red cavalry: a novel of stories

Russian Literature XXXIII (1993) 249-264 North-Holland

RED CAVALRY: A NOVEL OF STORIES

JAN VAN DER ENG

Several studies of Babel’s narrative art qualify ~onazrnr$r @ed Cav&-yJ as something more than a cyclic structure. Ragna Grongaard notes a tendency from the cyclic towards the novel-like arrangement when she writes that in her study “it is the view of the work as a cycle - or, as might cautiously be suggested, the ‘novel viewpoint’ - that has dominated” (29).2

Danuta Mendelson describes IZecf Cava@ as an “episodic novel in the modernist tradition” (114). She calls it “a memoir of a certain period preserved in a book of thirty-four chapters” and quotes Babel’s letter to Furmanov of 4.11.1926, which clearly indicates “that he had a segmental development in mind for the stories, which he saw in a dual role of independent units and chapters” (cf. also the note in his diary quoted by Patricia Car-den: “Short chapters saturated with content”, 42).

Most of these chapters have the status of independent stories. For some units, however, the qualification ‘story’ may be considered doubtful as Luplow points out with respect to ‘Prishchepa’, which according to her is simply a brief anecdote, ‘The Cemetery at Kozin’, which she calls “a lyric sketch”, ‘Continuation of the Story of a Horse’, which consists of two juxtaposed letters and in her eyes therefore goes without narrative construction, and ‘The Brigade Commander’, which she designates as “a brief character sketch” (110). Luplow adds that “these [. . .] units acquire their proper significance in the light of the larger narrative structure - the story of the Polish campaign and of Lyutov’s experiences in that campaign”(ll0).

The same, however, holds in her opinion also for the narrative pieces which may be considered stories in their own right. The question then

0304-3479/93/$06.00 @ 1993 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reseNed.

250 Jan van der Eng

arises how Babel manages to preserve the independent short-story status of most of the sections of Red Cava& and at the same time succeeds in making them an integral part of its narrated world.

One of the means to achieve this double effect consists in the truncation of the habitual transitions from one narrative section (story) to the next: new developments will not be announced at the end of a narrative unit nor continued in the beginning of the next. Even when two short stories are connected by the same characters and by strict chronological and topological designations, this is done so unobtrusively that the occurrences uniting them in place and time and causal succession escape from the reader. So it is with the transition from ‘Gedali’ to ‘The Rabbi’. The last sentence of the former short story reads: “Gedali, the founder of an impossible International, has gone to the synagogue to pray.” ‘The Rabbi’ begins with a long metaphor-laden and passionate statement about Hasidism. The subsequent observation that Gedali, having come to the end of his prayers in the synagogue, took the narrator to Rabbi Motale is as it were lost between Gedali’s outcry and the continuation of the story: the contrastive account of a cheerful Hasidic gathering in rabbi Motale’s room. Moreover, the tenuous link between the two stories is as it were overrun by separating them by means of an intercalated tale describing the narrator’s entry into Budenny’s cavalry army. This tale takes us back in time to the beginning of his career. And it confronts us with a major device of construing the development of Red Cavaky as a kind of novel, while at the same time assuring the independent quality of each of its narrative sections.

I am thinking of the flash-back device pertaining to the intercalated story ‘My First Goose’, which refers to an episode absolutely different from the experiences described in the Jewish stories located in Zhitomir. The latter stories are in their turn flash-backs in relation to the Novograd stories, in particular the opening story of Red Cavaky ‘Crossing the Zbruch’ . These flash-backs have to be reconstructed by the reader: there are no time indications such as “at the beginning of my cavalry career” (concerning ‘My First Goose’), or “some weeks ago during our stay in Zhitomir” (concerning ‘Gedali’ and ‘The Rabbi’).

As a consequence of these hidden retroversions in time the autonomy and consequently the short-story status of these tales is preserved. It is only thanks to the reader’s reconstructive effort that they constitute stages in a novel-like story line. As such these flash-backs are what L&nmert calls

untergeordnete Bestandteile der Gegenwartshandlung bzw. eines ti sie relativ gegenwtitigen Handlungsstranges. Der Erzghler verltisst also hier die Gegenwart nicht, urn an zeitlich ftierer

‘Red Cavalry’: a Novel of Stories 251

Stelle einen anderen Teil seiner Erz$ihlung zu beginnen, sondern er tihrt ausholend ein Stick Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart ein. (101-102)

