Today my father was cremated. Though he had lived an enviable life he was just fifty-nine – not an age at which many would be satisfied to face death. For my brother and me, at sixteen and twenty-one, it feels far too soon to lose him, and more than a little unfair. But so sudden was the cancer that we all had little say in the matter. Death affects us all in different ways, and those of us touched by it must find our own solutions for coping, whether they be fighting bravely against the current, or following it into a numbing despair that seems, all things considered, reasonable enough. I want here to set down a few thoughts about books, and their value, in times of difficulty. Exhaustion has left my mind not entirely clear, so I apologise for mistakes and incoherency. This is, I’m afraid, a personal piece.
Medicine
I am the only one in my family who reads fiction. My father was a great lover of non-fiction and read widely, according to his whimsy, in the way that only one who is naturally intelligent but has never been confined in a university can. When news of his several brain tumours came, just over two months ago, in spite of his inability to read properly he did what he could to try and understand the disease that was killing him, and see if he might not discover a solution that the doctors had passed over or did not know. I myself placed my faith in them, because I know many medics at Cambridge, and they have always struck me as the greatest, hardest working, and best of all the students there. If anybody could save him, it seemed to me that a doctor would be the one.
Leo Tolstoy may have ended up with some odd views about God and religion, but at his best his fiction can instil a sense of wonder that lets us weather the storm the death brings into our lives
In Anna Karenina Tolstoy on several occasions displays
a sort of scorn towards medicine. Doctors come to try to rescue Kitty from her
despair, proscribing contradictory remedies that never work and looking like
fools in the process. Of course, Tolstoy has a point that is still relevant
today, when it has been proven how much our mental health can affect our
physical health. Often the best remedies can be ones of the heart and head, and
not things we ingest. Tolstoy’s mistake, at least as I see it, is that he
thinks all diseases work this way and doctors have no purpose. But he was as
opinionated as they come, and I can understand why he thought that way – at least
in the late 19th century medicine still had something alchemical to
it. Now we are much luckier. My father’s problems were in his head, yes, but not
his mind.
Wonder
I thought of Tolstoy a lot as my father rapidly declined. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Hadji Murat, and Anna Karenina in particular were sources of comfort. They made death real, but Tolstoy, the spiritual man, also made death valuable and sacred by imbuing it with a sense of wonder and mystery. He makes us see its horror, yes, but he also shows that through it there may also come a kind of salvation. There was a sense of wonder in seeing my father’s casket, and a sense of wonder in hearing our bagpiper piping us all in. In moments of such wonder you can feel that death is but a stepping-stone to something that lies beyond.
Tolstoy, like the best of our writers and artists, instils this sense of wonder. They make us see that death is not an end, but a new beginning. By making us aware of the mystical, the spiritual component that accompanies a passing on, they give us the consolation that mere thoughts and intellectual rigor cannot. Schopenhauer’s idea of death as returning to sleep is nice, but not nearly so nice as what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other writers of spiritual conviction can achieve at their best. The Bible, and the other mystical books of our world’s religions, are full of tales that inspire wonder. They give us food for belief in magic, the sort of magic that makes the world glisten and shine with meaning. I’m thinking of Ivan Karamazov’s sticky buds here. And when we feel wonder, nothing, not even death, can hurt us or our love for the world.
Fyodor Dostoevsky is another writer who for me can fight against the pain of death. His earnest belief in God and mankind, regardless of one’s own spiritual persuasions, is inspiring. His politics, however, is not.
Dreams and Levin’s Brother
For what consolation can rationalism offer here? The man under the shroud is still dead and cold. Death can lose its sting through thinking about the absence of our perceptions in the tomb, but loss of life will never cease to be painful to contemplate unless we see the mystical opportunities that surround it. My father came to me in a dream. He was in the Saint Petersburg Metro, healthy and well again, and heading onwards. He did not speak, but we embraced. The dream came during his final night alive – he died the next afternoon. Of course, it could have been just luck that made him appear at that time. But I see no reason to favour seeing it as mere chance instead of a holy and hopeful sign.
I cannot explain my dream, except as a revelation of the magic and mystery of our human souls. I remember clearly the death of Levin’s brother in Anna Karenina – his death was not one, but twofold. He said his final words and departed in dignity as a soul – “Don’t leave me”. And then he struggled on for another day, and when the characters gathered round his deathbed mention he has finished his struggling he suddenly comes back to life to say: “Not yet… just a little longer”. And then he dies as a body as well.
