Just a Ghost Story? Dickens’s “To Be Read at Dusk”

“To Be Read at Dusk” is a ghost story by Charles Dickens. Or rather, it is emphatically not a ghost story at all – “I don’t talk of ghosts” one of the characters declares. Instead, it is a collection of different encounters with what we might term the inexplicable. We can just leave it there, but as with many other similar tales, we may find something beneath the surface that the characters have missed.

The story begins with our narrator, sitting out in the Swiss Alps, and eavesdropping on the conversation of five nearby couriers, men who have worked in private houses as personal servants. They are discussing their experiences of the supernatural. One, a German, tells three stories and a Genoese man tells another, the longest.

The German’s Stories

At least one of these encounters will be familiar to us. The German tells of an old Marchesa who during a dinner party declared in shock that her sister, far away in Spain, had died. And so it was. My grandmother likes to tell stories about her own talents for detecting the deaths of her relatives. And my own father, the night before he died, visited me in a dream. It is a mystery how such a thing can happen, but since I do not as a rule dream, it feels wrong to call such a thing a mere coincidence. I imagine you, too, reader, can find examples of this mysterious sense.

The German also mentions the time when his mind was suddenly filled with thoughts of an old friend of his, with everyone reminding him of him on the street, and then to his surprise actually meeting the man that day, though he had believed him elsewhere. It is a more innocent version of the story above, for death sits outside of this arrangement. Yet there is something here that does not quite add up – “what do you call that?” he asks.

At the end of “To Be Read at Dusk” the German tells a final story, this time from when he was in the service of an Englishman. Just before he departed on a long journey the man’s twin brother seemed to send him a message in a dream. Sure enough, word soon arrives that the twin is near death from illness. When the first brother arrives his dying twin only has time to declare before expiring: “James, you have seen me before, to-night – and you know it!”

These stories all focus on what we cannot seem to explain. After relating the experience of seeing his friend, another courier, a Neapolitan, compares such things to the blood of San Gennaro liquifying back in Naples. That is a miracle, but to the others it is inappropriate – one gets the impression they are talking about something more serious. “That!” Cried the German. “Well! I think I know a name for that.” Bollocks, in short.

But as with a lot of stories set in the 19th century, we have here a certain uneasy relation to the supernatural. We may disbelieve miracles, but not quite the everyday inexplicable. Though we may try. The Englishman, on receiving his twin’s message, goes to the German with the hope of putting his mind to rest through the latter’s more scientific vision:

“You come from a sensible country, where mysterious things are inquired into, and are not settled to have been weighed and measured – or to have been unweighable and unmeasurable – or in either case to have been completely disposed of, for all time – ever so many years ago. I have just now seen the phantom of my brother.”

But nothing can be done, and nothing can be explained. Each of these stories tells us precisely nothing, except that such things do happen. They remind us that our world is filled with things that cannot be explained, and that mystery is better accepted than denied. For a 19th-century reader perhaps these tales were enough to make one lose sleep, but they did nothing for me. Our eavesdropping narrator, however, feels a chill, because after hearing the stories he goes back to talking to the very American he had avoided by listening in to the couriers in the first place. This man, from his new and naïve country, tells a more prosaic tale about “one of the largest acquisitions of dollars ever made”. The narrator, clearly, prefers a world that can be explained, even if, by comparison with the previous stories, it is hardly an exciting one.

The Genoese’s Tale: The Obvious Reading

The three previous encounters with the supernatural take up about a third of the length of “To Be Read at Dusk”. They set us up to approach the central tale, told by the Genoese courier and sandwiched between the German’s stories, as being another example of things that cannot be explained. Yet somehow, this does not quite add up. Here the mystery seems, if anything, more complex and more worthy of our attention too.

The Genoese courier tells of his hiring by a young English gentleman to accompany him, and his soon-to-be wife, on a trip to a slightly forlorn palace on the coast between Genoa and Nice for a few months of rest and relaxation. “All we had was complete; we wanted for nothing. The marriage took place. They were happy. I was happy, seeing all so bright.” The newlywed couple, the courier, and another servant, the wife’s maid, head to the palace. On the way, however, the courier notices something amiss about his mistress. He sees her “sometimes brooding in a manner very strange; in a frightened manner; in an unhappy manner”. He is perplexed, but eventually manages to get from her maid the information that she “is haunted”.