The narrator’s rather coarse conduct in the house of the Jewish family before he faced the facts (the pogrom related in the opening tale ‘Crossing the Zbruch’), acquires its preparatory perspective when set against his behaviour in the eighth story (‘My First Goose’), which marks the beginning of his cavalry career. This story emphasizes the narrator’s desire at all costs to be accepted by the Cossacks. His exalted joy when at last he is admitted to the company of the Cossacks after he has ‘obliged’ them with some brutal and bloody performances, does to some extent explain his strained initial effort not to know, not to see, not to understand the symptoms of the pogrom recorded in the opening tale of Red Cavalry, just as if he were a plain Cossack horseman who is not likely to be impressed by such occurrences. The reconstructing reader may hence infer that the narrator’s pose in the opening story fits in with his Cossack role, however forced this role may seem under the present conditions. A case in point is the narrator’s endeavour to forget about his Jewish identity and in particular about the anti-Semitic scourges which ravaged his fellow men and which, according to the opening story launched by the Poles, were also an habitual accompaniment of Cossack raids.

The narrator’s strained attitude in ‘Crossing the Zbruch’ is the more stupefying as some ten days earlier, during his stay in Zhitomir, he be- haved in an open-minded loyal way, not in the least making a secret of his Jewish origins. In the beginning of the story ‘Gedali’ he even exults over the sweet memories flooding back to him on the eve of the Sabbath; he seeks the company of oId Gedali, with whom he thereupon attends the merry Hasidic meeting at Rabbi Motale’s house.

The story ‘The Rabbi’s Son’ - initially planned as the finale of Red Cavalry- begins with a flash-back to this meeting. The link with this tale (‘The Rabbi’) is unmistakable as some details are repeated word for word and as, of course, the same characters hold the scene. But these flash- backs also contain unexpected incidents that seem unbelievable in the light of the earlier story, notwithstanding the strong suggestion that they were fully covered in ‘The Rabbi’. In other words, the flash-back takes the form of a ‘paralipse’, to use Genette’s term (93). The new amazing information in this case concerns the Rabbi’s son reading from the Torah during the meeting described in the story ‘The Rabbi’. This performance is on the one hand completely at odds with his commitment to the revolution, on the other it throws light on the youth’s ambiguous position, due to his Jewish upbringing about which the penultimate (initially last) story provides ample information. Moreover, the portrayal of the Rabbi’s son is of prime

252 Jan van der Eng

significance for one of the constructive principles underlying the novel. An important novelistic device for suggesting a developmental course in a main character’s life is indeed the (mostly) implied juxtaposition with secondary characters. It is the reader who on the basis of some scarce hints, should figure out the how and why of such a juxtaposition, i.e. its significance for the representation of the principal character. Next to the Rabbi’s son, some other figures in Red Cavalry sewe this purpose. Thus without any introductory remarks elucidating their relations, Afonka Bida turned out to be a close friend of the narrator. This friendship was stated several times in the story ‘The Road to Brody’. The attentive reader will perhaps grasp the reasons behind this intimacy when he sees that in this story ample room is given to Afonka Bida’s poetical performances, to his tale about the bees, which refused to strike at Christ (“a carpenter like us”), and to his song about a subaltern who in a drunken stupor mounted his steed and set off for the heavens on the day of the beheading of John the Baptist. Bida’s poetic leanings must have been an important element in the friendship with the narrator, who is himself a poetically inspired man in almost all his memoirs of the Russian-Polish war. But certainly also Bida’s justification of the revolution and its consequences must - in the beginning - have appealed to him, notwithstanding his complaint (in the story’s first paragraph) about the extermination of the bees after the hungry Cossacks went to look for food and extracted the honey from the hives. This does not, however, exclude the narrator’s more ambiguous attitude towards the principle that the end justifies the means: if for Bida “the bees got to stick it now: it’s for them too that we’re messing about here”, for the narrator “the chronicle of our workaday offences oppressed me without respite, like an ailing heart”.

