Short Stories Archives - Page 2 of 5

Two Petersburg Tales – Nevsky Prospekt and the Notes of a Madman

I’ve written earlier here about Gogol’s “The Nose”. But Gogol wrote more tales about Saint Petersburg than just that one and the equally well-known “The Overcoat”. He wrote five Petersburg Tales in all, and today I’ll give my impressions on both “Nevsky Prospekt” and “Notes of a Madman”, which are good, but not nearly as good as those other two tales. Since I’ve now been living in the city again for a month already, they make for interesting reading. As for the story “The Portrait”, which I liked a lot, I’ll save it for another time.

Nevsky Prospekt

In Saint Petersburg, in spite of the best efforts of the Bolsheviks to replace it with Moskovsky Prospekt (Moscow Avenue) in the south, the most important street in the city is still Nevsky Prospekt. At its far end there lies the golden spire of the Admiralty Building, and halfway down there is the Cathedral of our Lady of Kazan, one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the whole city. As for the other buildings, just as was the case in Gogol’s time there are a lot of shops, though now they are much more touristy than once they were. Though you can buy yourself some upmarket things here too, such as caviar, if you’re concerned at all about saving money you would be better off looking elsewhere. During the day in the summer it’s packed with tourists, and during the evening they are joined by local musicians, strutting their stuff.

It is this place, half magical, half grimy and commercial, that forms the theme of Gogol’s Petersburg Tale: “Nevsky Prospekt”. Rather boringly he describes life on the avenue for about ten pages, from dawn till the narrator gets tired and distracted (half way through the afternoon). There is a lot that is interesting if you happen to like this sort of stuff, but I’m not sure there are that many that do. There is irony in abundance, and lots for me to take apart when I inevitably have to write an essay on the Petersburg Tales, but that doesn’t make for great reading.

Eventually, we meet our two heroes – for this is not one story, but two, taking place on the same city’s street. The first is Piskarev, while the second is Pirogov – one of those characters with a classical Gogolian name. “Mr Pie”, I suppose, would convey the idea in English.

Piskarev’s story – the first of the beautiful women

Piskarev’s story centres around a woman, seen by him as he’s walking down Nevsky Prospekt. This woman, as is frustratingly common in the Petersburg Tales and Russian literature of this period more broadly, is mind-blowingly beautiful. I say this because Gogol seems to forget that women have personalities, and their beauty seems to be his excuse to avoid coming up with one. Though, perhaps I shouldn’t complain too much, since in actual fact this story plays with this idea anyway.

Anyway, Piskarev is an artist, and he decides to follow this woman home – as one does in early 19^th century Russia. As he chases after her he continually imagines that she gives him signs of encouragement, from “an easy smile” to a beckoning gesture with her finger. At this point I was sure Gogol was simply demonstrating the degree to which Piskarev was deluding himself in his attempted pursuit of the woman, but in actually all of these signs are happening in the real world, and not just in his head, though we don’t yet know it. Piskarev heads up to the fourth floor, which in Gogol’s world always hints at the devil (the Russian word for “devil” and for “four” are almost the same), where he finds a trio of women, including the one he followed. I thought it was a parallel to the Fates of Greek Mythology.

And all the while Piskarev heaps on his adoration for the girl – “God, what godly features!”. But he is betrayed, for this woman is no goddess: she is just a prostitute, even though her beauty is mindblowing. The destruction of Piskarev’s delusions are too much to bear, especially when the woman starts speaking “such stupid things, such base things” – and he flees. That night he dreams that she is not a prostitute at all, and that she was merely testing him, and now is inviting him to a ball. He goes, speaks with her again, and finds her to be closer to what he wants. But then he awakes, and the dream is gone.

In search of the dream girl

Piskarev cannot let things stand like that, especially when his dream was so wonderful compared to the reality he’d encountered. He attempts to go to sleep again, and sleeps as much as he can, all to try to recover that dream, so that “eventually the dreams became his life”. He stops going out, lives only to fall asleep. But the dream fades and fades, and he is forced to resort to opium to return its contents to him. With this preference for the dream over reality comes a theme that runs throughout the Petersburg Tales – that of the sanctity of life. Because in his preference for the dream, Piskarev comes to believe “It was better that she had never existed! That she’d not lived in the world, but was just the creation of an inspired artist’s mind!” – he comes to reject life itself.

