Isaac Babel
THE JOURNEY1
The front collapsed in 1917. I left it in November.
At home mother prepared a bundle of underwear and dry bread
for me. I got to Kiev the day before Muraviev began to bombard
the city. I was on my way to Petersburg. For twelve days we sat
it out
in
the cellar of Chaim the Barber's hotel in the Bessarabka.
I got a permit to leave the city from the Soviet commandant of
Kiev.
There
is
no drearier sight
in
the world than the Kiev rail–
way station. For many years its makeshift wooden barracks have
blighted the approaches to the city. Lice crackled on the wet
boards. Deserters, gypsies and black marketeers were lying all
over the place. Old Galician women urinated standing on the
1.
This story is largely autobiographical, as Paustovsky suggests in his
reminiscences of Babel which appear in this issue. As a child in Odessa,
Babel had endured the pogroms of Czarist Russia; as a young Bolshevik
during the Civil War he was witness to the White Army's acts of violence
against Jews, described here. During the Civil War and the war with
Poland, Babel was a political commissar in Budyonny's cavalry, and, for a
brief period, a clerical worker for the Cheka. In "Red Cavalry" and
other stories, like "The Journey," Babel described the savagery of war
with scrupulous objectivity, making no attempt to draw the moral which
socialist realism demands. As a result he was always under attack for
"naturalism." Publication of his work ceased altogether in 1937; he was
arrested two years later and died in a concentration camp in 1941.
"The Journey," written in the '20's, was first published in an obscure
literary magazine,
30 Days,
in 1932. It reappeared in a censored version
in
a collection of Babel stories published in Moscow in 1957, after his
posthumous rehabilitation. The censored passage, which is indicated in
this
trarulation, was evidently omitted for reasons of prudery.