Of paramount importance for the contingencies of the narrator’s path of life is the opposition to the Rabbi’s son. In both cases there are processes of growing awareness and altering positions which partly run parallel to each other and fmd their ultimate expression in the story ‘The Rabbi’s Son’. As a result the narrator’s perception of what is going on and his position in the Russian-Polish war is clarified. Thus he acknowledges in the Rabbi’s son “his brother”: this young man opts for the revolution as he does himself, and is like him deeply attached to his cultural and religious heritage. Eloquent evidence of this conflictive attachment in the case of the Rabbi’s son is - in the narrator’s wording - “the depressive rain” of the youth’s personal belongings strewn about when he - deadly wounded - is pulled into the propaganda train: ancient Hebrew verse, the Song of Songs, resolutions of the Party’s Sixth Con- gress, revolver cartridges, etc. Other points of similarity concern the aversion of both to the stagnation of the Hasidic way of life. It is implied in the young man’s situation as described in the stories ‘The Rabbi’ and ‘The

‘Red Cavalry’: a Novei of Stories 253

Rabbi’s Son’, it is explicitly worded by the narrator in the story ‘Bere- stechko’, e.g. in the following passage: “Hasidism kept that superstitious population of hawkers, brokers,.and tavernkeepers in stifling captivity.” This aversion in both cases motivates their reservations about the Judaistic traditions of human values and shades their monstrous alliance with the revolution.

It is probably intentional that Babel foregrounded the comparison of the narrator with the Rabbi’s son in the story which - as said - was initially planned as the finale of Red CavaZry. This finale seems designed to actuate the most important themes throughout the sequence of stories. As such it constitutes the typical closing part of the modernist type of novel which as a rule does not provide an epilogue but ends abruptly with an effect of central thematic significance, comparable to the short story’s finale.

For the reconstructing reader it means another powerful device for creating a novel-like structure: the echo-effect as a result of the thematic essentials brought into focus at the end.

Next to the comparison between the narrator and the rabbi’s son, discussed in the above, there is the cataclysmic development of the war, most expressively worded by the narrator as follows:

Our troops faltered and mingled. The political section train started crawling over the dead backbone of the fields. And a monstrous and inconceivable Russia tramped in bast shoes on either sides of the coaches, like a multitude of bugs swarming in clothes. The typhus-ridden peasantq rolled before them the customary hump- back of a soldier’s death.

This climactic moment of the disastrous course of the Polish campaign may trigger reminiscences of the various stages of the war, beginning with the July fights which led to Savicky’s replacement, as is stated in ‘The Story of a Horse’. Several stories are marked by this first sign of the cala- mitous turn of the war: ‘The Road to Brody’, ‘The Death of Dolgushov’, ‘Afonka Bida’ and ‘Two Ivans’. The narrator is faced with a worsening situation in the course of August. His observations in the stories ‘Bere- stechko’ and ‘Squadron Commander Trunov’ are significant in this respect. The downfall of the Red Cavalry Army is evoked by the narrator’s harrowing experiences in the stories ‘Zamoste’, ‘Chesniki’ and ‘After the Battle’. Mid September follows the chaotic withdrawal from non-Russian territory, described in ‘The Rabbi’s Son’.

An important device of modernist novel construction, engaging the reader to find out missing links in the information and to fill in the gaps, consists in the procedure of presenting the narrator’s maturing process

254 Jan van der Eng

along the line of sudden changes and unaccounted-for forms of behaviour in square contradiction to his previous attitudes and acts. Thus the circumstances which led to the end of the narrator’s friendship with Afonka Bida are related in the story ‘The Death of Dolgushov’. So is his shameful position after his failure as a cavah-yman by Bida’s standards: as is well known he proved unable to shoot the fatally wounded Dolgushov before the enemy would turn up to - in Dolgushov’s words - “play their dirty tricks”. Not only did Afonka turn his back upon the narrator but he was even on the verge of killing him. It was only through the agency of the kind Grishchuk that the mortally frightened narrator was saved.

However, their relations again undergo a sudden strong modification, without further details. In the story ‘Afonka Bida’ the narrator no longer seems afraid of his former friend, or otherwise in awe of his personality. He now even self-confidently seems to distance himself from Bida’s riding into the foot soldiers and whipping them “for fun”. This is evident in his reproachful outcry “What are you fooling about for?“.

Still more he keeps his reservations if not his authoritative condemna- tion of Afonka Bida in the story ‘In St. Valentine’s Church’. This story ends with the narrator reporting the outrage done to the religious feelings of the population. The laconic last words that the offenders “were brought before a court-martial” must apply primarily to Afonka Bida as the man who smashed St. Valentine’s shrine and, dead drunk, tried to play the organ not knowing when to stop. In other words, the narrator’s relation to Bida no longer bears the slightest evidence of a sense of inferiority vis-a- vis the reckless cavalryman whose friendship he once so greatly appre- ciated.

