I am haunted by the ghosts of lost worlds. In a sense, this is what all literature is about – taking us into the past or into another world altogether and making it real to us so that we can live in it and love it. But I do not mean that sense of lost worlds here. What I mean is the desolation, the empty space where a world once was. The world of religions in which most of us can no longer believe, or countries or spaces that no longer exist, like the Habsburg Monarchy or the Soviet Union, function in my life like ghosts. Driven by curiosity, I want to know them, but at the same time, they come to me, often against my wishes, like obsessions, to torture my mind. They gather me into conflicted mourning for what was lost.
Ukraine is a land of ghosts, and one of the greatest horrors of Russia’s invasion is that it promises the creation of more ghosts and more hauntings. When I awoke on the 24th of February last year and saw the first fires on Ukrainian soil, I was overwhelmed in a way that I didn’t think possible of myself with visions of emptiness. Empty houses, empty villages, emptied worlds.
Babel’s Ukraine
Many worlds have been lost in Ukraine. At least two of them we see in the work of Isaac Babel. The Soviet writer, a Jew from Odessa on the Ukrainian coast, described a world of gangsters and crime that seems more appropriate to America than anywhere this side of the Atlantic, in his Odessa Tales. But today I am writing about another world, the world of today’s West Ukraine, a land that at the time was the site of one of the Soviet Union’s first wars – in fact, a war before the Union really had that name at all – the Soviet-Polish War of 1919-1921.
Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, a short story cycle that is the most brilliant I have ever read, is his main work of the period. (You can read my translation of one story here). But even though it is written with plenty of cunning, and was successfully published in the USSR, it is still a work of evasiveness. Babel also kept a writer’s diary of the period, the 1920 Diary, and here he is much less equivocal about what he saw and what he experienced. Here, for readers, there is the terrible horror and curiosity of a world that is being annihilated before our eyes, a world that will be finished off some twenty years later with the invasion of the lands by German troops and later population transfers organised by Stalin.
Contested Identities – Babel and the Land
The 1920 Diary is a text about identity. In the contested land of today’s West Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus live Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Czechs. They speak languages ranging from German to Yiddish, Polish to Ukrainian and Russian, and practice a hodgepodge of faiths including traditional Catholicism, the Uniate faith, Eastern Orthodoxy, and of course Judaism. From town-to-town identity shifts in a way that seems scarcely believable today. But beyond this, there is Babel himself. We can read the diary, like we read the Red Army Cavalry Stories, as a site of struggle between Babel’s understandings of himself. In fact, due to its personal nature, the 1920 Diary is perhaps even better for this than the stories are.
But first, who was Babel? An Odessan Jew of course. Raised in Odessa – then the most cosmopolitan city of the Russian Empire – and briefly in Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), he was educated in Kiev (Kyiv), moved to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) where he met Gorky, who helped him establish himself as a writer. He seems to have been fluent in at least Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and French. He wrote a little, and used to joke that he was “the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence.” Silent or not, he managed to fall under the suspicion of the authorities and was executed under false charges by the authorities in 1940. Babel had several opportunities to emigrate from the Soviet Union, but he did not take them. Like Andrei Platonov, one element of Babel’s fascination to me lies in his attitude towards the USSR, mixing the love of its hopes and criticism of its realities.
Babel wrote primarily in Russian, but we know that some of his first stories were written in French. Like Nabokov, or Taras Shevchenko in Ukrainian literature, he was at ease not just reading, but even writing in multiple languages. The 1920 Diary is written in Russian (as was Shevchenko’s personal journal), but it is peppered with other languages, including the ever-popular refrain from the poor Ukrainians he meets: “nemae” – we have nothing left to give.
Was Babel a Jew, a Russian or perhaps even a Ukrainian, or rather a Soviet and a Communist? The 1920 Diary is a place where we can begin asking these questions.
If he refers to himself occasionally as Russian, there are certainly moments when he seems more comfortable with the Ukrainian cultural space. “Ha, what a gloomy life these Russians lead! Where is the Ukrainian mirth?” he asks at one point. His main allegiance, however, seems to be to Odessa and to the Jews. “An old Jew – I love talking with our people – they understand me,” he remarks, even as at other times he lapses into a more critical voice towards the “Yids”. He notes every town and city where he encounters the Jews and he notes the injustices of the rampaging armies towards them, from rapes to being forced to cook on the Sabbath. Besides this, it is Odessa that he longs for. “We spoke about Tiflis, fruit, sun. I think about Odessa, my soul is torn.” Whenever a character has some association with the city Babel seems to brighten.
