and the great Out There, where the dark side of man is unleashed and we revert to savagery...

...They stood for a while like this in a silent embrace...

...Russian history of the 19th century and in Pasternak's own lifetime seemed to him to indicate with particular intensity and drama the conflict between the two planes of reality as he conceived them...

...Besides a number of matchless war stories, there is some very early material recently unearthed by Soviet scholars consisting mostly of character sketches: people observed in the public library, in editorial offices, on the streets of Odessa...

...The episode is strongly reminiscent of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher...

...This, the longest surviving work by Babel (possibly the beginning of a novel, unfinished or lost), is worlds removed from the colorful shenanigans of the Odessa Jews...

...his sensibility was essentially 19th century...

...with representative characters popping up like ventriloquist's dolls to speak their piece and Dumas providing the feed lines, the text comes to an abrupt end...

...It is a revelation...

...This sense of the inherent precariousness of existence stems from the very structure of Babel's language...

...He was obsessed with concision, and took extraordinary pains to eliminate the superfluous...

...Her son—a Bolshevik and therefore a bridge between past and present—takes his mother and sister away from the shed, where the family has lived in poverty for generations, to begin a new life in Moscow...

...This is clearly a novelist's approach...

...Grishchuk," one of my favorite stories in the new collection—and the shortest (one page)?is about a Russian prisoner of war who has spent four years working for a German farmer "who lived alone and was out of his mind...

...He knew what he was about: "No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment"—and he placed his periods so that every sentence is a cliffhanger, with the abyss opening between one paragraph and the next...

...Babel hated people to talk about a writer's "development," the different "phases" of his work—yet it is difficult not to see "The Jewess" as a tremendous advance over the roustabout ethnicity of the earlier stories...

...The second and lower reality is that which we call by the name 'history,' and which exists only in time...

...In view of what was to have followed, it seems just as well...

...If babel's stature has been enhanced by posthumous publication, the same cannot be said of Boris Pasternak...

...As in the best social reportage of our own time, Babel combines the reporter's objectivity with a passionate concern that raises journalism to the level of personal witness...

...Babel's daughter Nathalie, who edited the present work, says that although he did continue writing, his unpublished manuscripts were confiscated when he was arrested in 1939, and probably destroyed...

...The contrast shows up in their work: Pasternak is ardent and talkative where Babel is noncommittal and taciturn...

...As Max Hayward explains in the Foreword, he believed that "there are two orders of reality...

...Babel's is ageless, guarded, pained, at once kindly and infinitely shrewd—the face of a man whom nothing could surprise, a man described by Paustovsky as "outwardly skeptical to the point of cynicism but who, in fact, believed in the simple goodness of the human soul...

...his writing is lit by a kind of flamboyant gallantry, while Babel's is intransigent to the point of gracelessness...

...The Naked and the Dead, or in any number of war movies...

...Acts of surpassing brutality are recounted casually, without surprise...

...The rest of the play is talk: not Chekhovian talk, not talk that develops the characters or advances the action, but the transparently contrived kind whose sole raison d'etre is to convey information or serve as a vehicle for philosophical speculations...

...Babel, who learned his craft amid the unimaginable chaos of post-Revolutionary Russia, in the years of foreign intervention and Civil War, is superbly equipped to bring this home...

...Pasternak fled from the knowledge of our solitude and mortality into a diffuse mysticism...

...In attempting to work out in literary form his ideas about history-ver-sus-eternity, he failed, ironically, to do justice to either side of the antithesis...

...In any case, Babel's extant oeuvre is quickly read...

...without toppling into farce...

...That is why his stories speak to us as intimately and urgently as if they had been written yesterday rather than 30 or more years ago...

...his vulnerable heart was so clearly in the right place, that to be less than enthusiastic about his work seems petty...

...Babel's reports from the front are not horror stories, not exotica...

...like a number of Russian landowners in the 18th and 19th centuries, keeps a peasant troupe...

...Diamonds are spilled, pistols are brandished and shots tired, a symbolic bust is shattered (blinding the peasant girl referred to earlier, whose wails of despair richly compound the confusion...

...The Blind Beauty (Harcourt, Brace and World, 128 pp., $3.95), an unfinished play that has come to light nine years after the author's death in 1960, is a historical drama about the liberation of the serfs...

...Every story in the new collection drives home the enormity of it...

...on the eve of the Great Reforms...

...As the celebrants made a point of telling each other, when it was 20 years too late to do him any good...

...There was to have been a performance by the peasant troupe...

...He is being trained as an actor under the enlightened tutelage of the wicked Count's liberal-minded nephew, who has inherited the estate and...

...Yet by tracing the fortunes of a typical Russian nobleman, his family and his serfs through the social upheavals of the 19th century, Pasternak apparently hoped to give dramatic expression to his philosophy of history and art...

...For us, living as we do on an island of stability in a sea of violent change, it is all but impossible to grasp what has been going on in other parts of the world for the past half century...

...The process culminated in November 1964, when an evening of speeches and readings was held in Moscow to commemorate what would have been his 70th birthday...