The unexpected turn in the narrator’s status is best illustrated - though not explained - by his doings in the story ‘Squadron Commander Trunov’. His conduct as described in this story is a far cry from the green- horn position he held in the story ‘My First Goose’. In an authoritative manner he indicts commander Trunov on the charge of slaughtering two Polish prisoners of war. And he assures this character of epic dimensions that he will file a complaint against him on account of these bestial murders. His authoritarian behaviour amongst the Cossacks is again put forward in the story ‘After the Battle’, but it is now complicated by a number of facts utterly opposed to the Cossack way of life. However, this complication is highly significant of the narrator’s being and gives it a further intriguing shading.

The coachman Akinfiev blames him for not having put cartridges in his revolver when he went to the attack at Chest&i. The narrator contemp- tuously scorns Akinfiev’s accusations, mimicking them. In front of a gathering crowd he even knocks him down. Nevertheless Akinfiev’s accusation is not unfounded. The closing paragraph of the story presents a

‘Red Cavalry’: a Novef of Stories 255

gloomy picture of the narrator walking away in darkness and rain and ending up with his recognition that to kill is completely beyond his ability.

This revelatory purport of a story’s close brings our discussion round to the significance of several story endings. As a matter of fact these endings are highly functional in the narrator’s growing self-knowledge and insight into the essential values of life. This applies not only to the endings given by the narrator himself but not infrequently also to utterances voiced by a character or otherwise brought to expression. The direct speech of the narrator is in the latter case of course a suggestive element but more decisive is the echo effect of several finales, resonant with quite comparable and sometimes almost identical but also complementary feelings and perceptions. Thus the outcry of the Jewish woman at the end of the opening story is echoed by the finale of the story ‘The Cemetery at Kozin . ‘* “0 death, o covetous one, o greedy thief, why couldst thou not have spared us, just for once?’ (cf. van der Eng 1984a: 587).

I may also refer to the closing short paragraphs of the story ‘The Death of Dolgushov’. On the one hand these passages concern his sorrow at having lost his best friend, on the other the consolation he found in Grishchuk’s gesture:

“There, you see, Grishchuk,” I said, “today I’ve lost Afonka, my closest friend.”

Grishchuk produced a shriveled apple from his driving seat. “Eat it,” he said to me. “Do please eat it.” And I accepted Grishchuk’s donation of charity, and ate his

apple in sorrow and in reverence.

This ending provides certain complementary aspects to the narrator’s dilemma, which also came to the fore in the story ‘After the Battle’, where his inability to kill was more or less sardonically contrasted with a view of the village drenched in blood. The closing paragraph begins with the words: “The village was swimming and swelling, and blood-red clay was oozing from its dismal wounds.”

The complementary aspects provided by the ending of the other tale may reside in Grishchuk’s understanding of and even sympathy with the narrator’s dilemma; this accounts for the narrator’s deep-felt gratitude.

The narrator’s doubtful position was already anticipated in the story ‘My First Goose’. The title itself seems calculated to mock his soldierly bravura: he can kill a goose, but certainly not a human being. And even killing a goose apparently forced him to go against his conscience. This seems evident from the pointed finale, in which the sights and sounds of the killing are evoked, thereby expressing the narrator’s anguish: “my heart, stained with bloodshed, grated and brimmed over”.

256 Jan van der Eng

The end of the story ‘The Road to Brody’ consists of a metaphor which, in enigmatic terms, expresses the narrator’s emotional ties with the Jewish, in particular the Hasidic way of life:

0 Brody! The mummies of your crushed passions breathed upon me their irremediable poison. I could already sense the deathly chill of orbits suffused with tears grown cold.

As I have explained elsewhere, the puzzling ending of this outburst becomes clear when set against the last words of Gedali’s exclamation in the beginning of the foregoing story ‘The Rabbi’: “With oozing orbits Hasidism still stands at the crossroads of the turbulent winds of history” (cf. van der Eng 1984b: 176). Thus a story may comprise passages con- taining echoes of other stories which shade the narrator’s innermost feelings and perceptions.

Another device for the development of the narrator’s position is a steady combination of themes in several stories. Such a combination triggers a revaluation of the revolution and of allegedly outdated traditions of the Jewish life-style. A persistent thematic juncture is the disastrous course of the war and the persecution of the Jews which, in the amalgam of motifs, repeatedly stand out with expressive force and provoke a reappraisal of traditional Jewish values which, of course, have a universal significance.