Conclusion: Narratives against Death
I have an advantage as a reader and as a writer. I live in stories, and I build them. Death, as Walter Benjamin remarks, destroys the placidity of our bourgeois existence – it is the one thing that breaks through even the strongest of our illusions and delusions about our lives. It creates a rupture and destroys the meaning of our world. In the initial weeks of my father’s illness I was almost glad to have, for the first time, a real reason to be depressed. It felt right for once to be in mental anguish. But of all my family I have been the one to cope with the fewest tears and the least pain, and I can’t help but think that reading has something to do with that.
Against the rupture of death, I was able to create a narrative, to come to an understanding with what has happened. I had read about death many times, and when the grief came, I saw how it reflected countless moods I’d seen in books. It gave me the community of fellow-sufferers and their strengths, and their own attempts to move on. And it made me feel less alone. By understanding that stories are the way we give meaning to our lives, I was able to reconfigure the meaning of my own to take into account my father’s death. Perhaps I am deluding myself in talking of wonder, in seeing signs in dreams and the dewy grass. But it is the power of books that they give you the choice to do so. They give you the tools to choose your fate. And that is a magical thing, whatever you believe.
Have you found literature to be a consolation in times of great suffering? Or have all our great scribblings become petty and unreal for you under the harsh light of death? Do leave a comment and let me know what you think
Introduction – Germany’s contribution to the European
realist novel
There are no two ways about it – Effi Briest is a sad and depressing book, and a deeply tragic one too. It tells the story of the marriage of a young girl to a much older man, and that marriage’s inevitable break down. I heard about it, as I imagine a few others may have done, because Samuel Beckett really liked it, and though I don’t like Beckett’s writing much his praise was enough to put Fontane’s novel on my radar. Beckett said of it: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places”, and while I can’t imagine reading it four times I do think I’ll come back to it one day, and maybe even be moved once more. It is, all in all, an excellent book.
Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) is the most well-known representative of German bourgeois realism. He turned to novel writing late in his life, using works like Effi Briest and Frau Jenny Treibel with their female leads to criticise the social structure and ideals of the newly unified German Reich.
But that’s where its problems begin. Effi Briest is a
good book: it is meticulously well put together, pleasantly short for a 19th
century realist novel, and has interesting characters whose fates are easy
enough to be interested in. But it was published 1895, a few scant years after
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a book which it has a lot in common with, and a
book which is Great where Effi Briest is only good. I know the
Germanists have tried to make Effi stand among Anna and Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary as one of the best realist novels of the 19th Century, but I can’t
help but feel the comparison just leaves Effi looking silly, a little girl next
to these older and more experienced women.
The Daughter of the Air – Effi Briest at home
“Poor Effi”, as the narrator on rare occasions
breaks their neutral facade to call her, is seventeen at the story’s beginning,
though there’s very little indicate that. The girl is introduced more as a
cheeky child than as an almost-adult, with she and her mother doing some
handiwork together. Effi soon leaves to be with her friends, though, where they
make a mess eating berries and sitting on the swing at Effi’s house. The swing
is one of the recurrent leitmotifs of the story, one of those objects connecting
Effi and a certain vision of her world. She is given the epithet “Daughter
of the air” at one point, and it well describes the carefree attitude that
she has at the novel’s outset.
But there are storm clouds ahead, even if Effi can’t see
them. While they eat their berries she tells her friends about the guest to the
family’s house, Baron Geert von Innstettin, who once was madly in love with Effi’s
mother but was unable to marry her due to lack of funds, and who perhaps – we
assume – still has some passion left over. He proposes to Effi as soon as she has
finished with her friends, in spite of only having had a glimpse of her up till
then, and with no small amount of pressure from her parents Effi agrees to let
herself be married off.
Very little of this is described, which I suppose is one of
my main gripes with Fontane. The wedding is not described, the first real
meeting between Effi and Innstetten isn’t described, and the honeymoon trip to
Italy is equally sparsely illustrated. You might say that this is impressive
stylistic economy – Fontane knows what he doesn’t need to show. Furthermore, it
surely adds a sense of mystery to the novel, making us ask ourselves what might
have happened and look for clues in the rest of the narrative. Up to a point
I’d agree with both of these views. But only up to a point. For I suspect that
Fontane’s economy is due to a lack of funds too – I can’t help but feel he just
doesn’t have the talent or confidence to attempt certain scenes, such as going
inside Effi’s head while she’s giving birth.
