THE STORIES OF ISAAC BABEL
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theless, a modern classic, quite in the category of excellence of
Dubliners
and
In Our Time.
In 1920 Babel served in the Polish campaigns of
Budenny's Cavalry, troops of horse recruited principally from the Cos–
sacks. Many of the sketches and stories of
Red Cavalry
were committed
to writing in the midst of the campaign, Babel's powers of contemplation
being so mercurial that he could sometimes transform experience into
literature almost without a pause.
Red Cavalry
is concerned with an appropriate response to the life
of the times-this straightforward moral inquiry underrode all Babel's
complexity of treatment. He found that the Cossacks' response was ap–
propriate and because it was appropriate admired and cherished them.
Babel conceived the times as substantially Hobbes' state of nature, where
each man's hand was ready to be turned against his brother and where if
one's life and death were not gallant and glorious they would be poor,
nasty, brutish and short. In "A Letter," Babel records with tacit ap–
proval how a Cossack father and his sons, on opposite sides of the Revo–
lution, methodically and remorselessly proceed to torture and kill each
other, communicating his sense of the propriety that lay within the ne–
cessity of terror. The Cossacks had been made for this epoch of carnage,
and they surmounted it with "the masterful indifference of a Tartar
Khan." Like Tolstoy, he saw in the Cossacks a conjunction of beauty
and fierceness, in which their athleticism gave grace to their aggressive–
ness. "And he swung his well-proportioned athlete's body skilfully out
of the saddle. Straightening his perfect legs, caught at the knee with
a small strap, he went with circus agility over to the moribund animal."
This appears in "The Remount Officer," where Dyakov has just had his
horse collapse beneath him. The story continues:
I t fixed wide, deep eyes on Dyakov and licked from his ruddy palm
a sort of imperceptible injunction. Immediately the exhausted beast felt
a dexterous strength flowing from the bald and vigorous Romeo in the
prime of life. Straightening its head and slithering on its staggering legs
at the impatient and imperious flicking of the whip on its belly, the jade
got up, slowly and warily.
Then we saw a delicate wrist in a wide, flowing sleeve patting the
dirty mane, and perceived how the whip cracked whining against the
bloodstained flanks. Her whole body trembling, the jade stood on her
legs, her doglike eyes, filled with love and fear, never for an instant
leaving Dyakov's face.
This episode may call to mind similar ones in
Crime and Punish–
ment, Hard Times
or
St. Mawr,
and it does not take much to discern
in it a moral inclination at odds with them. Familiars of "Spotted
Horses," however, will at once notice a likeness of accent.
