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Red Army Cavalry by Isaac Babel – The Birth of a Revolutionary Culture

Introduction: Isaac Babel and his World

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.

Picture of Isaac Babel — 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.

Picture of Red Army soldiers during the Polish War — 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.

Picture of Anton Chekhov — 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.

Picture of a Cossack — 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.

Picture of an icon — 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

Before the Law by Franz Kafka – Translation and (brief) Analysis

This is my translation of Franz Kafka’s story “Vor dem Gesetz”, which also appears towards the end of The Trial. After the text there are some casual comments on the meaning and on reading Kafka generally.

Before the Law

Before the Law there stands a gatekeeper. And to this gatekeeper comes a man from the country and asks for entry into the Law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry. The man thinks for a moment and then asks whether he will be able to enter later on. “This much is possible,” says the gatekeeper. “But not now.” Since the door onto the Law stands open as ever and the gatekeeper stands to one side of it, the man bends forward so as to see through it into what lies within. When the gatekeeper notices it, he laughs, saying: “If you’re so allured by what’s inside, why not try going through in spite of my forbidding it? Be warned, though: I am mighty. And I am but the lowest of the gatekeepers. From each hall to the next there are gatekeepers, each one mightier than before. By the third one I cannot even bear his sight.” Such difficulties the man from the country has not counted on. Surely the Law, he thinks, ought to be accessible to all people and at all times. But as he looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, with his sharp nose and long thin black beard like a Tartar’s, he then decides he had better wait until he received permission to enter. The gatekeeper gives him a little stool and lets him set himself down on the side by the door. He sits there for days and then years. He makes many efforts to be let in and tires the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper every-so-often engages to give him little interrogations, where he asks the man about his homeland and about plenty of other things. But they are lifeless questions, however, of the sort that great men ask, and in the end he tells him once more that he still cannot let him in. The man, who had prepared a great deal for his journey, uses everything he has, whether valuable or not, in order to bribe the gatekeeper. The other man takes everything from him, but says as he does so: “I am only taking these from you so that you don’t think you haven’t tried everything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost without a moment’s pause. He forgets about the other gatekeepers, so that this one seems to him the only obstacle preventing him from entering the Law. He curses his misfortune, at first heedlessly and loudly; then, as he grows older, he just mutters to himself. He grows childish and, since from his years of study of the gatekeeper he has come to recognise the fleas in his felt collar, he asks the fleas to aid him in changing the gatekeeper’s mind too. At last his sight grows weak and he is unable to tell whether it is really getting darker, or if it is just his eyes deceiving him. He does recognise well, however, a radiance shining forth in the dark, one that escapes inextinguishably from the door into the Law. Now he has little time left to live. Before his death all the experiences of the whole time gather themselves inside his head into a single question, which he had hitherto not asked the gatekeeper. He beckons to him, for now he can no longer hold his head up straight. The gatekeeper has to bend himself deeply to lower himself down to him, since the height difference between them has greatly changed to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know?” Asks the gatekeeper, “You are insatiable.” “Look, if every man strives after the Law,” says the man. “How does it happen that in all these years nobody but myself has demanded entry?” The gatekeeper recognises that the man has already reached his end and, so as to reach him through his failing hearing, he shouts to him: “Nobody else could obtain permission here. This entrance was destined only for you. And now I am going to shut it.”

Comments

I’ve never been much of a fan of German, either as a language or as a literature, in comparison with others. I guess I’ve struggled to see the beauty in the words, and for a long time it seemed that German literature was a lesser copy of the Russian version, but without the redemptive hope of national faith. That is, simply a little grim and depressing. But Kafka has always been an favourite exception, in part because he has never fit snugly into the classification of “German literature”, being a Jew in what is now the Czech Republic, which even in the early 20^th century was not exactly the centre of German culture. Yet Bohemia produced, in some way or other, Kafka, as it did Rilke. No matter my misgivings about the wider literature, misgivings which truth be told time and experience are quickly changing anyway, it’s hard not to feel grateful for those two.

Picture of Franz Kafka — Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is perhaps the most widely read German language author outside of the German-speaking lands, and just as ambiguous a fellow as is his work.

Even so, “getting” Kafka took a long time. I’ve read The Metamorphoses two or three times now, in both the original and in translation, and have struggled to enjoy it. Only recently, under the full weight of various critics’ opinions, did the work begin to open up to me. But in spite of that misfire, other parts of Kafka’s oeuvre have more easily reached and crashed against the inner shore of my soul: “In the Penal Colony”, “A Hunger Artist”, and both The Trial and The Castle are among them.