Kessin and its ghouls
After some shopping in Berlin, Effi is whisked away to the
fictional town of Kessin, out on the Baltic Sea, where Innstettin has his home.
It is a quiet, isolated town with an oppressive atmosphere that leaves Effi
longing for her own home. One of the best scenes in this section of the novel
is one where Effi sees the train heading West and cries – it is excellent
precisely because the connection between home and trains is one we have to make
for ourselves. Throughout the novel trains are constantly mentioned – they
always point to another life that seems to be running away from us.
The Baltic Sea. In Effi Briest the town of Kessin becomes a hugely oppressive place for young Effi, who finds its populace close-minded and hostile, and the sea equally cold.
Even with Innstettin, who Effi does love, or thinks she
does, there is difficulty. He goes away regularly for work, leaving her all
alone. The townsfolk, bar one, are no company, and the house may have a ghost
in the attic who prevents Effi from sleeping well. Another brilliant moment
that reveals just how isolated Effi is is when she confesses to the maid about
how she didn’t sleep well the first time the ghost appears. This information,
given privately, is then immediately passed on to Innstettin by his servant –
it shows where the real power in the house lies, and how Effi is completely
without anyone to trust.
“An Affair” of sorts
Eventually an old friend of Innstettin’s comes to town to
occupy one of the various beaurocratic posts created by the new German Reich.
He is, like Effi’s husband, in his forties, but Major Crampas is also a far
more youthful man than Innstettin is. Innstettin is a man who is absolutely
blinded by various conceptions of duty, order, and what is proper – his career
is everything to him, and even though he cares for Effi it’s hard to see much
passion in his interaction with her.
Meanwhile, Crampas knows poetry, and dazzles Effi by
introducing her to Heine’s works. Even though he has a wife, that doesn’t stop
him from seducing her. The consummation of their affair takes place in a
carriage, deep in the woods late one night on the way back from a dinner – a
thoroughly Romantic location. It lies at the centre of the novel in terms both
of structure, and in terms of pages.
But after it, there’s almost no hint that the affair took
place. Effi meets him a few more times, and we forget about him. It may be that
I didn’t understand the nuances of the German I read the novel in, but that
really did seem to be all there was to it. There aren’t any more chapters
devoted to him. He just fades out. Effi, for her part, doesn’t really seem to
be all that into the affair. Like a leaf floating the air, she just seems
content to be blown around by his passions.
Growing up and its Consequences
With the prospect of an imminent promotion Innstettin
decides, much to Effi’s relief, to move to Berlin with her. She goes ahead to
choose a flat, but deciding she doesn’t want to see Crampas again, she feigns
illness until Innstettin himself comes out, a few weeks later, having finished
up at home in Kessin. Her illness is a key incident because it shows how Effi
has gone from being a carefree dreamer to having something akin to a cunning nature
of her own. From being a child who it is easy to like, I found myself turning a
little bit against her.
But time passes, and everybody gets on with life. Effi’s
daughter, Annie, grows up a little, and Effi herself reaches about twenty-five
years old before anything else happens. It is then, quite by chance, that
Innstettin discovers Crampas’s old love letters to Effi. Even though the whole
thing lies deep in the past he decides that his honour still demands he duel
with Crampas, so he arrives in Kessin and kills him in single combat in another
sparsely described scene – “The shots came; Crampas fell”. Crampas
tries to say something, but dies before he can have any last words. Innstettin
goes home, having already sent Effi away, and gets on with his life. Fontane’s
realist style does well to take any kind of magic away from the conflict.
The Ending of the Story
Effi can’t go home – her parents forbid it – but she does
get a little money from them and rents a small flat, also in Berlin. She has
few visitors, except for one of Innstettin’s servants whom she had been
responsible for hiring, and who now decides to carry on serving her. Only twice
does she see her own child, but the second time, in a meeting organised with
Innstettin’s blessing, Annie is completely monotonous and shows no signs of
affection towards her mother. Effi sends her away after only a few minutes, and
cries. But her inner turmoil is avoided by Fontane – another moment where he
seems to have lacked the confidence to go inside her head.
