centenary of isaak babel || the paradox of red cavalry

Canadian Slavonic Papers

The Paradox of Red CavalryAuthor(s): David K. DanowSource: Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 36, No. 1/2, Centenaryof Isaak Babel (March-June 1994), pp. 43-54Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40870771 .

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David K. Danow

The Paradox of Red Cavalry

In Red Cavalry the first story sets the tone: horrific violence thrust upon the unsuspecting narrator and reader, accompanied by a question at the end for which there is, and can be, no response. "And now I should wish to know... I should wish to know where in the whole world you could find another father like my father?" asks the daughter whose father has been butchered before her eyes.1 The question itself, we are told, is delivered "with sudden and terrible violence." In Babel's cycle of stories, violence that is sudden and terrible appears generic to the world he describes. That disturbing feature generates an equally compelling need to understand; these two aspects of the tales are inextricably united in the minds of both teller and reader. The focus of this essay will be on this fearful, human union, bom of that need for understanding linked to mindless brutality.

Like questions pervade the cycle. While Liutov, the most prominent consciousness of the work, is clearly and most consistently seeking to understand, throughout the tales there are numerous other seekers posing their own questions to which there are no answers. Old Gedali wants to know how he is to say Yes to the Revolution, when it "sends out in front nought but shooting..." In frustration the old man articulates in querying paraphrase what it is that he does not understand: "I cannot do without shooting, because I am the Revolution." In response to his implicit question (How can that be? How can the idea of universal brotherhood be squared with universal shooting?), the old man hears only his own paraphrase directed back at him, with added ironic overtones: "She cannot do without shooting, Gedali... because she is the Revolution." Pointing out that both sides are principally occupied with shooting, Gedali asks: "Then how is Gedali to tell which is Revolution and which is Counter-Revolution?... Woe unto us, where is the joy-giving Revolution?" (70-71). He gets no answer; both urgent questioner and author of ironic rejoinders fall into silence. As a further, deeper irony, not only does the old man receive no response, but Liutov as well must do without answers. Finally, since Liutov, as the principal voice, can provide little understanding, the reader is also left essentially on his own to unravel the terrible enigma of human being that Babel repeatedly and variously poses within the collection as a whole.

1 Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories (New York, 1955) 43. All translated references to Red Cavalry are from this collection, and will be subsequently noted in the text. The original is found in I. Babel', Sochineniia, vol. II (Moscow 1992).

Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. XXXVI, Nos. 1-2, March-June, 1994



44 DAVID K. DANOW

The question raised by the daughter in the first story of the cycle concludes that story. There is nothing further that can be said; having gleaned only sparse and brutal detail, the reader learns nothing more. In "Gedali," likewise, there are no answers. Thus silence appears as the predominant mode in these stories,

governed by a poetics that perversely inverts the Socratic mode of attaining understanding. Here questions do not beget answers; the persistent seeking for

understanding (Gedali, for instance, is certainly persistent) leads nowhere. In this world of cruel and murderous havoc, the primary teller of the tales and the reader, as well as numerous other fugitive seekers populating the stories, are all left to attain their own answers in what remains perhaps the quintessential existential situation of modern times. Briefly put, the ruling governance of that

contemporaneity that was Babel's, and is now our own, dictates that we either

acquire our understandings privately and independently - or we do without.

Having taken the horrendous situation of civil war as his subject, Babel

projects his world in extremis impassively, as a kind of norm - in a sense,

operating on the well-founded assumption that people can get used to just about

anything - and thereby models contemporary reality which, likewise, provides neither a set of recognized truths nor an undisputed source from which the seeker

may attain "true" understanding (as opposed to a certain ephemeral solace). In this crucial respect, the tales, situated in an outlandish, horrific setting, model,

paradoxically, the prosaic, everyday life that constitutes ordinary existence. In a related respect, the inverted poetics of the cycle serves also to negate, in

effect, the possibility of achieving understanding through dialogue. What Bakhtin designates in his most profound meaning-producing model as the "self and other," engaged in shared dialogue, is entirely negated here. That model bears the potential to produce answers. In contrast, in Babel's stories, where such a model is dissolved into isolated speakers lacking a counterpart, simple talk is at once elevated to a higher "poetic" sphere, as stylized speech of an order that no one could actually speak.2 Affording little or no understanding, it exists solely to

exemplify its own formalized, stylized, self-indulgent form. Its principal virtue is thus precisely its form, which makes such speech the perfect exemplar of the autotelic sign (designed to designate itself alone) by which art is made.