A dream before her marriage, of a man wearing black, with black hair and a grey moustache. This is the image that haunts her. The characters fear that they might find such an image at the palace when they arrive, but there is no such likeness anywhere, even among the many paintings. At the same time, our narrator’s description of the palazzo makes us think of gothic tales, and we are on the lookout for any indication of our man, knowing that his presence in the story will probably be fatal.

It does not take long for such a man to arrive, in the form of one Signor Dellombra, whom the Genoese describes as possibly an Austrian noble travelling incognito. When he is shown in for dinner the woman faints, but after her husband talks with her, she agrees to see him again. The couple have had no other guests in all the time they have been there. The husband insists he keep coming, so that his wife might master her fear of him, and this works, albeit incompletely. Eventually, the group go to Rome, where one day the wife disappears. Attempting to find her, the courier and her husband discover that she fled in the carriage of a man they recognise as Dellombra, but as he sent the horses of the station all in different directions, they are unable to give chase, and they never see the woman again.

On the face of it, this is another story about the presence of the supernatural. Like the Englishman in the German’s final story, the young husband here has a largely rationalist viewpoint, and sees himself as needing to go about “curing mistress of her fanciful terror.” Unfortunately, he was wrong in thinking he could fight fate in this manner. Signor Dellombra is a more mythic force, and he achieves what he must have been set on earth to do – to steal away the man’s wife from the bliss of their honeymoon. In this reading, the supernatural seems more hostile than it does in the other stories, but there does not appear to be a greater message here.

The Genoese’s Tale: Alternative Reading

Yet that is far from the case. There are clues in the text that support an alternative reading, things which our Genoese narrator may have missed but which, most likely, will not pass us by entirely unnoticed. We must, for this, consider not the grieving husband, nor the attentive but limited narrator, but rather the wife herself.

What do we learn of her? That she is “a fair young English lady, with a sufficient fortune.” Interestingly, immediately, we might notice that “He was enamoured of [her]”, not that the feeling was mutual. Our only indication, possibly, of that is that “they were going to be married.” As noted, they are married, and the narrator declares that “they were happy.” Perhaps they were, but then why is the woman immediately afterwards gloomy?

This gloom comes upon her when she is alone and appears to be dispelled when he comes and shows her affection. “By and by, she laughed, and then all went well again.” The dream, perhaps, is real, but there are other things that might make any of us unhappy. This is her life: “[she] would sing, and play the harp, and copy the old pictures, and stroll with master under the green trees and vines, all day.” That is her life. And she is happy – isn’t she? For master says so: ““Now Clara,” Master said, in a low voice, “you see that it is nothing? You are happy.”” The narrator says so too. “She was beautiful. He was happy.” But wait, have I not forgotten the “s” on the second sentence? No, we know that the woman is beautiful, but never that she is happy. Indeed, we read this exact sentence twice, with the second time near the end of the story, as if to nudge us towards questioning the sentiments the story contains.

The woman’s life is boring. When Dellombra appears, she is shocked to see the figure in her dream. Her husband, “almost angry”, at this, “and yet full of solicitude” – as I write this, I wonder whether the latter part of the sentence is the Genoese narrator quietly, like Stevens in The Remains of the Day, trying to excuse his master from something that is not quite right. Master forces mistress to see Dellombra again, though she says that the man terrifies her.

““Again? Why, surely, over and over again! Are you cold?” (She shivered)” In a single short speech the master has revealed a certain disregard for his wife and her feelings, which are indicated subtly by Dickens showing us her hidden reaction of horror at his words.

So, then, the woman may not be happy at all in her new relationship. She may need the affection of her husband to remind kindle in her any kind of joy. She has a mysterious dream, a horrific one shortly before her marriage which seems to presage not its end, but rather its lifelessness. When she actually sees Dellombra (and it is she who identifies him as the figure of her dream, while nobody else notices, suggesting that her description of the dream’s contents was perhaps even deliberately vague) and is forced to spend time with him, we read that “she would cast down her eyes and droop her head, before the Signor Dellombra, or would look at him with a terrified and fascinated glance, as if his presence had some evil influence or power upon her.” That rather sounds like a woman who is, at least partly, in love.