Eventually though, Effi gets to go home after her parents
take pity on her. She has some happy moments, then dies of a chill. It is a
frustrating ending because there really is no reason for her to die. Both Anna
Karenina and Madame Bovary had relatively good reasons to justify their tragic
fates. But with Effi, I can’t help but feel like Fontane was just shrugging his
shoulders and saying “well, I have to finish the novel somehow”. I also am not
sure I am a fan of the implications of the end, which seem to suggest that
death is inevitable for adulterers. It’s strange to me because Fontane is
generally a champion of progressive social changes in the novel. It’s like he
can’t bring himself to have an ending that fully goes against convention.
A little girl on a swing. If only Effi had chosen to stay on her swing instead of marrying at such a young age her life would not have ended in misery and tragedy. But as with both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary social pressures proved greater than Effi’s own resistance. We can only hope that in our own day the situation is no longer so.
The one thing I did like about the ending, though, was the
glimpse we get of Innstettin. He now has served a short stint in prison for the
duel and is back at work, having also had the promotion he wanted. But all his
love for his job has vanished. He is tormented by the feeling that all of his
career ambition is actually meaningless, that the duel was a mistake too. I
didn’t want to see him have a gruesome comeuppance, but I was glad to see him
face the consequences of his own actions. In much the same way Effi’s parents
express the beginnings of doubts concerning the whole marriage, once she is
back at home and dying. Even though Fontane isn’t willing to keep Effi alive, I
suppose he does make the most of her death.
Conclusion
I suppose I can recommend Effi Briest, but only with reservations. If you are going to dip into Fontane, it seems to be an excellent place to start – but given how few of his works are translated, there’s not much choice to begin with. He called Effi his “first real success”, and it is a success. But as much as we often like to read good books, variety also seems to be pretty important in considering what to give our time to. And unfortunately there is another novel which involves trains, adultery, parents and children, and the battle of the individual against social pressures – another novel which is, I think, far better than Effi Briest. That’s the unavoidable problem here. If it weren’t for the book being useful for my German exams next year, I’d be feeling a little disappointed that I hadn’t just read Anna Karenina another time through.
Am I completely wrong here? Have you read Effi Briest and did you enjoy it? Comment below!
Picture of the Baltic Sea by Mantas Volungevicius [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]is used without changes.
War is a time and space of rapid change, of unrivalled destruction but also of the creation and recreation that comes in its aftermath. In 1920 a young Russian Jew of Odessa accompanied the newly formed armies of the Soviet Union in their war against Poland. Isaac Babel, friend of Maxim Gorky, had been given the role of war correspondent through his connections to the other writer. Gorky saw Babel as needing first-hand experience to improve the quality of his writing. What came out of this time was a cycle of short stories, Red Army Cavalry (Konarmiia), a work of both beauty and brutality. Babel’s stories, published separately in the 1920s before being collected together, showed a new revolutionary world being born, and all the ambiguity it brought.
Isaac Babel (1894-1940) was one of the greatest writers of the early Soviet period. But like so many, he fell foul of the state and was murdered by the secret police.
Babel’s work in these stories is of vital importance to
understanding Soviet culture because it contains within itself the two trends
that were later to become dominant in it. The first, in works lying outside of
state approval and published only clandestinely if at all, criticised the state
for claiming to have made a utopia reality when in practice they had made a lie
leading only to suffering; the second view, however, which developed into
Socialist Realism, was one that promoted the Russian Revolution as creating a
new and better world, which saw bright hopes and the chances to put them into
action, and a new type of heroism, accessible to all.
Babel expressed both views with equal care, and for this his
collection is important in a world where views of the Soviet Union tend to be
particularly black-or-white. But these stories are also intellectually
challenging, extremely well-written, and even at times entertaining. And that
doesn’t hurt them either.
War and its Representation: The Structure of Red Army Cavalry
The great Russian war novel is the aptly titled War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. At well
over a thousand pages it conveys the totality of war by describing everything
Tolstoy can think of that is connected with it. Red Army Cavalry is, by contrast, tiny. The stories themselves are
only ever a few pages long, and the whole book in my edition is just over 150
pages. But Babel was a huge admirer of Tolstoy’s, and his influence is felt
here, albeit in a sublimated form. Whereas Tolstoy aimed to write about
everything, Babel felt that such an option was no longer open to him.