This is not to suggest that among Babel's characters there is no desire to talk. Apart from such garrulous and disparate types as Gedali and Matthew

Pavlichenko, the one challenging the Revolution while the other extols it, all the while indulging in florid rhetoric, there is, for instance, the solitary (and

2 Consider, for example, "The Letter" (ÜHCbMo), which includes one of the most extraordinary exchanges reported in Red Cavalry, as the brother Simon converses with his father just prior to the latter' s execution at his own son's behest.



THE PARADOX OF RED CAVALRY 45

nameless) figure, who utters the plaint: "These nights on the line are long. There's no end to them. And a man sort of gets a longing to have a talk with someone else, but where's one to get someone else, I'd like to know?" (170). Typically, the speaker here receives no response, yet his query serves as counteipoise to "the fierce and wordless brigandage" (136) that typifies this hellish world. There is, in other words, at least the occasional desire to communicate and that desire is not limited to this speaker alone. Aside from Liutov, after all, there is a veritable profusion of storytellers and letter writers, who articulate their respective word and seek to be heard. Not only, then, is there the human bent toward violence, but a like inclination in the need to talk and to tell, which, one hopes, even more conclusively defines our kind. But that latter, distinctively human element is one that Babel can only grasp at among the "fierce and wordless brigandage" that affords so little potential for dialogue. As a result, the word uttered in solitude, the desire for verbal exchange, remains essentially unanswered. The speaker in Babel's world is generally a solo speaker. The letter writer, likewise, pens his word with little expectation of response. In rare counteipoise, the retired and disillusioned Khlebnikov receives an answer from his former commander Savitskii ("The Story of a Horse, Continued" [IlpoflOJiaceHHe HCTopHH oflHOH jiouiaflH]), who tells him, in effect, that if they meet again, it will be in Hell.

The question most often left unanswered has to do with violence, perpetrated or threatened, implicit or explicit. The young woman of the first story was forced to witness her father's murder, contrary to his last wish. Gedali was blinded by the dark force of Counter-Revolution, but feels an even worse threat from the supposedly "joy-giving Revolution" that has so far failed to calm his fear. To say that the crux of the stories is centered in violence amounts to a critical cliché. Violence is clearly at the core of what Liutov, in particular, struggles to understand, even as he perpetrates it himself, both physically and psychologically. He crushes the goose with his boot, shoves and punches a crippled epileptic, and threatens first one landlady ("I'll bum you... I'll bum you and your stolen calf [171]), then another ("I smelt meat in that cabbage soup of hers, and laid my revolver on the table..." [187]). Food, of course, is the essential thing; its absence is frequently a primary factor in dislocating character. Yet how are the individual manifestations of violence that focus the tales effected? What makes them so distinctive and profoundly affecting? Is there, in the cycle, a hidden understanding that somehow redeems these tales?

First, as noted, there is virtually no informed response to questions, whether implicit or explicit, centered on violence. The landlady, obliged to cook the goose, articulates obliquely (in mournful terms that suggest helplessness and



46 DAVID K. DANOW

further recourse to violence): "Comrade... I want to go and hang myself (76). The shoved and punched epileptic makes no response, but Sasha, the regimental whore who leads the beaten man away, expresses it thus: "Cocks have only one

thought in life - to go and tear at one another... And everything that's gone on

today makes me want to go and hide my face" (186-87). While, in response to

Sandy's offer to comfort her ("I don't mind laying myself out to be nice to you, if you like"), the other threatened landlady laments:

Never see no cabbage soup... It's gone, my cabbage soup has. People only go and show me weapons, and when there does come along a decent chap I could have a bit of fun with, I'm so sick of everything I couldn't get no pleasure out of sinning (190).