Eventually he decides to go back to the woman, to try to save her from her situation. But she doesn’t want to be saved – she appears to be happy. “I only just woke up – they brought me back at seven in the morning. I was completely pissed!”. Piskarev’s artistic imaginings mean he cannot bear the thought that beauty of body doesn’t always correspond to what we assume beauty of mind is. Piskarev doesn’t value her – he only sees her as an artistic object. Dejected and humiliated by her refusal to come with him, Piskarev kills himself. For not valuing her life his punishment is to cease to value his own.

Pirogov’s Story – yet another beauty

Pirogov’s tale concerns another attempted seduction – this time of the wife of a German craftsman – and is as packed with delusion as Piskarev’s story was. Schiller is the name of the German, a drunk but talented worker whose wife has the misfortune of being seen by Pirogov as he was walking down Nevsky Prospekt. Pirogov decides to use all his powers to spend time with her, including paying an extortionate sum to Schiller for the pleasure of a new set of curtains, which gives him plenty of opportunities to drop by and check on their progress. The delusions here concern Pirogov’s view of himself: “politeness and his magnificent rank absolutely gave him the right to full attention”. What this means in practice is that he assumes he can get whatever he wants because he is a civil servant and Schiller is not.

In this manner kisses with Schillers wife, inappropriate touches, and so on and so forth take place, all while Pirogov justifies the whole thing to himself as being completely in accordance with public etiquette. The situation is funny, but horrific at the same time. The wife, whose Russian is almost non-existent, is a completely passive victim in the text. The high point of the story I shall quote in full because it is particularly comic. Pirogov has determined when Schiller will not be home so that he can finally have some time alone with his wife. He enters, finds her alone, and decides to ask her if she’d like to dance.

“The German agreed at once, for Germans are always lovers of dance. On this front Pirogov had placed a lot of his hopes: firstly, it already gave her pleasure; secondly, it could show his own talents and gracefulness; thirdly, while dancing you can get very close, embrace the cute little German and start the whole thing off – in short, he concluded he would have complete success here. He started some kind of gavotte, knowing that Germans need gradual seduction. The cute little German stepped into the centre of the room and raised one beautiful little leg. This situation so overjoyed Pirogov that he lost all control and began to kiss her. The German began to cry out, which in fact just increased her wonderfulness in the eyes of Pirogov, and he covered her in even more kisses. But just at that moment the door opened, and Schiller and Hoffmann and the joiner Kuntz entered. All of these worthy craftsmen were drunk as old boots.

And I will leave it to the reader to imagine the displeasure and wrath of Schiller.”

Pirogov’s story concludes exactly as might be predicted. He gets beaten up, goes home, but unlike Piskarev he finds solace in reading, and eventually moves on.

Nevsky Prospekt – Conclusion

What is Nevsky Prospekt? Gogol’s goal in this story appears to be to show that the place is more than a road. It is something magical, with more than a hint of the demonic about it too. But that magic manifests itself in tired tropes of overly seductive women with no personalities, which doesn’t, in this day and age, make for particularly interesting reading. There are exciting, thought-provoking things going on here: there is the way that a place like Nevsky Prospekt can contain within itself a huge number of potential associations and powers; there is also in Piskarev’s story an entertaining reversal of his unfounded hopes for the beautiful woman’s beautiful mind. And most importantly, these stories are funny. But ultimately, since I go down the street almost every day now, I can’t help but feel a sense of missed opportunity. There is so much more here than girls.

I do like the title though. It puts location in pride of place as opposed to the other Petersburg Tales where objects seem to be the main receptacles for magic and the demonic.

Notes of a Madman

This one is strange. In fact, though it’s the funniest of the Petersburg Tales it’s probably also the most uninteresting of the them – the impression I got while reading it was that it could have been written by anybody with sufficient talents, not just Gogol. There was something missing, or rather, there was too much there. Too much strangeness is always the danger in these kinds of stories and in this one Gogol sort of overdoes it. His narrator goes from being odd to being completely mad. At the time of its writing this story may well have seemed pretty novel, but by now it feels somewhat like a collection of tropes. For example, the use of the diary format. At first everything is organised “October 3^rd…,” then the next entry, etc, but by the end it collapses into gibberish – “Marchtober 86^th, between day and night”.