Faced with the horrors of war, and aware of his own limits as a witness, he wrote what comes together to be a fragmented novel rather than a short story collection. Characters recur, and each story chronologically follows on from the previous one, as the cheerful optimism of the Soviets is replaced by concern as they begin to suffer losses, and then fear as they are routed. The narrator is a man called Liutov, which was Babel’s own name while he was working as the war correspondent, and the two men share other similarities that blur together fact and fiction. Babel made liberal use of his diary for creating these stories, so that it is hard to tell where Babel ends and Liutov begins.
Kalinin and Trotsky survey Red Army troops. The Polish War was an early failure of the new state, but at least it led to Red Army Cavalry.
By showing an individual’s challenges during war, Babel can
focus on the reality of suffering rather than the abstractions that are
inevitable when trying to paint a bigger picture. Liutov encounters many of
those affected by the warring armies, from Catholic priests in Poland to
smaller Jewish communities in modern-day Belarus, to simple peasant men and
women. Even as an individual there is enough material to bear witness to. And
whenever Babel wants to expand beyond this, he uses the Russian technique known
as skaz, similar to free indirect
speech it is where characters speak in language and styles clearly distinct
from those of the author. For example, in the story “The Letter”, a young boy, Kurdyukov,
dictates a letter for his mother to Liutov. In this letter he reveals the
extent of his own, personal suffering in the war in a way that Liutov himself
cannot express on his own, except by recording it.
The Prose of Sympathy and Absent Judgements
What Babel takes from Tolstoy is not a grandiose scale so
much as a sense of sympathy towards the world and its inhabitants, and a lack
of direct judgement on them. He takes time to focus on the specific and concrete
casualties of the fighting in ways that challenge the simplistic metanarratives
of war being merely a tug-of-war between opponents.
The first story, “Crossing the River Zbruch”, is
representative of this. It begins “The leader of the Sixth Division reported
that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn” (translations mine unless
otherwise noted) – the tone here is formal and military. But by the second
paragraph there is a shift from the objective towards a more subjective and
poetic appraisal of the landscape: “Fields of purple poppies are blossoming
around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowy rye, and on the horizon the
buckwheat rises like the wall of a far-off monastery”. Death, hidden in official
reports under mere statistics, breaks through in images like that of the orange
sun that “rides across the sky like a decapitated head”.
After these lyrical moments the bulk of the narrative takes place. Liutov enters Novograd and is billeted in a flat with a pregnant woman and three Jewish men, one of whom lies on the floor and sleeps. The descriptions of the poverty within the flat indicate more than the narrator’s frustration ever could what suffering the war has caused. The floors are covered with human faeces, while the pregnant woman’s very existence demands the question – by whom is she pregnant? The lack of judgement by Liutov encourages the reader to search the text carefully to determine for themselves what it might indicate.
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) wrote stories which, like Babel’s in Red Army Cavalry, often end without conclusions. Through a lack of judgement both writers encourage their readers to come to their own conclusions about the meaning of a story.
This lack of narratorial judgement, analogous to the
conclusions of Chekhov’s stories, is made even more glaring by the often horrific
contents of the stories. At the end of “Crossing the River Zbruch” Liutov
discovers that the pregnant woman’s father, who he’d thought was sleeping, is
actually dead. “His throat was torn, his face was chopped in half, and dark blue
blood lay in his beard, like a piece of lead.” This description of death is so
different to numb cliché that we are forced to pay attention to it, to face the
terrifying reality of war. Its presence invites judgement but does not make it.
The pregnant woman has the final words of the story, explaining how the Poles
killed him because it was “necessary”. Through his sacrifice she finds “a
terrible strength” and pride in spite of her surroundings. Only in “terrible” is
there hinted Liutov’s own reaction.
Culture Wars: Introduction
The world after the Russian Revolution was changing culturally
just as much as it was technologically and politically. In some sense the
change was a positive one, bringing art and artistic production down to the
masses from being almost exclusively the domain of Russian elites in the
capitals. Religion was dismissed as mere delusion, “the opium of the people” in
Marx’s eyes, and science and rational thought were promoted as the alternative.