Not nearly so oblique as the response of the old woman deprived of her

goose, this equally plaintive remark nevertheless jibes with Sasha' s general deploring of what she sees. For these women, as for Gedali and, to a certain extent, for Liutov as well, there is and can be no explanation for the violence that "never lets up." Neither they, nor Liutov, nor the reader can get a clear grasp of what it is that motivates a man to kill. As partial recompense, however, we do encounter a kind of global response to the entire problem, uttered in summative fashion, as one figure (characterized only as "a sort of lively humpback") puts it: "Nowadays everybody judges everybody else... And condemns to death - it's as simple as that" (157). Seemingly, for the Cossack it is simple; there are no entangling questions, no extraneous circumstances that would prevent Matthew Pavlichenko, for instance, from carrying out his self-

appointed task, nor stop Prishchepa from taking his vengeance. Similarly, there are no extenuating circumstances that would allow Afonka Bida to forgive or even understand Liutov's failure to put Dolgushov out of his misery.

The desire for vengeance is simple; from one otherwise inarticulate

perspective, it is also simply human and perhaps stronger than the desire for talk heralded earlier. The same incontrovertible argument applies, it would seem, in the case of Dolgushov. He needs to be shot; since that is the only possible solution, there can be no attendant questions. For the Cossack riders, as distinct from Liutov and his counterparts, questions of life and death are fully codified. The matter, regardless of its complexity, is clear; correct and proper behavior have long ago been both prescribed and proscribed: one takes vengeance for harm

perpetrated against oneself or one's family; one does not leave a helpless comrade to suffer further at the hands of the enemy. Thus it cannot be fathomed how Liutov can go into battle without cartridges in his pistol. For once, then, the

question of violence is posed by one of those for whom, presumably, there are no questions: "The Poles go after you, and you don't go after them... What for?" And the response he gets, prior to receiving a punch in the face, is the same



THE PARADOX OF RED CAVALRY Al

mimicking paraphrase that Gedali had heard: "The Poles go after me and I don't go after them..." (186) - a response that once again answers nothing and resolves nothing.

Moral and ethical resolution on the philosophical plane is alien to the Cossack; it is central to the Jew. The latter seeks intellectual resolution - an idea that takes recourse in law, tradition, humane conduct. Rather than resolution, the Cossack seeks retribution, whatever the cost. After the loss of his horse, Afonka Bida wails: "No, I won't give in to accursed fate!... Now I'll go and butcher the bloody Poles without mercy. I'll do them in right to the heart, do them damned well in..." (134). The Cossack will go one better than an eye for an eye; he will go an eye for a horse. "Where his left eye had been, a pink swelling gaped repulsively in his charred face" (137). No matter now the loss of a horse, nor the loss of an eye; retribution has been effected. For the Jew, what counts is the idea: Is it moral/ethical? For the Cossack, what matters is the act: Have I paid my enemy out? Whether it is termed an act of retribution or of vengeance is of no consequence; as the fundamental tenet of such a code, one must act. In other words, one responds - to the vagaries of fate, to the distressing hand dealt by (mis)fortune - wordlessly. In clear opposition to the life of the mind that guides the principal consciousness of the stories is the life of the body which, seeking no approbation, remains the governing ethos of the cycle. Intellect is subordinated to brute force, the idea to the act. Were Babel to have had it otherwise, the reader would have had less. In this existential universe of free choice, in which all that one has is the code and a horse (or the need of one), the man who tears at life trudges off "alone, utterly alone..." (135).

Afonka Bida, Matthew Pavlichenko, Prishchepa all ride out alone. Their individual aim is the same - to maim and to kill. Yet their respective projects are not conducted in secret. Rather, each has his ready audience, witnesses as eager spectators or avid listeners. In proclaiming his murderous exploit, Matthew Pavlichenko, who serves both as chief protagonist and "chorus," relates to his fellow "Stavropol boys" in lyrical, poetic fashion how he took his enemy "by the body and by the throat and by the hair" in order "to get to know what life really is, what life's like down our way" (106). While Prishchepa goes about the task of settling his accounts, "The inhabitants of the settlement watched his progress sullenly... The young Cossacks were scattered over the steppe, keeping the score" (108-9). In the case of Afonka Bida, we read: "Only the menacing murmurs from the countryside - traces of rapacious plundering showed us his arduous course... Echoes ofthat ferocious and single-handed struggle reached our ears, echoes of those despairing, lonewolf attacks upon the masses" (136). In each case, there is no possibility of shame, criminality, or of conducting oneself



48 DAVID K. DANOW

otherwise. Further, the possibility of such behavior even being perceived as heinous is at once precluded.