The story follows another down-and-out civil servant. He is in love with the daughter of one of his superiors, a man whose pens the servant is in charge of cleaning – a role he sees as evidence of favouritism, though he is mistaken. As with the other stories, here too the main character struggles with money, and is overly aware of class divisions. Underlying the text there is the same thread about the importance of human life that can be found elsewhere. When the diarist heads onto the streets we are told “On the streets there was nobody; just old women, hiding from the rain inside their dresses, and Russian merchants under umbrellas, and couriers came into my field of view”. “Nobody” means nobody well born – our narrator is a complete and utter snob, no matter how little reason he has to feel superior.

Dog Days

I wonder if Mikhail Bulgakov was inspired by “The Notes of a Madman” to create “The Heart of a Dog”. In Gogol’s story, too, we have dogs communicating. The narrator, in the first real sign of his madness, hears his love’s dog communicating with another dog, and is, naturally, amazed. I too was amazed, and had to check I hadn’t forgotten how to read Russian – but the translation I found confirmed my suspicions about the meaning. Eventually the narrator decides to use the dogs, who are apparently writing letters to each other, as a way of finding out more about his superior’s daughter and her life. He follows the second dog home and is stopped by the dog’s owner. The following is funny enough to translate at length.

“What can I do for you?” The girl asked. “I need to speak with your dog!” I said. She was a stupid one, all right! I understood just at that moment that she was not right in the head! But then the dog appeared, barking away; I wanted to grab it but – the bitch – it almost clamped its teeth around my nose. Just then I saw, however, its lair in the corner. Aha! – that’s what I needed. I went over, tore up the straw bedding in its wooden cage and, to my great pleasure, drew out a bundle of scraps of paper. The dreadful bitch, seeing this, first bit my thigh, and then, when it smelled that I’d stolen its paper, began to wail and hang onto me. “No, my dear, farewell” – and I ran off.”

I like this extract. It made me laugh when I first read it. It makes little sense and is hilariously slapstick. I think that’s the thing I like most about “The Notes of a Madman” – it’s actually pretty funny.

Madness à la Quixote

But it’s all not very original or inspired. The initial delusions of the narrator become full-blown madness once he discovers, having read the dogs’ letters – themselves highly funny and not particularly sane, that the daughter he is hoping to marry is in fact betrothed to another. The news leads to a complete collapse in the man’s identity, out of the ashes of which he decides to remake himself as the King of Spain. This is the first key hint towards the big literary influence on the story: Don Quixote. The narrator hopes to persuade the girl to marry him instead by believing that, as the King of Spain, she wouldn’t be able to refuse him. When he is eventually thrown out of his house, and even taken to prison, like the hero of Cervantes’ novel, our narrator chooses to interpret everything according to his imagination. The prison becomes “Spain.”

An engraving of Don Quixote — Don Quixote seems to be a big model for “The Notes of a Madman”. Both stories have main characters whose madness allows them to repurpose the world in such a way as to prevent it from doing them harm.

Cervantes’ influence is just too great here. The story is funny, but that’s not enough to elevate it up to “The Overcoat” or even “The Nose” in importance; meanwhile the decline into madness is something we’ve seen plenty of times in more modern culture, so it doesn’t have nearly as strong an impact as it probably did back when Gogol was writing. The story is good, but it’s just nothing special next to some of the other Petersburg Tales.

Conclusion

If you want to read these stories, you’ll end up getting a copy of Gogol’s collected stories, or a copy of the Petersburg Tales specifically. Either way, my recommendation isn’t that much use here. “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” are both fantastic stories that are worth reading again and again, and worth the price of admission. These other stories are good, and give you something else to look at, but I wouldn’t rush out to buy them if they were sold on their own. The one remaining story, “The Portrait”, is the longest of the bunch and also, I think, one of the most exciting. In a few weeks I hope to have a piece on it up here too.

