The beauty of this book is not rooted in excellent turns of phrase, like
“Both of them felt like milk bottles in the hands of a good housewife, ringing with cleanliness after a good wash.”
“Everything incidental had drained from Olga’s face; all that was left was a sharp, naked beauty, and the illness itself.”
“Tea and vodka poured out in rivers, kitchens basked in the fervent steam of political dispute, so that the dampness crept up the walls to the hidden microphones behind the tiles at the level of the ceiling.”
No, the beauty here is in the steady, comforting accretion of character and detail as the plot builds and develops. It is in Ulitskaya’s onion-layer revelations of new facets of her characters by retelling aspects of the story through differing perspectives. It is like the way you get to know someone over many years: first through one type of interaction, then another, then yet another. Soon you have a suitably complex picture of the individual, yet deep down you know there is much more that will never be revealed.
On one level, The Big Green Tent is the story of a handful of young friends coming of age in post-Stalinist Russia, and of the connections, circumstances, and relationships that bind their lives together in a secretive, authoritarian, class obsessed society. Several of them choose a path of dissent, gently urged on by their gifted teacher Victor Yulievich and the informal leader of their “circle” Anna Alexandrovna. Others sell out, emigrate, or hew the loyalist line.
But, more deeply, this is the story of the increasingly complex web of relationships between characters, of the hidden motives for one character’s actions that only become clear when we hear the story again, this time from their point of view.
Ulitskaya’s storytelling style is plain-spoken, almost laconic, and often you are halfway through a chapter, seeing the world through the eyes of a new character, before you realize you have met this person before, yet only in passing, or only through the eyes of another. It is a deeply affecting style and by the time you get to the end of this wonderful novel, you will feel as if you learned all these characters’ histories not from the pages of a book, but from the edge of a linoleum veneered table in a humid kitchen on the fourth floor of a cozy khrushchyovka.
If you are looking for a book to provide a detailed history of recent events, the war with Russia, Crimea, etc., look elsewhere. If, however you are interested in gaining deep background to understanding the Ukrainian nation, this is it. In fact, you need to read over two-thirds of Plokhy’s book just to get to the end of the Soviet Union. And perhaps that is valuable context, because in the long sweep of history, recent events, no matter how brutal and disturbing, are little more than a blip.
Plokhy begins his history two millennia ago, with the rise of settlements along the “Hospitable Sea” (the Black Sea), with the Scythians and the Greeks (and Ovid, “Ah, how near I am to the ends of the earth!”). And he charts a history that shows how Ukraine has been, as its name asserts, the borderlands between empires and peoples – an object of history and rarely a subject.
It is a fascinating and complex story told concisely.
Still, the last 100 pages do provide context and history for times within our temporal grasp, showing how Ukraine was instrumental (no longer an object) in the collapse of the USSR, how the battle over its borders, over Crimea, are not recent skirmishes, but merely the latest developments in a story that lasts many hundreds of years, and how the country’s vibrant pluralism is both a blessing and a curse as Ukraine, ever a borderland, strives to navigate between Russia and Europe.
Pushkin Press continues to create books that are not only fine translations (spot comparisons find Dralyuk to be more fluent and truer to Babel’s voice than previous translations), but finely made books. This volume is compact and beautifully bound. It fits nicely in a coat pocket and I found myself carrying it around to savor while in waiting rooms or in coffee shops.
And there is much to savor here. For Babel was one of the finest writers of the Soviet era. Unfortunately, like Mandelstam, Bulgakov and far too many others, his vast talent was sent to an early grave by murderers who fashioned themselves as protectors of the common good.
Babel was a literary chameleon – able to vividly capture the voices and characters he met during the brutal years of the Polish-Soviet War (1919-21), where nations barely born were fighting over borders soon to be forgotten. The stories here are gory and profane, funny and disturbing, filled with the blood, anguish and up-close horrors of one of the last wars in Europe fought with sabers and horses. But there is also a taste of magical realism here. Roads die and villages bleed, the world itself seems to moan and suffer from the carnage wrought on its fertile soil.
No one is spared Babel’s goring and, more than anything, Red Cavalry is an indictment of the banality of armed conflict through the voices of commissars and idealists, revolutionaries and soldiers alike. It should be required reading in every high school, in every nation where people still think wars are worth fighting.
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