Echoes of the "lonewolf ' going at others alone appears a kind of tautology. Yet in this world of vengeance not talked about but acted upon, what might not readily appear tautological may nonetheless be akin. That each of these attackers goes out alone to get his own represents not only "facts" but unquestioned acts. The Cossack may ask how (in an incomprehensible act of inverted courage) a man rides into battle with an unloaded gun. But he does not question how one can be so pitiless as to leave a helpless comrade for the enemy "to play their dirty tricks." Certain conduct brooks no mitigating possibility. Behavior that obviates the code necessarily obviates the need to question circumstance. Entirely self-evident, then, the lack of a question suffices to explain the corresponding lack of an answer. Yet the reader, as well as the writer of Red Cavalry, presumes the need to pose one question at least: namely, how to explain the violence? For the Red Cavalry riders there is no such need. There is an enemy and there are themselves. There is the universal military code that proclaims unequivocally that one must kill or be killed. And, coupled with these irreversible facts, there is the desire to live. So, from the Cossack perspective, what question can there be? Such reasoning is as clearly evident as any tautology.

Yet the paradox remains; thoroughly engaging and all-pervasive, like the violence that engenders it in the first place, paradox is definitively a part of the work. As a principal fundament of the cycle, it is generated by Babel's unflinching ability to present images that nonetheless cause the reader to flinch, producing, in turn, the need to understand. For the main protagonists there is no such need; there is no uncertainty and no ambiguity. Thus Dolgushov says simply: "You'll have to waste a cartridge on me" (89), taking for granted what he considers his due and his comrade's duty. Conversely, but drawing on the same understanding in the same situation, Commander Truno v writes: "Having to die today, I consider it my duty to fire a couple of shots toward the possible bringing down of the enemy..." (150-51). Matthew Pavlichenko explains coolly: "Then I stamped on my master Nikitinsky, trampled on him for an hour or maybe more. And in that time I got to know life through and through" (106); of that he is sure. In the same fearful spirit, the closing of "Two Ivans" (flßa HßaHa) promises like cruelty: "Well, now I'm going to have sport with you, Ivan, and no mistake. You just wait and see the sport I'll have with you" (160). Whether the act is already performed or projected into the future, there is the same unwavering sense of certainty, as though it were already an accomplished fact.

The sense of a strong will in action derives precisely from such certainty. Even the idiot Kurdiukov ("A Letter") knows that "father was a dog" (51);




Diakov ("The Remount Officer" [HanajibHHK KOH3anaca]) never doubts that he will demonstrate to the poor supplicating peasant that the dying mare he received in return for his own horse is indeed "a mount" (54); Sidorov ("Italian Sunshine"

[CojiHue HTajiHH]) is certain that "The King [of Italy] must be sent to join his forebears" (67); Afonka Bida is close to doing the same thing for Liutov ("The Death of Dolgushov" [CMepTb flojirymoBa]) - out of absolute certainty that his murder would be just ("Get out of my sight.. .or I'll kill you" 90). Resulting from a like surety, "that stain from the face of the workers' land and the

republic" is, in fact, "washed away" (126) in a contrastively completed act of

perceived justice ("Salt" [Cojib]). Similarly, Khlebnikov knows that he has a

right to keep his horse ("The Story of a Horse" [HcTopHü oahoh jioiuaflH]) - or

resign; Afonka Bida knows he must get a horse - or die. Pavlichenko and

Prishchepa are certain that their death-dealing missions are just. Not one of these self-willed figures experiences doubt, uncertainty, or pity. Such sentiments are left for others. Questions of life and death - in their immediate concrete

application - aie immediately settled. This quick "settlement" precludes all other considerations: questions of

morality, ethics, law. Yet, for Liutov, who bemoans the fate of the bees (in the

opening line of "The Road to Brody" [IlyTb b Epoflbi]), whose hives offer the

only opportunity for purloined sweetness in bitter civil war, and who himself

expresses in analogous fashion virtually the only sentiment registered in the entire cycle, such problems are not raised either. Rather, the horror of violence and brutality is mitigated by expressions of feeling, concern, and the sustained

lyricism that frames many of the stories of the cycle.3 Hence, in the depiction of

yet another grotesquely sad image, we read: "I lit my little lantern, turned back, and saw lying on the ground the corpse of a Pole I had splattered with my urine.... I wiped the skull of my unknown brother, and went on, bent beneath the weight of the saddle" (155-56). That same democratic acknowledgement of brotherhood is extended in a more likely direction by Liutov when he encounters the dying "Red Army man Bratslavsky" (192), whom he had met earlier, designated then as "the cursed son, the last son, the unruly son" (79) in the court of the Hasidic Rabbi Mótale, the father. Now, lying naked and dying in a railroad car, that "cursed" son is buried "at some forgotten station. And I, who can scarce contain the tempests of my imagination within this age-old body of mine, I was there beside my brother when he breathed his last" (193).

