The Tower of (Isaac) Babel

The Tower of (Isaac) Babel

Born on July 13 in 1894, Isaac Babel has earned many an accolade for his achievements in Soviet letters. 

But not at first. Maxim Gorky said of him that he “would not get anywhere with literature… he wrote amazingly badly.”

And General Budyonny of the Red Cavalry coined the word “Babism” to condemn Babel’s distaste for violence and his sympathy for the Jews – features that made him womanly and anti-Soviet, according to Budyonny (a bosom pal of Stalin, by the way).

But was he really as bad as all that? When writers were being arrested left and right during the Great Purge of the 1930s, Babel refused to emigrate: he was “unable to imagine himself as anything but a writer,” he said. So there must have been something to his work.

What Gorky saw in 1916 as choppy and un-poetic, and Budyonny later lambasted as ladylike, are the features that have won Babel a place in Russian hearts and Slavic Department libraries across the globe. The violence he does to language, and his refusal to shy away from violent themes, have made his work disconcerting at best, and “Babist” at worst.

For example, his similes:

  • “The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head.”
  • “The wind hopped through the branches like a crazed rabbit.”
  • “The Apostles…[had] warts on their double chins like radishes in May.”
  • “Green rockets…came showering down like roses beneath the moon.”

Eerie, yet with a dash of lyricism. And it may be grounded in pre-revolutionary and early Soviet years, but Babel’s themes of war, anti-Semitism, and unmotivated violence are far from alien to today’s world, in Russia or elsewhere.

Specifically, Babel was a Jew by heritage, and, whether in the Russo-Japanese War, protests against the Tsar, or the Bolshevik Revolution itself, his early years were marked by many an excuse for pogroms against the Russian Empire’s Jews. Which was far from fun from Little Boy Babel, who escaped with his life but not without a bath of bird intestines. Yes, really.

With the pigeon offal cleaned off in time for the Civil War of 1918-1921, Babel had the stroke of luck to work as a war correspondent with General Semyon Budyonny’s Cavalry (the fodder for his collection Red Cavalry, or Konarmiia). An even bigger stroke of luck: changing his name to the Russian-sounding Kirill Lyutov.

Yet even de-Jewified in name, the short, bespectacled man of letters soon discovered in his time among the soldiers that the pen was definitely not mightier than the sword. As narrated in “My First Goose,” he only avoids getting bullied or even killed by the other soldiers in his regiment by slaughtering a goose and forcing a local lady to cook it for him. Yes, there’s a lot of violence against birds in Babel.

Only the violence among humans manages to put the avian carnage in perspective. And in a narrative about a war between Bolshevik and Polish armies, it is the Jews on either side who often face the worst brutalities.

Babel couldn’t explicitly speak out against this, fearing recriminations from the Bolsheviks. Yet a subtle sympathy may be found in the way he depicts the destruction of entire villages and the suffering of the Jews he encounters, in contrast to the careless violence of the Bolsheviks (“Let’s go die for a pickle and World Revolution!” one cries).

Babel’s work may not be an all-out attack on anti-Semitism, but his illustration of anti-Jewish violence (often spurred by unrelated social unrest) shows what has changed in today’s world – and that much has not.

It may be different in form, but the Jewish scapegoating in today’s Russia isn’t a far cry from that in Babel’s stories (bird guts aside). Even today, certain nationalist groups and social conservatives hint that Jewish opposition leaders have spawned the nation’s economic and social problems; others, more weirdly, have sneakily spurred on anti-Semitism in Ukraine to worsen morale during the current fighting. However the issue crops up, anti-Semitism continues to be a favorite tool for Russian nationalists. And in that it resembles Babel’s world of a century ago.

Babel’s sympathetic, yet often morally ambiguous depiction of war and anti-Semitism gives a lens for viewing today’s problems that seems at once to condemn such violence and to contribute to it. Babel was able to see beauty even in horror, and his inventiveness can as easily be whimsical (“the moon was green as a lizard”) as it can be frightening (“a nose like a flag above a corpse”). And it is that ambiguity that keeps his writing fresh today.

So as the sun sets on Babel’s 121st birthday, let’s hope it resembles something other than a severed head. Or at least, find the poetry in that simile, even if it induces a shudder.

Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 
The Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.
Woe From Wit (bilingual)

Woe From Wit (bilingual)

One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
Turgenev Bilingual

Turgenev Bilingual

A sampling of Ivan Turgenev's masterful short stories, plays, novellas and novels. Bilingual, with English and accented Russian texts running side by side on adjoining pages.
Survival Russian

Survival Russian

Survival Russian is an intensely practical guide to conversational, colloquial and culture-rich Russian. It uses humor, current events and thematically-driven essays to deepen readers’ understanding of Russian language and culture. This enlarged Second Edition of Survival Russian includes over 90 essays and illuminates over 2000 invaluable Russian phrases and words.
Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

A book that dares to explore the humanity of priests and pilgrims, saints and sinners, Faith & Humor has been both a runaway bestseller in Russia and the focus of heated controversy – as often happens when a thoughtful writer takes on sacred cows. The stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues and adventures in this volume comprise an encyclopedia of modern Russian Orthodoxy, and thereby of Russian life.
Moscow and Muscovites

Moscow and Muscovites

Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin. 
Driving Down Russia's Spine

Driving Down Russia's Spine

The story of the epic Spine of Russia trip, intertwining fascinating subject profiles with digressions into historical and cultural themes relevant to understanding modern Russia. 
Tolstoy Bilingual

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious. 
A Taste of Chekhov

A Taste of Chekhov

This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955