Social progress on a grand scale, by the most forward thinking (in its own eyes)
states ever to have existed, was the order of the day. A new type of hope was
born, one that saw agency transferred from a mysterious God above into the
hands of individual men and women.
But with all that there comes a question – what have we
lost? Red Army Cavalry presents the
two sides of progress’s coin through the times of the day, contrasting in daytime
stories those who represent the new world with the characters of stories set at
night, who represent an old world that, however irrevocably tainted it is,
still retains something intangible and important for human life.
Culture Wars: Night and the Old Culture
Who are the people who lose out in the face of the
Revolution and its consequences? Primarily it is the Jewish characters and the Catholics.
Liutov himself is like Babel, Jewish, and thus as vulnerable as these others to
the cataclysmic changes taking place. Within the stories the great
representative of the old culture is the Jew, Gedali, from the story of the same
name. In his story Liutov, late on the evening of the Sabbath goes out among
the Jews of his current village, looking at the little stalls where they sell
items like chalk to survive. The destitution makes him think of Dickens, and it
is such appeals to an established literary tradition that reveal how culturally
bound up in it he is.
Eventually he comes across the bench of an old man, Gedali,
and sits down for a chat. At Gedali’s bench there are dead butterflies and other
objects of fragile beauty. Yet with these symbols of culture there is a sense
of its own negation, when Liutov smells “decay” underneath it all. Gedali is an
educated man, and the two discuss the Revolution together. Gedali says he loves
music and the Sabbath, but the Revolution tells him he doesn’t know what he
loves. He talks of the violence the Revolution has led to and comments “The Revolution
is the good act of good people. But good people don’t kill. That means that the
Revolution makes people bad”. For all the idealism motivating the Soviets in
this period, Gedali is concerned with its failed reality of it. In pain he famously
asks Liutov “Which is the revolution and which the counterrevolution?”
Liutov has no real answers. His responses are pithy,
thoughtless, as though plucked from a handbook on propaganda. “The Revolution
has to shoot, Gedali… for it is the Revolution”, he says, obviously playing a
different role to the one he plays in other stories. Soon enough he gets tired
of his self-deception and asks where he can get some Jewish food and tea. Then he
sets off to take part in the culture he was born into and cannot, though he
tries to pretend otherwise with Gedali, escape. Meanwhile, Gedali goes to pray.
Closed indoor spaces, filled with decay and dust – these are
the domains of the old culture. It is dying, certainly. There is a distinct
sense of infertility in them, an absence of women and children. But for Liutov,
and for other intellectual characters, it is absolutely necessary. It is a part
of themselves that they cannot afford to lose.
Culture Wars: Sunshine and Cossacks in Red Army Cavalry
Loud and proud and colourful, the Cossacks stand out among the characters encountered during the day. They do not think beyond the present – neither past regrets nor the future hopes hold sway with them. They embody upheaval and joyous chaos. One of them is Dyakov, who was formerly a circus manager, and now is a soldier. He is described as “red-faced, silver-whiskered, in a black cloak”, as though he had never abandoned his roots as a performer. Colour is one way that the day-people stand out compared to the dull souls of the night. In their huge, larger-than-life poses and actions they are more than a little reminiscent of epic heroes.
Cossacks like this one pictured here were traditionally free of some of the administrative burden of the Russian state in exchange for aiding it militarily. They played key roles in the subjugation of the Caucasus, for example.
They have no culture of the sort comprehensible to Liutov. Instead,
they sing and one of them, Afonka Bida, at one point tries drunkenly playing a
church organ in an act clearly symbolic of the usurpation of old culture’s
place by the new. Their vitality is overpowering, and is usually marked by
connecting them to their horses. They are often shown having sex or seducing
women, demonstrating the sheer magnetic attractiveness of their love of life. They
do not care whether they live or die, so long as in every moment they are living to the full. In this sense, it is
hard not to wish to be like them and similarly free from restraint and concern.
But their freedom and joy is only one side of them. They come
at a cost – their violence and unpredictability sets them outside of society
and civilization, and for all their heroism, such as squadron commander Trunov valiantly
facing down a biplane on his own like a modern day Don Quixote, under its surface
Red Army Cavalry questions what good
these people will be able to do once the war has ended and it is time to settle
down. These are people who, thinking back to Gedali’s words, have made the Revolution
and made it in their own image. The violence with which they carry out the
Revolution also shapes it, and hardly in a good way.