•* For an extended discussion of this characteristic lyricism, in a companion study to the present essay, see David K. Danow, "A Poetics of Inversion: The Non-Dialogic Aspect in Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry'' Modern Language Review 86 (October 1991)- 939-53.



50 DAVID K. DANOW

Originally intended as the concluding passage to the cycle,4 these words bear considerable significance. On the one hand, they underscore the all-pervasive violence documented in the stories; on the other, they tentatively suggest a certain hope - tinged, nonetheless, with attendant irony - that Gedali's desire for "an International of good people" (71) eventually will be realized. His wish

implies the need for brotherhood, which is expressed in the stories in the two instances just noted. Yet the twin objects of Liutov's expressed sentiment are dead in both cases, giving good reason for pause rather than for optimism. Nonetheless, the sense of a relentless paradox emerges as not entirely negative but as also bearing a positive correlative. Since the very existence of a voice that

expresses humane sentiment serves as counteipoise to those that exist solely to sound a war cry.

Further, the presence of figures who either sing, paint, or make music

(Sandy the Christ, Pan Apolek, blind Gottfried) augment that barely audible sentiment in the face of the terrible despair expressed by the war- weary women of the cycle. In addition, those who practice their religious beliefs - Gedali, the Rabbi and his court, "the all-powerful body of the Catholic Church" (59) - and who maintain faith in the midst of unflagging carnage, offset the seemingly hopeless rage of war. Art performs a similar function. Suffering and Spirit are thus united in the religious imagery produced by "Apolek' s heretical and

intoxicating brush."

There was in this Berestechko church an individual and alluring way of looking upon the mortal sufferings of the sons of men. Saints in this temple went to their deaths with all the picturesqueness of Italian singers, and the black hair of the executioners was as glossy as Holophernes' beard (141).

Liutov's commentary here heightens the impression made by art. His first statement draws our attention, as it were, to the work. His second constitutes a verbal inlay of metaphor and simile that establish relations that are his alone. The pictorial image is thus enhanced, in the process, by the imagery of verbal art.

As a pronounced, greatly sustained element of the stories, Liutov's intellectual and cultural preoccupations, appearing as individual but repeated fragments in an otherwise unrelentingly blood-red mosaic, serve to remind one that the world of art, history, and learning have not entirely relinquished their

place to the seeming death of culture. In "My First Goose" (Moh nepBbiñ rycb), if Liutov initially wins over his bloody "brethren" through brutal behavior, he later makes a greater inroad into their ranks by reading to them. Conversely, in "The Song" (FlecHü), Sandy mollifies a hungry, threatening Liutov by

4 Babel later added "Argamak" as the final story.



THE PARADOX OF RED CAVALRY 5 1

dispelling the need for food ("So it was that... I was thwarted of my landlady's cabbage soup") and the use of a gun.

He turned away and, knowing full well what would give me pleasure, began a Kuban song.... I love that song. Sandy knew this.... And I listened to him, stretched out in the corner on the fusty hay. Reverie broke my bones, reverie shook the rotting hay beneath me" (188-89).

In sober reflection, Liuto v observes: "we needed his songs. At that time no one could see an end to the war.... Those songs are indispensable to us. No one can see an end to the war..." (189). In the more global terms that his "reverie" invites, we may conclude that it is art in general that is indispensable as the

paramount feature of human being most clearly juxtaposed to the mentality that

promotes war. It would be tempting but facile to say that the paradox of Red Cavalry is

resolved through art - that art in the multifarious forms by which it is repeatedly manifested and reflected upon in the stories provides the resolution to the riddle of life, the misery of war. Nonetheless, by its very presence and, indeed, proliferation in this world ravaged by war, it provides a partial resolution, at least a tentative understanding that being human entails not only savagery but the capacity to create beauty. That ability emerges from within hidden comers and unsuspected quarters. One of the least likely is the bruised and battered bludgeoner, Afonka Bida. The third paragraph of "In St. Valentine's Church" (Y cBflToro BajieHTa) begins: "I was amazed to hear the organ peal forth." Further, we read: "The sounds of the organ floated across to us, now slow and ponderous, now light and nimble. Their flight was laborious, and their reverberations rang on plaintively and long" (139). Appended to the description of Apolek's painting, certain "traces of destruction" that Liuto v had not noted earlier are remarked - followed by the words: "And Afonka Bida was still playing the organ." While the reader had already been made aware of its plaintive peals, it is not until now that we learn that it is Afonka Bida who was still playing. That unexpected fact is accompanied by more predictable detail:

