Born in 1894, murdered by the Soviet political police in 1940, Isaac Babel is best known for Red Cavalry, his collection of stories about the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1919-1921. Another cycle, Odessa Stories, has recently appeared in a new English translation by Boris Dralyuk. Praising Dralyuk for the “rhythm and concision” of his “clipped, pacey style,” Robert Minto notes the stories’ political message:
The book is broken into parts which show Odessa in its romantic heyday, run by gangsters, and then in its Soviet decline, as it is ruthlessly standardized, normalized, and drained of color. Babel’s autobiographical notes and essays about Odessa are tacked onto the end, to make the book a complete testament to his vision of the city.
That vision is complex and tragic. Odessa in pre-Soviet days may have been a region of mythic heroes, who share something of the amoral vigor of the bandits and warriors of folklore, but it also hosted a plundered populace. A city run by bandits is a paradise for no one but the strong. Still, compared with the regime that pacified the city, old Odessa may not have been so bad after all. The Soviet government rooted out corruption and crime, but it also cracked down on religion and innocent customs, reorganizing here as everywhere according to the blunt dictates of un-nuanced rationality. . . .
Babel . . . resisted the cultural mandate that writers should conform to a politically useful socialist realism. His stories were resolutely romantic, and rather than revising his oeuvre or adopting a new documentary style, he opted to write less and less. He said that he was becoming the master of a new genre, the genre of silence.
The tragic course of Babel’s career exemplifies the cleavage opened by Soviet history between the deepest feelings and the profoundest convictions of its best and wisest supporters. To dream the dream of red plenty while witnessing its dystopic implementation and watching your own art suppressed must have been soul-destroying. I think the conflicted admiration Babel’s gangsters wring from the heart of a reader is an echo of Babel’s own life-defining conflict.
Read more on Open Letters Monthly: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/passion-rules-the-world/