Revolution and the Vanguard
The Red Army are in Poland to spread Communism. In the early days after 1917, it seemed as though the workers’ revolt could truly become international, and military might would help to spread it. At the time of the diary Babel is certainly a supporter of the Revolution – after all, he was accompanying the army as a propagandist – but we also see increasing uncertainties come into his voice as the war goes on and he sees what the Revolution means in practice. As he asks at one point, “We are the vanguard, but of what?” He believes that the poverty and rank destitution of many of the people he encounters can be improved under Soviet systems – “I am exasperated, I can’t contain my indignation: the dirt, the apathy, the hopelessness of Russian life are unbearable, the Revolution will do some good work here.” But he discovers that his understanding of the Revolution is not shared with the soldiers themselves.
The cavalry are predominantly Cossacks, in Babel’s case from the Kuban region in today’s Russia. At the time, before the Holodomor and related policies, the land was populated mostly by ethnic Ukrainians, and the Cossacks go around singing Ukrainian songs. “What kind of men are our Cossacks?” Babel asks of the people who are bringing Communism to the West. “Many-layered: rag-looting, bravado, professionalism, revolutionary ideals, savage cruelty. We are the vanguard, but of what? The population is waiting for liberators, the Jews for freedom—but who arrives? The Kuban Cossacks. . . .”
Babel wants to see the Revolution as progress. Marxism, after all, envisions the world as tending towards Communism and peace and prosperity for all. But he realises instead that history is much more cyclical than this. A few posts ago I wrote about Gogol’s novella of Cossack violence, Taras Bulba. There the Cossacks go on a rampage throughout Ukraine and Poland, murdering Jews and Catholics and everyone else. Babel sees much the same in his own day.
“An ancient church, the graves of Polish officers in the churchyard, fresh burial mounds, ten days old, white birch crosses, all this is terrible, the house of the Catholic priest has been destroyed, I find ancient books, precious Latin manuscripts. The priest, Tuzynkiewicz, I find a photograph of him, he is short and fat, he worked here for forty-five years, he lived in one place, a scholar, the assortment of books, many of them in Latin, editions of 1860, that was when Tuzynkiewicz lived.”
Babel meticulously notes each pogrom, each act of violence against the Jews.
“The Zhitomir pogrom carried out by the Poles, and then, of course, by the Cossacks.
After our vanguard units appeared, the Poles entered the town for three days, Jewish pogrom, cut off beards, they always do, rounded up forty-five Jews in the market, took them to the slaughterhouses, torture, they cut out tongues, wailing over the whole town square.”
“the same old story, the Jews have been plundered, their perplexity, they looked to the Soviet regime as saviors, then suddenly yells, whips, Yids. I am surrounded by a whole circle, I tell them about Wilson’s note, about the armies of labor, the Jews listen, sly and commiserating smiles,”
The betrayal of the Jews by the Soviets is something Babel is obviously upset by. He tries to console those he meets with words of the Revolution, but it becomes increasingly inauthentic as the diary goes on: “The husband: Will there be freedom to trade, to buy a few things and then sell them right away, no speculating? I tell him yes, there will, everything will be for the better— my usual system—in Russia wondrous things are happening: express trains, free food for children, theaters, the International.”
What is happening in the war is a repetition of the violence that had come again and again to the people of the region:
“The Jewish cemetery outside Malin, centuries old, the stones have toppled, almost all the same shape, oval at the top, the cemetery is overgrown with weeds, it saw Khmelnitsky, now Budyonny, the unfortunate Jewish population, everything repeats itself, once again the same story of Poles, Cossacks, Jews is repeating itself with striking exactness, what is new is Communism.”
Communism with the Cossacks? No, “they are simply an instrument the party is not above using.” Instead, Babel comes to see the war as violence and hate. “About the atamans, there had been many there, they got themselves machine guns, fought against Shkuro and Mamontov, merged into the Red Army, a heroic epic. This is not a Marxist Revolution, it is a Cossack uprising that wants to win all and lose nothing. Apanasenko’s hatred for the rich, an unquenchable hatred of the intelligentsia.” The Cossacks care nothing for the Revolution, and certainly nothing for the people Babel records them raping, butchering, and stealing from. But the Poles, too, are little better. The Jews time and again recount the double pogrom, as first the Poles, then the Ukrainian Cossacks, torture them. At one point we get a brief glimpse of the ghost of a better world, then see the present that has replaced it:
“I won’t forget this shtetl, covered courtyards, long, narrow, stinking, everything 100-200 years old, the townsfolk more robust than in other places, the main thing is the architecture, the white and watery blue little houses, the little backstreets, the synagogues, the peasant women. Life is almost back on track again. People had led a good life here— respected Jewry, rich Ukrainians, market fairs on Sundays, a specialized class of Russian artisans: tanners trading with Austria, contraband.
