THE STORIES OF ISAAC BABEL
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fluttering, his paper dickey askew and fastened to the wrong button,"
humiliated, and Babel himself crushed and terrified into a nervous dis–
order. He saw his father pleading on his knees before a Cossack officer
who "rode as though through a mountain pass, where one can only
look ahead." And he, young Isaac, who had just been allowed to buy
some pigeons as a reward for his assiduous scholarship, saw his pigeons
mangled in front of him. "I lay on the ground, and the guts of the
crushed bird trickled down from my temple. They flowed down my
cheek, winding this way and that, splashing, blinding me. The tender
pigeon-guts slid down over my forehead, and I closed my solitary un–
stopped-up eye so as not to see the world that spread out before me."
In one day the male line of his family was disgraced and emasculated.
Babel accommodated himself to these scarifying hours by coming to ideal–
ize the Cossacks and dislike the Jews. By living as a Cossack, immersing
himself in brutality, he hoped to cleanse himself and his country of the
filthy past.
Red Cavalry
is his great effort in that direction. Several
of the stories reflect the effort literally-"My First Goose," in which he
tears apart a bird himself, is one. In another story he stands by while
a Cossack shoots a Polish boy "and bits of brain dripped over my hands."
And in a third he exacts retribution by urinating into the mouth of a
Polish corpse: "It was pouring out of his mouth, bubbling between his
tceth, gathered in his empty eye-sockets." In
Red Cavalry
he tried to
rid himself of the past, and the final story ends in a hopeful self-decep–
tion. "Months passed, and my dream came true. The Cossacks stopped
watching me and my horse."
As the years passed he continued to scrutinize his notions of the
Revolution and of his Jewishness; he began to realize that he had de–
ceived and indulged himself. Hesitantly, sorrowfully, he came to be cri–
tical of the unremi tting violence of Soviet life, and as his trust in violence
wavered he became increasingly involved in reminiscences of his child–
hood and lenient in his judgment of it. As his energy for carnage de–
clined, he gradualIy ceased to disparage his Jewish endowments-cur–
iosity, the love of irony, the love of ideas. He even asserted, once, that
his savagery was an inherited gift too, a wistful and quickly abandoned
illusion. And he perceived that the life of art had its own kind of
violence, a self-inflicted sort, and reflecting upon Maupassant's final
years his "heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth
touched me with light fingers."
He was a wiser and a gentler man, but his art had faltered. He
picked at his J ewishness laboriously; it was not an immediate actuality
but a sequence of memories and ideas upon which he ruminated and by