Her fainting and illness, her clinging to her husband’s influence, all read now like attempts to ward off this pernicious spirit which she feels as much within herself as within Dellombra – she knows that it will destroy the sacred bonds of her marriage. Yet it does not work. Somehow, in Rome, Dellombra finally gets to her, and they flee together. According to reports in the posthouse, Dellombra passed with “a frightened English lady crouching in one corner.” Yet are we to read her fear simply as that of a person trapped or may there also be a kind of liberated fear here too, which the Genoese narrator is unwilling to pass on to us as his listeners? It is impossible to say.

Conclusion

Sandwiched between tales of funny coincidences, this tale could just be another mysterious inexplicable tale, albeit one with added horror elements. Ironically, however, this tale embodies that classic fantastical trope – that there is always more to things than we may think. Instead of being merely a story about a fatal encounter, we can read this tale as telling us, unwillingly perhaps, about a relationship that merely appears to be perfect, and then only to one member of it. Through the two narrative layers – the Genoese, and the narrator himself – we are limited in what we can glean. But that just leaves an enduring mystery, albeit a much more prosaic one. How can a situation like this arise? How is it that in such a story its main victim is so deprived of her own voice? What was she really thinking?

Alas, we cannot know. But it makes “To Be Read at Dusk” a much more curious little collection of stories than it first appears. Some mysteries, certainly, cannot be explained. Yet some tragedies, equally certainly, can be avoided. Could this one have?

Ottessa Moshfegh – My Year of Rest and Relaxation

A few days ago, I finished the second term of my master’s and immediately went to the airport for a flight to Madrid, where I have an international elective on project finance coming up. I had a few books in my bag already, but at the airport I decided to pick up Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation because I thought it was appropriate given the state I was in – especially after several exams on topics I barely understood and came to realise I did not in any way like. The elective starts tomorrow, so I have had a slightly extended weekend to attempt a bit of rest and relaxation myself. Part of that was the Prado, part of that was Moshfegh’s book.

Moshfegh’s book has an interesting premise. It’s about a young woman who decides she wants to sleep for a year – “hibernate” – so that at the end of it she might emerge fresh and ready to face the world. With the help of a psychiatrist who is more than happy to prescribe a vast array of pills, she is set up to have a serious attempt at achieving her goal. Some of the drugs, I was a little disappointed to learn, were made up. In particular, there is no such thing as infermiterol, the drug that lets the narrator lose consciousness in three-day bursts.

There are various reasons why someone may want to sleep for a year. Here, the narrator has had an unfulfilling, largely abusive relationship with an older fund manager. She also has an unsatisfying relationship with her only friend, Reva, a girl who is determined to rise in the world of New York and does not seem to realise the falseness and baseness of the life she leads to try to manage it. The narrator’s parents are both recently dead, one to suicide. She works in a contemporary art gallery, surrounded by people who offer very little to art and whose individuality is all copy pasted. These are all reasons to want to sleep for a while, though we may assess how compelling they are differently. She has had a privileged upbringing at a nice private school, owns a nice flat in Manhattan thanks to her inheritance, and is very pretty. So perhaps she feels guilty about that too.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, we may surmise, is a book about depression. It’s a fairly funny book, but a very negative, very critical one. Readers of this blog will have noticed that I am not a big reader of contemporary fiction, but I cannot help but find My Year of R&R sufficiently repetitive if not all the same. Being critical of the world that surrounds us is very easy. I think it comes naturally to most of us who keep our eyes open, though our criticisms will vary according to our temperaments. At least for young people like the narrator and Moshfegh (who both went to Columbia University) who have been to half-decent universities, the critical theory just floats in the air like smog as you walk around, regardless of what you think of it.