A translation of “The Notes of a Madman” can be found here. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a translation of “Nevsky Prospekt” in the public domain.

Have you read these two lesser-known Petersburg Tales? What did you think of them?

The Magic and Mystery of Gogol’s “The Nose”

“The Nose”: Introduction – Not just a Strange Idea

What an odd idea it is to write a story about a man who loses his nose! After all, no one has ever woken up to find theirs has vanished unless I am much mistaken. But this is precisely the starting point for Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose”. In this piece I’d like to share a summary and interpretation of Gogol’s story, and my own thoughts on why it’s absolutely worth reading.

A daguerreotype of Gogol, showing his magnificent nose — Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), writer of strange tales of Saint Petersburg, and himself a bearer of a fantastic nose!

“The Nose” does have a strange premise. The completely surreal idea of losing one’s nose reminds me a little bit of the sort of modern art that we foolishly claim our children could have painted. Anybody can come up with a strange idea – that’s ultimately not hard that hard if you’re sleep deprived or have access to drugs – and even writing about such an idea doesn’t take too much doing. The challenge, and the sheer genius of Gogol, lies in taking a strange and simple idea and extending it, through understanding it and its implications fully, into a full story. The spark of genius is not a good metaphor here – rather the spark is the strange idea, and Gogol’s talent is all the wood he is able to gather together for the fire. Though it’s a story about a nose, “The Nose” has a lot of depth and flavour to it.

Translations from the Russian are all my own.

The Story of “The Nose”

Part I: Ivan Yakovlevich

One morning the barber Ivan Yakovlevich wakes up and has his breakfast as usual. However, to his great surprise, he finds that in the middle of the loaf of bread he has just cut there is a nose. “A nose, that was exactly what it was! And what was more, it seemed to belong to someone he knew…” Already the initial strangeness of finding the nose is compounded by the absurd logic of Gogol’s world, where a man can recognise the nose of another with such certainty. (In much the same way, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” begins with a strange event, but the true strangeness comes in the reactions of Gregor Samsa’s relatives).

The nose belongs to a civil servant, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, whose whiskers Ivan Yakovlevich trims a few times each week. Threatened with the police by his wife, Ivan runs outside and throws the nose in the river, only to be caught anyway by a passing policeman. At this point the narrator intervenes to say: “But at this moment the whole matter was completely covered in fog, and I have absolutely no idea what happened next”. Thus ends the first part of the story.

Part II: Collegiate Assessor Kovalev

Next we wake up with the man with the missing nose, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev. After noticing a small spot on his nose the night before, he now discovers the whole thing is missing. After a brief detour into social status in Imperial Russia, Gogol then takes us and Kovalev out onto the street, where he has to cover his face to avoid being recognised by his acquaintances – since, as we learn, nothing is more embarrassing for a man of society than being seen without his nose either by women or by co-workers. But then he sees on the street ahead none other than his own nose! One thing that must be mentioned here is that we never learn what a walking nose looks like – Gogol only talks about the uniform of the organ. But to Kovalev’s dismay the nose has a higher rank in the civil service than he does.

Still, he needs his nose, so he goes up to “him” inside a cathedral where “he” has gone to pray. Very awkwardly, Kovalev approaches and begins to speak. “It’s awfully strange, my dear sir… but it seems to me… you should know your place. Suddenly I find you here, and where else but a church? You must agree…” In spite of a few pages all about Kovalev’s rank and pride, everything collapses into gibberish in front of a superior. Funnier still, are the puns Gogol sprinkles around the dialogue. “You should know your place” appears to refer to the nose’s place on his face, but it is just what would be said by a superior to an inferior too. The nose, naturally, is unimpressed by Kovalev, and furrows its brows before departing in a hurry. Once again, Gogol plays with our idea of what the nose must look like.

A picture of Kazan Cathdral's interior. In "The Nose" Kovalev meets his missing nose here. — Kazan Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. It is here that Kovalev and his nose have their main encounter. One thing to think about in Gogol’s works is always the role of religion, and especially the devil. What does it mean for “The Nose” that the nose itself is pious?