Already in the opening tale suggestions of the worsening state of the campaign (in the narrator’s dream), abhorrent details of a pogrom and (by implication) the narrator’s awareness of what is most essential in human life, are brought to expression. Thus the first tale of Red Cavalry fulfils an introductory role as to these thematic essentials. Its acme consists in the story of the Jewish woman: she tells how her father begged the Poles in vain to kill him in the yard so that she would not have to see him die; she ends her story with a desperate lament:

“And now I should wish to know where in the whole world you could find another father like my father?’

As said, the narrator must have become aware of the irreplaceable loss to which these words refer, the real values of human life. A comparable assessment of these values - which run counter to the ideals of the revolution - comes to the fore in observations of the protagonists in the stories ‘Gedali’ and ‘The Rabbi’.

Gedali’s plea for an International of good people is opposed to the Communist International which indiscriminately sacrifices everything to its utopian goals. And also the Rabbi’s teachings and life-style begin to


stand out as infinitely superior to the revolutionary creed and its consequences. This applies in particular to his trust in the wise man who never loses his high spirits and laughs away all hardships in his quest for the sparks of God’s creation, which according to Hasidism are lost in the world and must be released in an atmosphere of joy. In this connection he jokingly provokes the narrator, after the latter has posed as a poet putting into verse the adventures of the jester Hersch of Ostropol. The Rabbi acclaims this “great task” of vital importance. He uses a spiritual metaphor to imply that the narrator truly abides by the Hasidic principles:

“The jackal whines when he is hungry, every fool has folly enough for despondency, and only the wise man can tear the veil of being with his laughter.”

I refer also to the stories ‘Berestechko’ an ‘Zamoste’ in particular, because of their variations of the aforementioned more or less constant thematic combinations; these may raise the reader’s doubts about the superiority of the communist ideology and practice to the mores of Jewish life.

Like most Red Cavalry stories, ‘Berestechko’ rushes in upon the reader with a wealth of contrastive data. Shortly after the beginning an account is given of how the cavalrymen burst into Berestechko to the sounds of a thundering march; an old fellow with a bandura thereupon recalls in a song the days of ancient glory when the Cossacks, led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky, raided the region. But then the informed reader will relate Khmelnitsky’s name to pogroms which wiped out entire Jewish communities. He will furthermore recall the story ‘The Cemetery at Kozin’, in which the narrator has stated directly that Rabbi Azrael was “slain by the Cossacks of Bogdan Khmelnitsky”.

Moreover, the story ‘Berestechko’ itself also contains many details that repeatedly tune the reader’s understanding to the anguished anticipa- tion of a pogrom:

The inhabitants had put iron bars across their shutters, and silence, almighty silence, had ascended its small-town throne.

And then the narrator describes in laconic terms the brutal way a Cossack slaughtered a “silverbearded old Jew”, allegedly for espionage.

Details about underground hiding-places, which traditionally provided some escape from the worst effects of looting and murdering troops, add to the anguished atmosphere.

Against this background the Comintern’s liberation message - pro- nounced by the Commissar - supplies the story’s finale with a paradoxical point. This paradox is heightened by the contrasting evocation of a country

258 .Tan van der Eng

estate and mural paintings from a bygone aristocratic culture. It is further intensified by the increasing symptoms of a fatal turning-point in the campaign, already anticipated in the stories ‘The Road to Brody’ and ‘The Death of Dolgushov’ and also hinted at in the beginning of ‘Berestechko’ itselt this story describes in the opening passage the cavalrymen’s exhaustion and gloom:

The men were dozing in their tall saddles. A song gurgled like a brook running dry [.. .]. Pavlichenko’s felt cloak flew like a somber flag above the Staff.

The catastrophic course of the war, in close connection with the persecution of the Jews, culminates in the story ‘Zamoste’. Again the persecution is embedded in the framework of various thematic elements, ranging f’rom images of luxury and illusory signs of rockets, scattering like rose petals above the scene of a pogrom in nearby Zamoste, to the narrator’s bitter words about the lost war in the story’s finale.

The strongest impression in this story is evoked by a peasant’s comments incriminating the Jews as always guilty of any disastrous turn of events, whatever it may be. His harrowing words provoke the narrator’s sudden departure and shade all catastrophic details of the story. Moreover, these words reverberate like an echo through the stories of Red Cav&y in which the Jewish theme is brought to the fore; they set off the lucidity and sprirituality of, for instance, Rabbi Motale’s view of life, his power to overcome, with an ahnost incredible joyfulness, the Jewish fate in particular and the human predicament in general.