...This admirable emotion, which drove him to make 20 or more drafts of every story in pursuit of the "precision and brevity" recommended by Pushkin as the prime qualities of prose, was in part responsible for the mea-gerness of his output—some 50 short stories, a play and some diaries...

...Like the war stories, these studies in the social pathology of revolution speak to us with a directness that cancels the years between...

...With his passion for economy of means and his understanding that "one must often proceed by opposites," he conveys more of the dreadfulness of war in a couple of matter-of-fact pages than will be found in the whole of, say...

...Part One is called "Prologue," yet it is 73 pages long and represents the greater part of the text as we have it...

...Babel did not write much...

...The Count's frantic efforts to appropriate his wife's jewels in order to stave off bankruptcy arc frustrated by her serf lover—who also happens to be his valet...

...His madness took the form of keeping total silence...

...By the convenient device [!) of bringing some of these personages together with Alexandre Dumas, who is snowed up at a posting station on his way to see a performance in the serf theatre at Pyatibratskoe, Pasternak is able to give a superbly concentrated survey of Russia's mood...

...An old woman has just lost her husband...

...Babel's enforced silence remained unbroken until the late '50s, when the slow process of literary rehabilitation in his own country began with a limited edition of his Collected Works...

...But it is in Act One ("The middle part of the play") that The Blind Beauty goes under for good...

...His best work is a jewel of utterance surrounded and interpenetrated by ominous silence—the same silence maintained by Babel in the last years of his short life, which finally led to his downfall and death in the purges...

...Look at the photographs of the two men on the dust jackets of their respective books: Pasternak's face is boyish, open, passionately earnest, full of generous and forthright emotion...

...Then the German, throwing up his hands, ran back home with quick, doddering steps...

...a transcript of the moving speech Ilya Ehrenburg made at the commemorative meeting, and reminiscences of Babel by various of his contemporaries...

...In the midst of this "survey...

...In a brief reminiscence appended to the book, his friend and admirer Konstantin Paustov-sky reports that "Babel always spoke with contempt about wordiness...

...Anything at all can happen the very next second: The front runs right through your living room...

...Babel's loss to us is inestimable...

...To be critical of Pasternak is not easy...

...Finally, one of the brigands shoots the Count...

...The movie of Dr...

...Pasternak's design was ambitious...

...What is more, virtually the whole of the on-stage action (as distinct from what happens to the characters in the long intervals between scenes and then has to be explained to the audience) is exhausted in Scene One of the Prologue, in a single burst of melodrama that I doubt could be presented, in 1969...

...Because of this, their agonies and ecstasies seem gratuitous, their noble aspirations an exercise in the art of fine feeling...

...In fact, before setting out to review this new collection of stories by Isaac Babel I had never read a line by the sad, sardonic wordsmith of Odessa, the Jew with "spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart" (to borrow his mocking self-characterization...

...WRITERS^WRITING Centuries in Collision By Kingsley Shorter Unlike the wretched boy in the autobiographical title story of You Must Know Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 283 pp., $5.95), who like a Strasbourg goose is force fed alternate helpings of Learning and gefilte fish with horseradish under the relentless eye of his grandmother, I don't know everything...

...The German pointed at the church, at his heart, and at the unending empty blueness of the horizon...

...He was so obviously a good man in the plain old-fashioned sense...

...the protagonists are affected only tangentially by the turbulence of the period, their lives do not appear to be rooted in the larger events going on around them...

...The Blind Beauty might have made a magnificent novel, but as theater it is a flop...

...No need to wait for war or revolution: Even in time of peace, safe at home with pipe and slippers, security is an illusion...

...violent death seems the most neutral, most inevitable thing in the world...

...It is illuminating to juxtapose Babel and Pasternak, for the two writers were as different as chalk and cheese: Virtually all they had in common was the Russian language, and this very dissimilarity has helped me to identify what it is about Pasternak that has always made me uneasy...

...He simply chipped away at his material until what emerged was the irreducible human fact: the ultimate mystery, without which neither history nor eternity can ever be apprehended...

...Any unnecessary word in a piece of prose made him feel outright physical disgust...

...Unwittingly, the Foreward explains why: "The play's cast of characters is an almost complete range of the social types who will dominate the scene in the future...

...The "historical" material in Dr...

...As the scene descends into chaos, the house is invaded by serfs-turned-brigand who have been biding their time on the grounds...

...The title refers to a beautiful serf girl who...

...Then too, his reputation, absurdly inflated by Cold War adulation, is such that any attempt to raise doubts will probably strike his admirers as lese-majeste...

...quite the contrary, there is a flat, neutral quality about them, a disarming ordinariness that belies the extremity of the subject matter...

...Finally, there are the "Jewish" stories...

...and a scene in which the local chief of police tries to rape one of the serf actresses and is driven off with a bottle of champagne...

...It is a mixed bag...

...For all its ludicrous theatricality, this part is at least dramatically alive...

...The theory sounds good, but the play is stillborn...