Kovalev is left alone, and now he tries to find some way of tracking down the nose again. He tries the police, he tries to place an advertisement in a newspaper. This last one is particularly funny, as Kovalev’s pride demands that he cannot let his name go into the paper. Instead, he falls back onto his acquaintances. “Look, a lot of people know me: Chekhtareva, wife of the state councillor; and Palagea Grigorievna Podtochina, wife of staff officer Podtochin. If they find out about this, God help me!” Which leaves the public to identify the nose without even knowing whose it is, and thus what it looks like. Another absurd moment. Kovalev goes home, writes a mad letter to a woman whose daughter he’d been flirting with, accusing her of using witchcraft to remove his nose, though naturally he has no evidence for it.

But just when all hope seems lost, the policeman from Part I arrives to say that the nose has been apprehended. What was the nose doing? It had been trying to flee the city and escape to Riga. As you do. The mad suggestion that the nose would flee Petersburg is first suggested by Kovalev’s addled mind a few pages earlier, and most readers (like me) will probably dismiss it as ridiculous. But this is just further evidence that Gogol’s world does not run on the same logic as yours or mine. The rest of Part II consists of Kovalev trying to reattach his nose, but to no avail.

Part III: Back to Normal?

And then one morning, April 7^th to be precise, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev wakes up and his nose is reattached. That’s it. It reattaches itself just as magically as it vanished. Kovalev is overjoyed, and heads out into town, determined to do all of the things his nose’s absence had prevented – flirting and performing his duties as a civil servant.

The story ends with the narrator having a brief commentary on the theme of his own story. “Whatever you may say, such things do take place – not too often, but they do”. Is Gogol having one final laugh at the reader? Absolutely. Almost every story is a little ridiculous, a little unbelievable, a little too reliant on coincidences. But most are at the very least possible. “The Nose” is not, and the veneer of factuality given by its use of dates – because we’re also told at the beginning of Part I, reasonably enough, that the story begins on March 25^th – is just teasing. But who are we to say what’s real and not real, possible and impossible?

That’s the story of “The Nose”. Now for a few suggestions as to what this all means – because it has to mean something, right?

Magic, Mystery and Meaning: The Themes of “The Nose”

Clothes and Respectability

For a story that is from its title onwards apparently concerned with our bodies Gogol’s focus in much of “The Nose” is oddly enough not on our skin and blood but on the things we use to cover them up. Clothes are at the centre of social rank in early 19^th Century Saint Petersburg, and Gogol satirises that in his story. By dealing so much with clothes, Gogol shows how vapid and superficial people were in their interactions – they don’t care to reach the person beneath the suit. This is played with most in the case of the nose itself. Kovalev encounters his nose, but the only physical description is of what the nose is wearing, not what the thing itself looks like.

The deliberate confusion as to what exactly a nose looks like is further played up when the nose is caught by a short-sighted policeman who only recognises that it is a nose and not a man once he has put is glasses on – otherwise, he says, he would have let him pass out of the city and escape to Riga without a hitch. People are overly willing, in Gogol’s world and perhaps our own, to look no further than the rank and respectability indicated by our clothing when interacting with others. Decorum is an important part of society, but we should be wary of letting it absorb all of our attention, lest we and others become nothing more than the clothing we are wearing.

A picture of an early version of the Table of Ranks. In "The Nose" social class plays a big role — The Russian Table of Ranks created by Peter the Great is indirectly a cause of much woe in Gogol’s stories. In “The Nose” Kovalev’s anxiety about approaching his nose is in part due to the fact that it appears to be of a higher rank than him.

Women and Sex

One of the most infamous works of Gogol criticism is Simon Karlinsky’s The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, which goes through Gogol’s works and finds that the key to understanding them is his repressed homosexuality. I’m not sure how far I agree with Karlinsky, but I think that thinking of “The Nose” as being about sex can prove fruitful. First of all, consider the object itself. Human noses are generally phallic in shape, and in Russian the word “nos/нос” is a masculine noun. The uses of noses, both smell and taste, are also important parts of sex. Furthermore, it’s also worth mentioning that in his correspondence Gogol regularly notes his awkwardness over the size and shape of his own. The shame that Kovalev feels at having a missing nose is directly connected with a much-reduced desire to flirt and see women. So perhaps it’s not a stretch, after all.