The narrator’s displacedness in the Cavah-y, and in particular his ab- horrence of the atrocities committed by its members in the name of the revolution, is often transmitted in an indirect way. His use of secondary narrators enables him to relate stories which stand on their own but which, in the context of Red Cavahy as a whole, give vent to his aversion by the drastic and lapidary wording of the loathsome facts.

These secondary narrators to some extent employ the same devices as the primary narrative instance, but the colourful variety of data consists in their case of tricky and nauseous acts of terror and is seen in a perspective as if nothing is wrong.

The narrator’s repugnance is sometimes hinted at in the frame of the story. Thus it is in ‘A Letter’. As I wrote earlier (1987a: 134):

The closing statement of the narrator serves as an indirect commentary on the complete lack of emotional concern in Kurdyu- kov’s letter to his mother.

‘Red Cavalry’: a Novel of Stoties 259

He tells in the same tone about “rather stereotyped details of his life as a soldier, his regiment, his closest comrade, a request for a parcel”, etc. and about his father, who brutally murdered one of his sons, and who was in turn killed in an equally sadistic manner by another of his sons (cf. van der Eng 1984a: 587-588). The point of this story lies in the narrator’s observations with reference to a photograph showing the father as “an inert figure with [. . .] the bright stare of vacant and colorless eyes” and his sons as “two lads [. . .] dull, broad-faced, goggle-eyed”. But, of course, the more fundamental comments are given by implication through Red Caval- ry as a whole. This collection of short stories propounds - often as it were over the head of the at times short-sighted narrator - the moral superiority of, again, the Jewish traditions, the exposure of atrocities as acts of personal vengeance, of sadistic outrages under cover of ideological make- belief.

The most striking story in this respect is ‘The Life and Adventures of Matthew Pavlichenko’. The odious way Pavlichenko murdered his former master is set against the idyllic picture of his youth as a herdsman, the erotomania of his marriage, the grotesque behaviour of his master’s mad wife, etc.

The topics and phraseological idiosyncrasies of the secondary narrator add an extra dimension to the autonomy of these tales. At the same time this element of a personal idiom with its odd combinations of folkloristic turns of phrase and propagandistic word-mongering is an appropriate means for the narrator to distance himself from the world of the secondary story-teller, and hence to impress upon the reader’s mind that here another world is at stake, utterly removed from his own (cf. Lonnqvist, 101,107).

‘Konkin’s Prisoner’ is another intriguing example of a story told by a secondary narrator. The allegedly jocular account of some scenes involv- ing merciless hand-to-hand combat fit in with new estranging examples of the Cossacks’ revolutionary mentality. The distance of the primary narrator and at the same time the self-sufficient structure of ‘Konkin’s Prisoner’ is underscored not only by the racy idiom of the secondary narrator, but also by the hidden flash-back to the victorious beginning of the campaign. The first narrator’s distance is furthermore intensified by embedding the inner tale in a frame which refers the telling of the story to a later time - judging from the place of the tale’s insertion into Red Cavalry - to a moment when the tide was turning. At all events, this frame reflects reac- tions of the listening public, which certainly are not shared by the primary narrator.

The frame consists of a brief dialogue with the story-teller (Vasily happens to be his name) which, in common parlance and again in a jocular-ironic tone, renders the crude execution of the Polish general by implication as follows:

260 Jan van der Eng

“And what came of your talk with the general, Vasily? [. . .]” “I couldn’t be bothered with him any more [. . .I” “So the old fellow was put out of his misery?’ “‘Fraid so”.

The narrator’s growing aversion to life in the Cavalry also shows in his changed attitude toward his journalistic concerns and in particular towards the propagandistic message inherent in them. In the story ‘My First Goose’ he is still carried away by his reading out to the Cossacks “the secret curve of Lenin’s straight line”, and at the end of ‘The Rabbi’ he seems enraptured about the sophisticated outfit of the propaganda train and the educational task assigned to him as a reporter for the Red Trooper newspaper. This attitude may come as a surprise for the reader as the theme of the story is the narrator’s lighthearted participation in a Hasidic gathering. The crux of this meeting is his playful conversation with the Rabbi, in which the latter surpassed him in wit, thereby maintaining the spirit of a wise man. The suggestion of the narrator’s commitment to the newspaper as the more serious part of his plan for the day is therefore not quite convincing but it fits in with his attitude at this stage of his Red Cavahy career. Later on, however, he displays an ironic attitude which will no longer be directed at forms of Jewish traditional life but at the pretentions of the communist revolution. Thus the story ‘Evening’ not only puts into words the narrator’s repudiation of life in the Red Cavalry army but also expresses his ironic view of the message to be conveyed by the Red Trooper. This story begins with a humorous exclamation:

0 regulations of the Russian Communist Party! You have laid down headlong rails through the sour pastry of our Russian tales. Three bachelor hearts, full of the passions of Ryazan Jesuses, have you turned into contributors to our paper the Red Trooper, converted them that they may daily fill the columns of the devil- may-care paper so full already of virility and coarse humor.