The Jews here are less fanatical, better dressed, heartier, they even seem more cheerful, the very old men in long coats, the old women, everything exudes the old days, tradition, the shtetl is saturated in the bloody history of the Polish Jewish ghetto. Hatred for the Poles is unanimous. They looted, tortured, scorched the pharmacists body with white-hot iron pokers, needles under his nails, tore out his hair, all because a Polish officer had been shot at—sheer idiocy! The Poles have gone out of their minds, they are destroying themselves.”
Loss
It is extraordinary that in a region where blood had only just dried from the First World War, people are so willing to spill it again. Babel notes that “more and more often we come across trenches from the last war, barbed wire everywhere, enough for fences for the next ten years, destroyed villages.” Rather than rebuilding, in poverty, the people are turning against each other. Even within the Red Army, as the war (which they ultimately lost) goes steadily worse, antisemitism increases: “Down with the Yids, save Russia!” As one soldier yells.
The Revolution, Babel realises, is not doing what it is supposed to. “I mourn the fate of the Revolution.” But an army cannot bring a revolution. Instead, “we are destroying, moving forward like a whirlwind, like lava, hated by all, life is being shattered to pieces, I am at a huge, never-ending service for the dead.” It is not Communism that they bring, but ghosts and fresh graves.
To read the 1920 Diary is to be surrounded by these ghosts. There is the Polish estate that the Cossacks loot, where Babel finds the books the owners in their hurry to leave were unable to take: “Extremely precious books in a chest, they didn’t have time to take them along: the constitution approved by the Sejm at the beginning of the eighteenth century, old folios from the times of Nicholas I, the Polish code of laws, precious bindings, Polish manuscripts of the sixteenth century, the writings of monks, old French novels.”
Babel, this most wonderful writer, lives and breathes culture. His joy at the Jewish celebrations, at the old churches and synagogues, is palpable. He sits and talks to a priest about the differences between Catholics and Uniates. He is curious about these differences, about all the peoples in the area. And as a “Russian” and a Jew, he has access to more areas than most.
The End of the Story
Yet Babel is out of place. In some twenty years this world, already aflame, will be ruined completely. The Ukrainian UPA, now celebrated as national heroes in that country, will collaborate with the occupying Nazi German government to slaughter as many as 100’000 men, women and children, Poles and Jews and any Ukrainians who dared intermarry or believe in Soviet ideals, in an act of terrible ethnic cleansing. The Poles retaliated with just as much force, to the delight of the occupying German forces who could leave the resistance to wear itself out on self-slaughter. As for the Jews, caught in the middle, they were systematically murdered even if they escaped the UPA and the Poles. A bit further East, Babel’s Odessa, with about 30% of its population Jewish, was more or less emptied of them and began a precipitous decline similar to that of Trieste, which I wrote about last year. Finally, Stalinist population transfers made West Ukraine unrecognisable, shunting Ukrainians and Poles and other ethnicities around so that the multiethnic, multicultural, world of the diary became just a dream. Lviv, today that most “Ukrainian” of cities, only became ethnically Ukrainian in this period. Before it, Lwów was mostly a home for Poles and Jews.
I came away from the 1920 Diary just so desperately sad. There was a world here, and human savagery ruined it. I despise the nationalists who have destroyed culture here and elsewhere, whether they be Ukrainian or Russian, British or German or French, they are all my enemies. Babel, the Jew from Odessa, writing in Russian, multilingual and ever curious, was a hero of literature and his time. This land, which has only recently become Ukraine, gave birth to some of the most extraordinary literary figures the world has known – Schulz, Babel, Gogol, Shevchenko, Bulgakov, Lispector – to name just a few of them. But as for the ghosts of writers stranded in today’s quite understandably nationalistic Ukraine but did not write in that language or belong to that culture, who now will tend to their graves? With a world of mixed language, mixed culture, mixed identity, safeguarding heritage can only be a communal, collective effort, and matters of culture must not be left in the hands of the nationalists, who cannot even successfully look after their own.