The Narrator and The Reading Public

It’s hard to avoid the narrator in “The Nose”. He’s a cheeky one, always appearing at the most inconvenient times with a wink. When Ivan Yakovlevich heads to the bridge the narrator decides to stop the action and tell us a little about him. The same thing happens, a few pages on, with Kovalev. And then there is the matter of the use of dates in “The Nose”. I think one layer to the story’s meaning is satirising the reading public’s demands for what a story must look like. After all, the public like prose narratives to have an element of factuality to them, in contrast to the more explicitly artistic verse narrative also popular then in Russia.

Gogol provides us with the outward appearance of veracity – clear dating, lots of unnecessary details about characters – while contrasting it with a clearly fantastic and absurd tale. Furthermore, at key moments he reveals the inadequacy of this factual veneer, such as when discussing the nose’s independent life – we learn a lot about what he wears and what rank he has, but as to what the thing actually looks like we are left completely in the dark. Gogol is poking fun at us here, and what we need to think of a story as “real”. Simply representing reality as we see it, “The Nose” seems to say, doesn’t get to the heart of things. We never learn why the nose disappears, no matter how much detail Gogol gives us – some mysteries go deeper.

Body Positivity

What I think is the most convincing overall interpretation of “The Nose”, though, is that it is about making us value our bodies more. A nose is something we can live without, but Gogol is keen to show that that doesn’t mean it is worthless. Throughout the story there are descriptions of food, flowers, and snuff – all of which we know Kovalev is unable to enjoy because of his absent nose. Furthermore, a lot of the language centres around our bodies. For example, the introduction of Kovalev – “Collegiate Assessor Kovalev woke up rather early and made a “brrr…” noise with his lips” – shows that from the moment we wake up our bodies are important to our character. When one of Kovalev’s attempts to track down his nose fails, the rejection is felt “not like a hit in the brow, but one right in the eye”.

We don’t think about our bodies until they begin to fail us, or until one morning we wake up and find a part of them has gone missing. Gogol’s story, at least to me, seems to bear the message that we ought to care about them and be grateful for them the whole time. They do a lot of good things for us.

Conclusion

The magic and mystery of “The Nose” lies in the fact that the story is so strange that, like with Kafka’s tales, it’s very hard to find an interpretation that rules out every other one. The more time we spend thinking about it, the more ideas come into our heads for what exactly the whole thing means. Ultimately though, that’s not a reason to read the story – the best reason is that it’s actually quite funny, and completely absurd. It’s short too. Give it a go.

Here’s a translation of “The Nose”. I might make my own in due course too. For more strangeness, I’ve translated Kafka’s “Before the Law” here.

Crossing the Zbruch by Isaac Babel – Translation and Commentary

This is my translation of “Crossing the Zbruch” by Isaac Babel. It is the first story in Konarmiia, or Red Army Cavalry, a collection of his stories on the Polish-Soviet war in the early 1920s. In other translations it has been rendered as “Crossing the River Zbrucz”. Following the text there are a few comments on the meaning of the piece.

Crossing the Zbruch

The leader of the sixth division had announced that Novograd-Volynsk was taken this morning at dawn. The headquarters moved out of Krapivo and our convoy, a noisy rear-guard, spread itself out along the highway that runs from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of countless peasants by Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowy rye, and on the horizon the virgin buckwheat rises like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn river bends, she flows away from us into the pearly fog of birch groves, she creeps among the flowery little hills, and with weakening strength she gets lost in the thickets of hops. The orange sun rolls across the sky like a head after a beheading, and a tender light illuminates the canyons in the clouds, as above our heads our unit’s standards blow in the sunset. The smells of yesterday’s bloodletting and dead horses drip into the evening coolness.

The Zbruch, now grown black, sloshes and twists the foamy loops of her rapids. The bridges have been destroyed so we have to fjord the river. A majestic moon lies on the waves. The horses, end to end, enter the water, its noisy currents trickling between a hundred horses’ legs. Someone goes under and loudly curses the Virgin Mary. The river is strewn with the black squares of carts; she is filled with murmurs, whistles and songs, rumbling above the lunar shapes and shining depths.