Liutov’s Among his Comrades
Liutov, of course, fits in uneasily among his comrades. Two
stories illustrate this. “My First Goose” is one of Babel’s most famous ones.
In it Liutov is first mocked by the Cossacks for his appearance – like Babel he
wears glasses – and for his education. Savitskii, one of them, suggests he defile
a woman in order to be respected by the rest of them. Instead, he goes and
kills a chicken with a sword in a mockery of his own hopes of being heroic
before giving it to its owner, an old woman, to cook. The woman repeatedly says
that she wants to kill herself, but Liutov ignores her, returning to his
comrades. Now that he has killed he is accepted by them and addressed as “mate”.
But the act leaves him feeling guilty, and during the night he dreams of the blood
he has spilled.
The second story, “The Death of Dolgushov”, further demonstrates
his failure to fit in. Dolgushov, a Cossack, is injured and dying from his
wounds, which are described just as horribly as they are in “Crossing the River
Zburch”. He asks Liutov to kill him, so that the Poles don’t find him alive to
torture him further. But Liutov, filled with compassion and the humanist values
common among the night characters, is unable to do it – his care paralyses him.
Instead Afonka Bida has to finish the other Cossack’s life. As he does so, he
says to Liutov: “Get away or I’ll kill you! You, four eyes, pity our brother like
a cat does a mouse”. Values that seem so effective in books fail Liutov the
moment he has to put them into practice. By the end of the story he has lost
the little all the respect he had gained.
Pan Apolek and the New Culture
Pan Apolek is not a Cossack, but rather a Polish Catholic.
Yet where the Cossacks fail to create a new culture out of the ruins of the
old, Pan Apolek in his own story shows one way in which a potential synthesis
of the old culture and the new is possible. Liutov first meets him at night, while
he is having tea with his hostess, and then learns about his work. Apolek is a church
painter, but with a difference. Traditionally such a person would go around trying
to paint according to the strict rules of icon paintings, deviating as little
as possible from an original image. Yet though Apolek paints Mary Magdalene,
Jesus, and other Biblical figures, they are not modelled on originals but
rather on local people. In this way he mixes high, religious culture with the low
culture of normal people.
Icons like the one pictured here generally were painted according to strict rules. Pan Apolek instead democratises the whole concept of an icon, bringing poor peasants into a religious culture that otherwise would seem distant and cold to them.
Though he is branded a heretic, he continues painting. His
subjects include such blasphemous pairings as having Mary Magdalene be Yelka, a
local woman who has given birth to many illegitimate children. What Apolek does
is bring the high culture of religion down into the world, and in doing so make
it more accessible. More than the revolutionaries themselves, he brings their
ideals into practice.
Conclusion: Writing and Synthesis
Liutov is not the only writer here. In the story “Evening” several
other war correspondents are depicted, each of them marked by illnesses, with
Liutov’s being his poor sight. In vain one of them tries to convince a girl in
the camp to sleep with him, but she instead joins one of the Cossack soldiers,
unattracted by statistics and historical figures. But the very existence of Red Army Cavalry is itself an argument
about writing and its use. As much as the Cossacks see little need for fancy
metaphors and complex structures, Babel still gives them to us. He gives us
stories of night and day, evening and the dawn. By writing about so many people,
those who suffer from the Revolution and those who are made great by it, he
encourages us to consider it not as good or evil, but as a mixture of the two.
A great deal of culture was lost, a strain of humanism of value seemingly disappeared, but in its place was a new world, filled with hopes and vitality. Liutov may be scrawny and bespectacled, but in writing this book Babel has made him, too, a kind of hero, because through these stories their emerges an attempt to shape the direction of cultural production within the Soviet Union, and with it an entire society, for the better. Like Pan Apolek, in the stories of Red Army Cavalry Babel syntheses two worlds, instead of letting one or the other get the better of him. If only his work had found more success instead of repression, perhaps the Soviet Union could have been a different place.
For more early Soviet literature filled with ambiguity, have a look at my piece on Andrei Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories. Alternatively, if you’d rather look at the dark side of the Soviet system directly, Varlam Shalamov writes wonderfully and grimly about the Gulag here.
picture of Babel, picture of Kalinin and Trotsky surveying the Red Army, picture of Chekhov, picture of a Cossack, and picture of an icon are all in the public domain