It is perhaps foolish to have people in schools read Kafka because often they haven’t themselves lived in any serious way. It was certainly my problem when I started out. Without experience, it’s hard to appreciate the absurdity, because the stories seem simply absurd, as opposed to that Kafkaesque standard – absurd yet constantly revealed in our own lives to be entirely real. Within school and even, to be fair, university, usually we can only look at them clinically, rather than personally – that is, we can only appreciate, rather than truly enjoy them.

Kafka’s Train Ticket

My first experience of Kafka’s world being transported into my own came with receiving a penalty fare while trying to take the train home after having had dinner with a friend. I had bought a return ticket at the same station a few hours earlier, but unfortunately after going through the turnstiles I had thrown away the return ticket rather than the outbound one. When I arrived that evening the ticket office had closed, so there were only machines for buying tickets still operating. But I didn’t have a card on me, so I couldn’t buy a new ticket. I waited on the platform for the train to arrive, hoping to buy a ticket on board. Instead, what happened was that one of the railway workers came up and asked to see my ticket beforehand.

I explained what had happened and why I was unable to buy a replacement ticket, then asked to buy one as I saw that the worker had a ticket dispensing machine on her. I said that I had more than enough money in cash to buy the ticket. She told me to be quiet and asked for my ID. She then began writing me a penalty fare for trying to travel without a ticket. I tried once more to explain, and indeed I asked the worker to go and speak with her co-worker – the exact person I had bought both tickets from only a few hours previously – who I could see a few meters away.

Yet again, though, and against all that could be called reasonable – given that I had plenty of money and my receipts and an eyewitness in addition to everything else – I was told to stop being rude and to write down all of my details. I was then told that I had a month to pay the inflated price of the ticket she was giving me, or else I would be forced to go to court. Unexpected and in part inexplicable exercises of power and an illogical and cruel bureaucracy are all mainstays of Kafka’s world, but here they had been transported into my own. In a particularly sour mood, I eventually got my train back home. The penalty fare had cost about £5. The damage to my pride and dignity had cost considerably more.

There was a silver lining to this tale, though: it was the key to understanding Kafka. This, of course, turned out to be a great overestimation on my part, for as with the many doors of “Before the Law”, there are many different Kafka stories and each of them is be opened up by a different experience or several. But this was the first of many, and over time I’ve begun to enjoy Kafka more and more. What at first was simply a cold academic understanding of possible meanings is now a personal understanding of a few meanings.

Before the Law

“Before the Law” is probably my favourite of Kafka’s parable-like shorter stories. In part this is because it is simple linguistically and, like anyone who reads in a foreign language they are not yet the master of, I much prefer those works I feel I fully understand, even if the works themselves are perhaps on some other scale less great or complex. But the fact that it’s easy to read is not the reason it’s my favourite. No, I love it because it uses its simplicity not to leave its meaning concealed, like some abstract postmodern text, but rather to multiply its potential meanings, so that each new reading and each time it reappears in one’s mind is accompanied by a new thought, a new guess at one of its many possible truths.

Some Interpretations

I mean, in a sense you can list the things it might be about. It may well be about Gnosticism. It may also be about trying to reach God through a faith that never seems sufficient. Here in Cambridge it seems to me to be at least partially about the struggles of learning, how in spite of our best efforts we can waste away on a goal of knowledge that turns out to be entirely illusory, or at best the first door when there are many others left to come. Or maybe it is more broadly about any of those goals or ideals that become so great that we fail to live as a result of our quest to grasp them and even give away all that actually can give our life happiness and meaning instead – the equipment the man from the country has with him.

I mean those are just some ideas. As part of the translation process I had to make decisions that undoubtedly also contribute to the meanings you can locate in the text. Capitalising “Law” is a little controversial because it undoubtedly makes it harder to imagine that the story as simply being about trying to reach a lawyer for some advice. That said, I think by capitalising it I make it more clear that the Law is itself a symbol, and worth substituting if you feel like it. Another thing is the translation of “bestimmt” as “destined” when talking about the door itself. This reinforces the suggestion that perhaps the story as a whole is a way of looking at our relationship to fate. We need to accept it as personal and at the same time immutable. The man is a fool for wanting to change it by entering.

We do talk about the “laws of fate”, after all.

Conclusion

But there are so many meanings that going on would be foolish. What is true without a shadow of a doubt is that this is a wonderful story in the way that Walter Benjamin conceived of the term. I narrated it to a friend as we both went out for a burger and with my own retelling it took on newer meanings while still retaining the heart of Kafka’s work. “Before the Law” is special precisely because its size and interpretative potential mean that wherever it goes it can have its impact, and that repeating it is like simply adding a new flavouring to a dish. That’s the best argument for reading it and retelling it, again and again and again.

What do you think the story is about? Let me know in the comments

Photograph of Franz Kafka taken by Sigismund Jacobi is in the public domain.

Soul and other stories by Andrei Platonov – A True Soviet Believer?