Other instances of an ironic perception of propagandistic idiosyncrasies are to be found in the stories told by secondary narrators. The tale discussed in the above ‘Konkin’s Prisoner’ is a case in point. Another story told by such a narrator, which is highly significant in this respect, is ‘Salt’; it abounds in bizarre forms of revolutionary rhetoric and concurrent idiosyncratic views of the revolution and the counterrevolution, interwoven now and again with poetic lines of a folkloristic provenance.

Our discussion leads up to the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that Red &v&y is mainly arranged as a novel of stories. As far as the story construction is concerned, several principles such as the alignment of the


beginning with the end, a central event, a pointed conclusion, are mostly observed; moreover, the sensation of distinctive and admirably finished stories is heightened from tale to tale by the arrangement of what are nearly always ‘new’ contrastive, paradoxical, dissonant thematical elements. But at the same time these stories prove to be part of the novel Red Cavalry. There is a clear developmental line to be seen in the events and the main characters, and above all in the narrator. The events follow a more and more catastrophic course, ending in a chaotic retreat. The charac- terological aspects of the primary narrator’s maturing process range from his strained efforts to be taken seriously as a member of the Cavalry to the awareness that he is a failure as a cavalryman: this goes together with his growing insight into his Jewish roots, his emotional ties with such move- ments as Hasidism notwithstanding his ironic reserve. Concomitant is his confrontation with the bestialities against the Jews, first on a personal level and then on a collective level. Striking in this connection is also the changed view of his journalistic activities, which is made known by way of implication. Equally implicit is his growing understanding of the Cos- sacks’ bizarre commitment to the revolutionary cause. Sometimes indirect and then again direct is his dismay at the sadistic instances of personal revenge; indirect in the shockingly laconic rendering by secondary narrators, and direct in the first narrator’s vigorous protest against the killing of war prisoners and the maltreatment of civilians.

The reverberating power of more or less steady themes dominating the amalgam of motifs and stories, in fact constitutes a system of undertones and overtones, highlighting the essential thematic elements in the sequence of contrastive, dissonant and bizarre thematic ‘leaps’ within the framework of each story and in the succession of the narrative sections.

A number of devices, partly overlapping each other but in all cases heightening the suggestion of autonomous stories as well as the impression of a novel-like build, could be listed as follows:

1. truncation of the habitual transitions from one narrative section to the next in combination with the kaleidoscopic arrangement of contrastive, paradoxical and dissonant themes in each separate story as well as in their sequential order;

2. not-indicated flash-backs, sometimes taking the reader back to occurrences and personages which are supposed to be known to the reader (presented in a previous story) but which in fact are not (so-called para- lipses);

3. implied juxtapositions of the narrator with secondary characters and the connected features of emotional and intellectual correspondences, contrasts, etc.;

262 Jan van der Eng

4. the central thematic significance of the story initially scheduled as the last one (‘The Rabbi’s Son’) and the reverberating power of its themes upon Red Cavalry as a whole:

5. sudden changes in the narrator’s development: unaccountable forms of his behaviour in square contradiction to his previous attitudes and acts;

6. the echoing effects of the stories’ pointed tinales, important for the narrator’s growing self-knowledge and insight into the essential values of life: his response to intimate human feelings and perceptions, whether voiced by himself or quoted as a character’s utterance;

7. the steady conjunction of complementary themes in several stories, pertaining to the catastrophic turn of the war, to pogroms and the Jewish ways to cope with anti-Semitic outrages in particular and the human predicament in general;

8. the use of secondary narrators as a means to create a world which is definitely not shared by the narrator (this in fact draws attention to his growing detachment);

9. a shifting ironic point of view, related in the beginning to Hasid- ism, later to communist directives of a propagandistic brand, to Cossack interpretations thereof and to his own journalistic activity.

University of Amsterdam

NOTES

i Quotations from: Isaac Babel, 77re CoZZecredStoties. Ed. and transl. by Walter Morison, with an intr. by Lionel Trilling. New York and Scarborough, Ont. 1974.

