Isaac Babel: 1920 Diary
Edited by Carol J. Avins
Translated by H.T. Willetts
Yale University Press, 192 pages, $20
Seventy-five years ago this spring, the 25-year-old Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel became a correspondent for YugROSTA, the southern section of the national wire service. He was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Army led by the famous Cossack general Semyon Budyonny.
Since 1917, wars of the sort being fought now in Bosnia, Chechnya and Azerbaijan had been tearing up eastern Europe. Red armies were beating back the White forces of Adm. Kolchak and Gen. Denikin, and, in the south, Poles were trying to regain territory taken from them 150 years earlier. Sorties, pogroms and battles stripped and torched the towns and villages of Galicia, Volhynia, the Ukraine and Poland.
The nearsighted, asthmatic, little correspondent mounted a horse for the first time in his life. He kept military records, interrogated prisoners, wrote reports and sent in dispatches to The Red Cavalryman. Every night, from spring till mid-September, he wrote down what he saw, smelled, heard, thought and felt. Years later, this diary was left with a Kiev friend and so escaped the confiscation of Babel’s papers when the secret police arrested him on May 15, 1939, eight months before they shot him to death. The diary, which was given to Babel’s widow in the 1950s, was published in Russian in 1990 and now appears in a splendidly translated and edited English version. It is, I think, well worth reading, and not just because it is the raw stuff from which Babel cooked the 35 sketches and stories of his masterpiece, “Red Cavalry.”
In 1916, Babel’s literary protector, publisher, adviser and friend, Maksim Gorky, “sent him out into the world.” He became, according to his “Autobiography,” “a soldier on the Rumanian front, then served in the Cheka, in the Narkompros , in the Food Detachments of 1918, in the Northern Army against Yudenich, in the First Cavalry Army. . . . I was a printer in the Seventh Soviet Press in Odessa, a reporter in Petersburg, Tiflis etc.”
Gorky wanted this gifted stray from the Odessa ghetto to become the great literary example of Revolutionary literature. It turned out that he wonderfully–and terribly–did.
The 1920 diary exhibits the transformation of the brilliant, bookish Babel into a half-reluctant, half-enchanted Cossack, an outsider turned inside-out. It charts his ever deeper, ever more horrified and ironic view of the war. A hapless pleader for decent restraint, he turned into an infuriated, then exhausted hater of human inhumanity. Through the spring and summer of 1920, as he set down his elliptic notes, he kept telling himself, “Remember,” “Describe,” “Mustn’t forget.” The observer is stocking up for the writer; Babel is becoming Babel.
What has survived of the diary–there are 75 missing pages–falls into a bell-curve pattern. The early and late entries are elliptic memoranda:
“Revolting tea in borrowed mess kits. Letters home, packets for YugROSTA, interview with Pollack, operation to get control of Novgorad. . . booklets of cigarette paper, matches, erstwhile (Ukrainian) Jews, commissars. . . . Love in the kitchen.
As the summer and the man deepen, the entries lengthen and sharpen, fill with brilliant descriptions, portraits and scenes that appear nowhere else in Babel (except, perhaps, in the confiscated manuscripts):
“31 August 1920. Czesniki. . . Farmhouse. A shady clearing in the wood. Total destruction. Not even clothes left. We pinch every last speck of oats. The orchard, apiary, destruction of the hives, terrible. Bees buzzing despairingly, the men blow up the hives with gun-powder, muffle themselves up in their greatcoats and attack the hives, a wild orgy, they tear the frames out with their sabers, honey drips onto the ground, the bees sting them, they smoke them out with tarred rags, lighted rags. In the apiary chaos, total destruction, smoking ruins. . . Budyonny says nothing, smiles, occasionally showing his dazzling white teeth.
“28 August 1920. Komanow. . . A pogrom. . . a naked, barely breathing prophet of an old man, an old woman butchered, a child with fingers chopped off. . . stench of blood, everything turned upside down. . . The hatred is the same, the Cossacks just the same, it’s nonsense to think one army is different from another. . . There`s no salvation.”
By September, everything and everyone are cracking up.
“3,4,5 September 1920. Malice. . . The Pole is slowly but surely squeezing us out. . . This way of life. . . I’m sick, quinsy, fever, can hardly move, terrible nights in suffocating, smoke-filled cottages, on straw, my body is covered with scratches and bites, itching, bleeding, nothing I can do. . . The command is passive or rather nonexistent.
“6 September 1920. Budyatichi. . . A nurse, a proud, dim-witted, beautiful nurse in tears, a doctor outraged by yells of `Smash the Yids, save Russia!’ They are stunned, the quartermaster has been thrashed with a whip, the contents of the clinic tossed out. . . I cannot see where it will end.
“7 September 1920. Budyatichi. . . Have gone deaf in one ear. . . abrasions everywhere. I’m losing strength.
“9 September 1920. Vladimir-Volynskii. . . Curse the soldiery, the war, the crowding together of young, tormented, wild, still healthy people.”
The final entries are numb, exhausted. It’s all over. Babel leaves the front and begins to come back to life (I`ve jumbled the last entries.):
“The Poles hacking us to bits. . . Life on the train. . . Smoking, gorging Muscovites. . . all bad-tempered, all have stomach trouble. . . Long wait in the station. The usual tedium. We borrow books from the club, read voraciously. . . Conversation about our air force, non-existent, all the machines damaged, the airmen haven’t learnt to fly. . . The Red Army man . . . pokes his finger in to scratch the mucus from his throat. . .”
In 1854, Babel’s literary idol, Leo Tolstoy, age 26, arrived in besieged Sebastopol to fight the battles he would record in “The Sebastopol Sketches,” the work that convinced him that he was a writer. Like Babel, he had written before; unlike Babel, he had fought before (in 1852, against the Chechens). Sixty-six years later, Babel underwent a similar transfiguration, personal and literary. To see his diary notes become the spare epiphanies of “Red Cavalry” is to see the difference between documentary and artistic truth. Babel once said that the difference was that between a “greasy paper bag and Botticelli’s Primavera.” Compared to “Red Cavalry,” the 1920 diary may be a greasy bag, but it is Babel’s bag and, therefore, precious, a few more words from that–as he called himself once–“master of the genre of silence.”
