PARTISAN REVIEW
Babel and Faulkner resemble each other remarkably, especially in
their understanding of that state in which men are possessed by a passion
so huge and immolating that they are turned dispassionate in consum–
mating it. In "Prischepa's Vengeance" Babel describes "a tireless ruffian
who had been turned out of the Communist Party, a future rag-and-bone
man, a carefree syphilitic, and a happy-go-lucky fraud," one of his
characteristically gay destroyers. Prischepa's parents were killed by the
Whites, and he returns to his village for revenge. "Prischepa went from
neighbor to neighbor, leaving behind him the trail of his blood-stained
footprints. In the huts where he found gear that had belonged to his
mother, a pipe that had been his father's, he left old women stabbed
through and through, dogs hung above the wells, icons defiled with
excrement. . . . The young Cossacks were scattered over the steppe,
keeping the score." After the massacre "he sent for vodka, and shutting
himself up in the hut, he drank for two whole days and nights, singing,
weeping, and hewing the furniture with his Circassian saber." For Babel
as for Faulkner, violence was the great cathartic and revenge its sweetest
and most corrupting form. But the butchery of Babel's Cossacks is not
the despairing, forlorn and solitary mayhem of Faulkner's Southerners.
They spread their carnage gayly, for they were born to this existence
not driven to it. They are as much like Faulkner's Indians as they are
like his Southerners-atavistic, immune to guilt, untrammelled in their
celebration of the momentous circumstances of life. Writing of the burial
of Squadron Commander Trunov, Babel wants us to recall the Homeric
funeral games and to esteem the Cossacks as if they were Achaeans.
"The whole squadron leaped into the saddle and fired a volley in the air,
and our old three-incher champed forth a second time. Then we sent
three Cossacks to fetch a wreath. They dashed off, firing, at full gallop,
dropping out of their saddles and performing all sorts of Cossack tricks ;
and returned bringing whole armfuls of red flowers. Pugachov scattered
them on the coffin and we began to move up to Trunov for the last
kiss." Before Trunov died he had murdered a defenseless prisoner, an
old man, cutting his throat with a sword and then riding away. "The
sun came out of the clouds at that moment and impetuously surrounded
Andie's horse, its lively pace, and the devil-may-care swing of its docked
tail." Babel would like us to believe that the universe conspires with joy
in the Cossacks' bright brutality. And here, in his exaltation of violence,
Babel departs from Faulkner who is as concerned with it as Babel, but
for different reasons. Faulkner's violence mourns the death of traditions
and institutions which he loved. Babel's rejoices in the death of traditions
and institutions which he had come to hate.