Sally Rooney’s novels, or even something older like White Noise or anything by Jonathan Franzen or what have you, all tell us the same things. After a point, the criticisms are uninteresting and just pass us by, numbing us to any social mission the author may have had. Look at how dependent the average American (youth) is on antidepressants and drugs. Look at how ridiculous and empty and misleading the media is. All of this irony just makes me think of David Foster Wallace’s essay on Dostoevsky, which, whatever faults he had as a writer and a person (and he’s namedropped in the novel critically), is a far more earnest and truer piece of work than My Year of Rest and Relaxation is. I don’t want to say that the novel isn’t funny. It’s just that funniness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Or certainly not when you’re depressed. The narrator is not a particularly good person. I certainly didn’t care about her. She was amusing enough to follow through the book, but that’s about it. Depression is, as readers will no doubt know, a pretty awful thing to go through. I generally spend about a quarter of each month experiencing the vortex that drags me down from the world into emptiness, loneliness, and despair. I wouldn’t say that I wouldn’t mind, from time to time, the ability to avoid existing for a while – not for a year, but maybe for a couple of days. Thankfully, I am not one for drugs or alcohol abuse, but I numb myself with videogames during my worst moments and they too make me eventually wake up and return to myself like out of a drug-induced swoon, unable to believe that so much time has passed, just drifted away, and all I have for it is a bad temper and a headache.

David Foster Wallace in that essay of his described our culture as one of “congenial scepticism”, where writers hold “an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions,” forcing them “either [to] make jokes of profound issues or else try somehow to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition.” That is certainly true of much of the modern fiction that I have read. And yet depression is serious stuff. At its worst, it is a constant teetering between life and death. Every criticism that the narrator makes of the world is rich in her irony, but it is also an avoidance of the kind of engagement with the problems that may offer a solution. The book needs our narrator to hibernate, but given it attempts to offer us a vision of renewal at the end it’s worth questioning the validity of that vision.

The problem is that My Year of Rest and Relaxation is just another one of those books about privilege. It knows that it is about that. It uses that word. And perhaps because of that, it does not allow itself to say anything serious. If there are people out there with more real problems than a woman in her mid-twenties living off an inheritance, then I get the feeling Moshfegh would feel uncomfortable letting her narrator’s problems seem properly urgent or desperate, a real matter of life and death. They have to be ironized because irony is sanitary. It’s perhaps the only way we can talk about anything at all.

On the flight out to Madrid, I also finished Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which was another book that didn’t do very much for me. There we have a young man who goes off to seek enlightenment and eventually finds it, according to Hesse’s understanding of Buddhism. Both Hesse’s novel, from the early 20th century, and Moshfegh’s, from a few years ago in our own, are in some sense about taking control over our lives and getting some kind of enlightenment and renewal. The only difference is that one attempts to reach this through wandering and spiritual (and other) experiences, and the other attempts to use drugs and sleep to achieve a similar goal. Both works are products of a godless, empty world, but Moshfegh’s is definitely a product of a world still more empty than Hesse’s. What separates them is that I can at least admire Hesse’s go at finding solutions – it was authentic, just a little silly. Moshfegh’s book felt hollow instead.

At the end of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Reva dies in the events of 9/11, and the narrator finishes her sleep and sells her parents’ house. She has cleansed herself of the world, and I suppose can start living again. The whole thing just feels pointless. The narrator hasn’t changed. She has just had a year off. If I were capable of resting, I’d probably feel the same after a week of lounging about. But we’ve wasted a lot of pages to get a faux epiphany.

Perhaps I am reading the wrong fiction. Perhaps I am a bad reader. I understood the cleverness of the book, I just didn’t care. Which probably says that I am depressed, not that the book is bad. But there just wasn’t anything there. I could give you examples of how the narrator mistreats her friend (she gives her her own drugs) or of the social commentary but, like, whatever, man. The truth is that I am alive, I have to deal with this stupid depressing horrible world every day and try to find things worth believing in and holding on to, and I expect my contemporary fiction to be about that struggle, not about the giving up, that is,  if it wishes to deal with this stuff at all. I don’t need success, I just need striving, something to make me put the book down with a little bit more motivation than I had when I picked it up.

If I wanted to feel numb or cold, I could just read about project finance.

The Ghosts in Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary

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.