He was drunk and wild and hacked to pieces, having returned only the day before with the horse he had seized from the peasants.... the Cossack would not stop, and his songs were many. Each sound was a song, and all the sounds were torn from one another. The song - its dense strain - lasted a second, then gave place to another (141).

Coupled, then, with the expected description of Afonka Bida as "drunk and wild" is the entirely unexpected indication that "each sound was a song" and that music might be a part of his sphere. The man who tears at life not surprisingly produces sounds that "were torn from one another." That the realm of art is not exclusionary, however, comes to us as something newly revealed, an epiphanic



52 DAVID K. DANOW

moment that confirms life even in the midst of death, just as the Cossack plays in the midst of those "traces of destruction" which he, sometime organist, undoubtedly wrought.

The sounds of Sandy's songs, the dissonant notes of the organ, as well as

snippets of history, emerge periodically as part of Babel's chronicle of death and destruction. Those snippets appear as "folios in which were printed hosannas to the Most Excellent and Illustrious Head of State, Joseph Pilsudski" (45); as the tombstone markings ("Carved gray stones with inscriptions three centuries old" (107) that essentially compose the brief lyric piece, "The Cemetery at Kozin"

(KjiaflöHme B Ko3HHe); as a song sung by "an old fellow with a bandore" that tells of "the ancient glory of the Cossacks" (118-19); and as "a fragment of a letter yellow with age" dated 1820, that asks if the Emperor Napoleon is really dead. Immediately counterpoised to that yellowed page rooted in the past is the voice of the Commissar proclaiming (to "the bewildered townsfolk and the

plundered Jews") an enigmatic future: "You are in power. Everything here is

yours. No more Pans" (121). History is revealed as mystery; analogous to the hidden chambers in "The Church at Novograd" (Koctc/t b HoBorpaae), it extends outward into the unknown:

We went around and around, searching. Bone buttons sprang beneath our fingers, icons split down the middle and opened out, revealing subterranean passages and mildewed caverns. The temple was an ancient one, and full of secrets. In its glossy walls lay hidden passages, niches, doors that moved noiselessly aside (46).

At times, however, history may appear in Red Cavalry as both immediate and very much known, as in the following personal and lyrical phrasing that

clearly surmises the end: "Tardy has been killed, Lukhmannikov has been killed, Lykoshenko has been killed, Gulevoy has been killed, Trunov has been killed, and the white stallion is no longer beneath me" (161). Here, through poetic refrain, commemorating the killing of both man and beast, there emerges a certain metonymy born of a peculiarly hellish logic that succinctly communicates the sense of one's own inevitable violent death. On a more

global, historical plane, a like surmise is encompassed by another warrior's

clearly dispassionate remark: "'We've lost the campaign,' muttered Volkov, and snored" (172). For the man who no longer has the white stallion beneath him, for the one who cannot remain awake, and for all the others - in that sound is

expressed the utter exhaustion that no one expresses. As an instance of further, unobtrusive historical account, rendered in more

fully developed fashion, "Discourse on the Tachanka" (YneHHe o Tanamce) provides a survey of the innovative and effective use of a small battle wagon, "a mobile and formidable instrument of warfare" that is likened to "the Ukrainian