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. I find a pregnant woman in the flat that I’ve been allocated, and two ginger Jews with thin necks; a third is asleep, hiding his head and lying close to the wall. I find a looted cupboard in the flat I’ve been allocated, and on the floor scraps of women’s coats, human shit, and shards of pottery from the special crockery used by Jews once a year – at Passover.

“Clean it up.” I say to the woman. “How can you live in such filth, and when it’s your own home too…”

The two male Jews get up from their spot. They jump onto their felt soles and clean up the pottery from the floor; they jump around in silence, like apes, like Japs in the circus, their necks swelling and twisting as they go. They place a scruffy feather bed on the floor, and I lie towards the wall, right by the third, still sleeping, Jew. A timid poverty closes in around my pillow.

Everything is dead with silence, and only the moon, with the blue arms of night wrapped around its shining, carefree head, wanders above the window.

I loosen up my numb legs; I lie on the scruffy bed and fall asleep. The leader of the sixth division comes to me in a dream. He is on a heavy stallion and chasing after the leader of the brigade, and then he places two bullets into the other’s eyes. The bullets make holes in the brigade leader’s head, and both his eyes fall to the ground. “Why have you turned the brigade around?” Savitsky, leader of the sixth division, shouts at the wounded man… And there I awake, because the pregnant woman is groping at my face with her fingers.

“Sir,” She says to me. “You’re shouting in your sleep and throwing yourself around. I’ll make your bed up in the other corner, because here you are kicking my dear father…”

She picks up her thin legs and round belly from the floor and takes the blanket off the sleeping man. It is a dead old man that lies there, thrown onto his back. His throat has been torn out, his face is chopped in half, and dark blue blood lies in his beard, like a piece of lead.

“Sir,” the Jew says as she shakes out the feather bed. “The Poles cut him down, and he begged them: kill me in the yard outside in the dark, so that my daughter doesn’t have to see me die. But they did what they thought was necessary – he died in this room, thinking of me… and now I want to know,” said the woman suddenly, and with a terrible strength, “I want to know where else on the whole earth you might find another such father as my own…”

Commentary

The River: Border and Baptism

“Crossing the Zbruch” has also been translated as “Crossing the River Zbrucz”, and this is a good place to start when considering what exactly we can get out of the text. The river Zbruch is a river running in Western Ukraine, which at the time of Red Army Cavalry was part of Poland. For that reason, the title can use either the Polish name of the river, or the Russian/Ukrainian one. I chose the second primarily because that’s what is the case in the original, but in using the former option the sense of strangeness, of non-Russianness is heightened. Either way, we are moving, just as the Russians of the story do, from a familiar world into an alien one, both ideologically and culturally. Poland was a democratic country in the 1920s, and Western Ukraine contains a large number of Jews and Catholics compared to the East.

A Picture of the River Zbruch — The River Zbruch looking particularly mysterious and misty. Crossing this river brings the Soviets and their worldviews into a challenging conflict with the outside world.

The image of the river as a border has a long history. The Styx comes to mind, and the images of death as the army crosses, such as the dead horses, give this suggestion a particular resonance here. A river marks a division, and divisions are central to Red Army Cavalry as a whole. Partially they are cultural divides – between the old world and its culture as seen predominantly in the Jewish characters, and the new world of the Cossacks – but there are also divides between night and day, fathers and mothers, and plenty more besides. Entering the water also denotes baptism, made more obvious by the full immersion of one of the soldiers (who then curses the Virgin Mary in a reversal of the sacredness of the baptismal act).

Ambiguous Descriptions

What we have is a profane crossing and an entry into the unknown. The suggestion that the Soviets were in some way fulfilling a divine (or at the very least a fated – think Marx’s conception of historical development) role would have been welcomed in Soviet literature in the 1920s, but Babel undermines the purity of the idea by corrupting the Christian image. This is one of the ways he works in Red Army Cavalry – no image or idea is permitted without being questioned simultaneously. Indeed, one of the main metaphors employed by Babel in the collection is the idea of “rot” or “mould” – at the centre of what we take to be perfect there is a hostile element. Another example of this in “Crossing the Zbruch” is the standards. Though they suggest military glory, they are tainted by their association with the horrific decapitated head of the sunset.