2 Several scholars somewhat reluctantly employ me term cycle, which in their opinion does not cover me structure of Z?ed C&&y in all respects. Thus, while ascribing to Red &v&y the cycbc features of plotlessness and absence of character development, J.J. van Baak also refers to temporal-thematic se- quences which he considers ‘novel-like’ phenomena, such as “the cbronolo- gical, though disrupted sequence of tbe three main stories with Jewish thematics: ‘Gedali’, ‘Rabbi’ and ‘Syn Rabbi”’ (148). Many scholars, however, assign the form of a cycle to Red CavAy. Patricia Carden describes this form as follows:


The cycle as a form is something more than a series of stories and something less than a novel. In the novel the elementary structure is A leads to B leads to C. In the cycle (if it is more than a mere stringing together of a number of stories) the elementary structure is A equals B equals C. The separate episodes have a weight that is determined outside their places in the cycle, by their own qualities and interest. The episodes determine the cycle rather than the cycle the episodes. Red Cavahy, the cycle of Babel’s work that most closely approaches the form of the novel, differs from the novel in that the significant unit of structure is the story. The narrator of Red Cavalry will never come to understand more than he understands at the end of the first story, ‘Crossing the Zbruch’, although the revelation he experiences there will recur in other circumstances, its relevance to other situations will be demon- strated, and the reader’s sense of the meaning of that revelation will be relined and sharpened by repetition. (50-51)

Wolf Schmid also emphasizes the cyclicity of Red Cavalry at the close of his article on ‘Crossing the Zbruch’. He writes:

Es gibt keine Kontinuitat von Erzahlung zu Erzahlung. Nicht nur, da8 der Erzahler “nie mehr verstehen wird, als er am Ende der ersten Erzahlung versteht” (Carden 1972: 50) er wird immer wieder riickfalhg, vergi&, was er einmal gewuBt hat. Es handelt sich eben nicht urn einen Roman, sondem urn einen Zyklus. W&rend der Roman langwierige Entwicklungen mit syntagma- tischer Koharenz darstellt, bietet der Zyklus ein und dasselbe Teilereignis in paradigmatischer Auffacherung dar. (132)

What Wolf Schmid calls forgetfulness which from story to story forces the narrator to make a fresh start, is in my opinion the deliberate attempt at hiding the temporal flow, the interim moves, the causal connections of the thematic development; this attempt reveals itself in the devices of the modernist novel: truncated transitions, hidden flash-backs, unaccounted-for changes of the narrator’s behaviour, etc. which I will discuss in the present paper.

REFERENCES

Bask, J.J. van 1983 The Place of Space in Narration. Amsterdam.

Carden, Patricia 1972 The Art of Isaac Babel. Ithaca and London.

264 Jan van der Eng

Eng, Jan van der 1984a ‘The Pointed Conclusion as Story Finale and Cyclic Element in

Red Cavalry, Language and Literary Theory. In Honor of La- oKslav Matejka. Ed. by B.A. Stole, I.R. Titunik, L. DoleZel. Ann Arbor.

1984b ‘The Imagery of Red Cavalry’. We and They. National Identity as a Theme in Slavic Culttnes. Donum Stiefanum 11 August 1984. Ed. Kristine Heltberg, Peter Alberg Jensen, Peter Ulf Moller a.o. Copenhagen.

1987a ‘Types of Inner Tales in Red Cavalry’. Text and Context. Essays to Honor Nils Ake Nilsson. Ed. by Peter Alberg Jensen, Barbara Lonnqvist, Fiona Bjorling a.o. Stockholm.

1987b ‘Komplizierung der Thematik durch den Mythos. Babel’s Kon- armija’ . Mythos in der Slawischen Modeme. Hrsg. von Wolf Schmid. WienerSlawistischerAhnanach, Sonderband 20.

Grongaard, Ragna 1979 I. Babel’s Red Cavalry. An Investigation of Composition and

Theme. Aarhus. Lammert, Eberhard

1955 Bauformen des Emens. Stuttgart. Lonnqvist, Barbara

1989 ‘K probleme perevoda skaza: rasskaz I. Babelja Pis’mo’. Scando- slavica, Tomus 35. Copenhagen.

Luplow, Carol 1982 Isaac Babel’s Red Cave. Ann Arbor.

Mendelson, Danuta 1982 Metaphor in Babel’s Short Stories. Ann Arbor.

Schmid, Wolf 1984 ‘Das nicht erzahlte Ereignis in Isaak Babel’s tiergang z&r den

Zbru?. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Band 14.

red cavalry: a novel of stories

Documents