village of not long ago - savage, rebellious, and grasping" (83-4). The sketch




concludes on a note, inspired by a fleeting reference to the Jews of Volhynia and Galicia ("their capacity for suffering was full of a somber greatness") that is both historical and lyrical: "Watching them, I understood the poignant history of this region: the stories of Talmudists renting taverns, of Rabbis carrying on usury, of young girls raped by Polish troopers and over whom Polish magnates fought pistol duels" (86). That brief concluding frame documents the history of dispaiate peoples fairly tripping over themselves in an unceasing effort to commit mayhem and folly, much as Red Cavalry itself recounts essentially the same detail on a grand scale. As a significant redeeming factor of a work pervaded by a single-minded preoccupation with violence and death, part of that "grandness" of scale may be attributed to the intermittent historical detail, whether projected in stone or song, that provides a sense of continuance; the hellish time of the present thus exists within an artistic framework that acknowledges the diachronic over the synchronie. The sense of history that also pervades Red Cavalry provides a counterbalance to the alternative of a static synchrony inexorably promising the certainty of a frightening, unchanging reality. Instead, there is the feeling of a continuum, affording the possibility of flux and consequent change. The carnage that is now present, in other words, need not exist indefinitely. The stones that populate the cemetery at Kozin need not proclaim the future but only signify the past.

Nonetheless, while the intermittent linked presence of art, history, and especially a sustained lyricism serves to mitigate a dismal present, Red Cavalry is permeated by the sense of an ever-present death that makes itself felt in Babel's striking imagery. "More rain fell. Dead mice floated along the roads. Autumn set its ambushes about our hearts, and trees like naked corpses set upright on their feet swayed at the crossroads" (170).

The past, in its own (lyrical) way, also fares poorly. Thus, we read: "Woe unto you, Res Publica; woe unto you, Prince Radziwill, and unto you, Prince Sapieha, risen for the space of an hour!" (45). Woe unto the past; but is there allotted to the present more than "the space of an hour?" That is a question that Red Cavalry does not take up. Instead, we are told, regarding Berestechko, for instance, that "The little town reeks on, awaiting a new era..." (120). The cycle indulges neither in speculation nor optimism for the new "republic" or man in general. There is only the paradox of contemporary historical fact. What Babel describes is both contemporary and historical; the reader never doubts the immediacy or the veracity of what is depicted. The stories convey a joint sense of history being lived at the level of individual biography and of history being made collectively - now, at the present moment of narration. Just as there can be no possible answer to the young woman's question that concludes the opening story, which sets the tone for what follows, the final lines of the entire cycle



54 DAVID K. DANOW

sound a hopeful note in only a very minor key. "Months passed, and my dream came true. The Cossacks stopped watching me and my horse" (200). Yet those words follow the wistful observation, "I was alone among these men whose friendship I had not succeeded in gaining" (199), emblematic of the commitment to a vision of existential reality that focuses the stories, affording the paradoxical sense of the contemporary merging with the historical in a troubled present that is now.

Paradox is thus at the core of the stories in a temporal sense: what is past appears present; history is made immediate. Paradox is also central both thematically and philosophically, with the question of violence and how it is to be understood, situated - multi-leveled - at the core of the paradox itself. Thus the question, 'How are we to understand violence?* entails the related, embedded problem of 'Who is "we"?' For the perpetrator of violence - the Cossack who is protagonist - does not "perpetrate" the question. To do so would constitute a kind of indulgence on his part equivalent to the writer's unlikely projection of a false optimism. The Cossacks' answers are ready-made - by the code, the need to survive, and, in effect, by the nature of war itself. Hence, only the outsider has the need for an answer; the insider seeks only to live or, if need be, to die without shame. As a final paradox, then, Red Cavalry makes of the reader - much as we find in the author - a vicarious seeker, who can never partake of the code, never participate in the violence it condones, and, ultimately, never understand. Yet in all this negation, there remains the sustained desire to live, impressive and instructive in itself, linked to the power of art, at which, also paradoxically, and as here shown, both "outsider" and Cossack are able to marvel. As a final illustrative instance, in "Berestechko," the Cossack appreciation for song is followed, subsequently, by more music - this time the sound of war:

From behind a burial stone an old fellow with a bandore crept forth and, plucking the strings, sang to us in a childish treble of the ancient glory of the Cossacks. We listened to his songs in silence; then unfurled the standards and burst into Berestechko to the sounds of a thundering march (118-19).

The passage, in effect, is peculiarly emblematic both of Red Cavalry, as a striking encapsulation of its principal themes, and of the present topic. For here the merging of art, history, and (potential) violence is manifested in a way that is undeniably and inexplicably human. But if violence is itself human, a fact that Babel so ably shows and cannot subsequently deny, then art is, perhaps, what unites us in our otherwise disparate humanity.



centenary of isaak babel || the paradox of red cavalry

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