A Divided Narrator: Misanthropy and Poetry

The narrator, who we learn later on in Red Army Cavalry is called Liutov, also seems uncertain in his role. We go from the formal language of the first paragraph into the lyrical second paragraph, and then back round again. The poetic beauty of the landscape is stressed, but then suddenly its horrors come to the fore. I take the image of the decapitated head to mean that it is impossible, even as you try to focus on the splendour of the natural world, to escape the violence and destruction that penetrates it throughout – even the sky is not safe from blood.

Liutov arrives at the flat he has been allocated, and here the main action of the story takes place. After the dream-time earlier on, where each paragraph seems to move at breakneck speed, here everything slows down. The formal tone returns as Liutov repeats the phrase “I’ve been allocated”, as if he is trying to take responsibility away from himself for what he sees and place it onto his superiors. The initial scene is dreadful, with only the image of the moon providing a sense that there is a better world out there. A sense of misanthropy permeates Liutov’s interactions with the Jewish inhabitants of the flat. He calls them “apes”, and when he describes the pregnant woman she seems to be a body before she is a human being – the image of her picking up her own body from the floor is particularly repellent.

Heroisms

But even here there is a tension. Liutov’s hostility towards the Jews is countered by his own Jewish nature, which is at this point only hinted at through his recognition of the Passover crockery. And even as he tries to order the other inhabitants of the flat around, his own nightmare makes his apparent confidence and leadership seem very much feigned, or at least unnatural. This is then contrasted with the pregnant woman. Her very nature as someone pregnant in a warzone suggests great suffering and asks questions about how she became so.

But instead of cowering away, she alone of the other characters is given a voice to express herself, and she does so at length and with self-assurance. This is in sharp contrast to Liutov’s speech, which is marked by the uncertainty of its closing ellipsis. She has experienced death – just as we, seeing her father’s body described in grim and unusual detail, have too – and for that she has come out stronger. Her own speech ends the story, and the message of her words is ultimately a positive one, stressing love for her father and also praise for his heroism. Her language, memorialising her father’s memory within the story, defends heroic death over cowardice, even as his body repels us. In Red Army Cavalry we see time and again that language’s power is transformative, giving us protection against the hostile world around us. It makes the woman herself a hero.

Conclusion

“Crossing the Zbruch” is the first story in Red Army Cavalry and it sets out immediately the main thematic currents of the collection. The nature of suffering and heroism in the form of the woman and her father, the dehumanising effects of war through the other Jews, and also the counterpoint to all this, the glorious loud and boisterous army – all are given attention. Key to the representation of all of these themes is Babel’s lack of judgement about them – the story, after all, ends with the woman’s words, not the narrator’s. As a result, the reader is forced to consider for themselves what they think the woman’s speech means – should we find it uplifting, or is horror a more sensible reaction? It is also important that images are always undermined, such as the connection between beauty and blood, and water and a distorted baptism.

Picture of Babel after being arrested. — Ultimately Babel was murdered by the Soviet secret police for his writing. But *Red Army Cavalry* comes from an earlier time, and portrays an uncertain if cautiously hopeful attitude towards the Revolution.

Nothing is ever clear in Babel’s world. The challenge of finding one’s way in the new and tragically flawed ideology of the Soviet Union makes itself manifest in the competing impulses of the narrator of Red Army Cavalry and the collection’s world. But these confusions were present in Babel’s own life too, and his death in 1940 at the hands of the secret police. We have to make up our own minds here instead of going in with our opinions already iron-cast, and repeated readings of Red Army Cavalry only give more food for thought. The intelligence of Babel’s stories, and their ambiguity, is something that I hope is captured here in my translation of this one.

For my essay on Red Army Cavalry as a whole, look here. Another Soviet writer whose attitude towards the new state was dangerously ambiguous is Andrei Platonov – see my review of his Soul and Other Stories here. For more Russian translations, check out my work on a Tolstoy short story here, or some Leskov here.

Picture of the Zbruch by Arts at pl.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]; Picture of Babel after being arrested is in the public domain.