Andrei Platonov is not well known in either his home country or the West, but he is perhaps the most interesting of the Soviet writers I’ve encountered over the course of this academic year. He was recommended by my favourite Russian professor in the context of a lamentation that so few people read him or wrote on him, for to her mind he was certainly worth the trouble. Since my exam this term is flexible enough to let me write on anybody, so long as I can answer the question, I went and sought Platonov out in the library, to see what I could find.

The Perfect Soviet Writer?

Andrei Platonov was born the son of a railway worker in 1899 near Voronezh. He started work aged 13 as a clerk at an insurance company, and throughout his life he tried many different jobs. When the Russian Revolutions started he began studying electrical engineering at university, then once the Civil War broke out he helped deliver supplies to the troops. As he was a young man there was little reason for him not to support Russia’s new Bolshevik leaders, who claimed to be bringing the recently-created Soviet Union into a new age of technological and cultural vitality. Until 1922 Platonov worked as a journalist as part of the Union of Communist Journalists and wrote some fiction and poems, but he abandoned all this in the wake of the drought and famine of 1921 to work on land reclamation and electrification projects so that such catastrophes could not happen again.

A photograph of Andrei Platonov — Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) had all the makings of a perfect Soviet state writer. But he couldn’t betray the reality he saw before him for a lie.

All this is to say that Platonov was a serious Communist, someone who acted for his beliefs as well as just writing about them. With his humble origins and history of hard work in the service of the state he was on paper the perfect writer for those Soviet authorities who wanted to create a new literature to go alongside their new country. But Platonov’s experience, which made him so acceptable to the Soviets, was a double-edged sword. He saw first hand the results of the New Economic Policy, and the hypocrisy of local Communists, and it left deep marks upon his fiction. For what he presents, time and again in these stories, is the collapse of the idea in the face of reality.

Socialist Realism and the Realistic Soviet Writer

At the time “Soul” and the other seven stories of this collection were written the Soviet Union had, after a period of limited censorship in the 1920s, decided upon the values which every book aiming to be published within the country ought to reflect. These were, broadly put, Pravdivost’, Narodnost’, Klassovost’, Ideinost’ – or, translated, Truthfulness; Accessibility to the common people; Free from class influences and belonging to a classless society; and in accordance with the Party line. Each of these terms is heavily loaded – for one, Truthfulness doesn’t simply mean showing what you see, but rather showing how what you see is in accordance with the development of Communism before our eyes. That is, it is contradictory – if you don’t see reality to be in accordance with this, you must distort reality so that it is. Soviet fiction became, then, as much about shaping reality than displaying it.

In practice, what this meant was optimism, forced or unforced, and settings that focused on the common worker to elevate his or her standing into something akin to heroism. From the ballrooms of 19^th century we enter the city streets, farms, and remote railway villages. Flowers, youth and sunlight were celebrated, as were the new technologies of aviation, electrification, and trains. Heroes became those who, as in a Bildungsroman, moved from unenlightenment into knowledge, but here that knowledge was of a particular sort – it was acceptance and understanding of the fact that the Soviet system was the greatest such system to ever exist. All of this places a great demand on the writer to believe in what he or she was writing – the optimism could not be tempered, if one wished to be published. Support for the Soviets counted for little if it wasn’t matched with purity of optimism.

Platonov and friends

Platonov doesn’t fit well into the categories that a cursory look at Soviet literature tends to result in. Those people who we praise and rank so highly in the West, rightly or wrongly, are those who stood outside of the system and wrote against it. Mikhail Bulgakov, Varlam Shalamov (whose stories I look at here), and Anna Akhmatova are names that immediately come to mind. Or else people who died for their writing, like Osip Mandel’shtam, Daniil Kharms, or Isaac Babel’. We read them, at least in part, because they confirm the simplistic notion that the Soviet Union was a terrible place and gosh darn aren’t we lucky that we didn’t live there, eh? They give us a smug satisfaction, besides their entertainment value.

Those writers who truly gave themselves over to Socialist Realism, and its dream, are mostly forgotten. In Russia, a few of them are still struggling on in school syllabi. Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, or Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, are pretty much the only ones I can think of people I know having read. Vladimir Mayakovsky is remembered more for his poetry before the Revolution than after it. And Maxim Gorky is perhaps better known for what he did as a political activist than for what he wrote. The good writers, we like to say, died, left, or wrote in secret.

But then there is Andrei Platonov. Though he was friends with Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, the centre of the web of writers and intellectuals who were not in support of the state, Platonov never abandoned the beliefs that the Revolutions in his youth had brought to life in him. But what his fiction displays is the divided impulse between the belief in Communism, and the belief in the importance of Truth, of showing what actually was taking place in the countryside, and how there was suffering yet in the utopia-come-early the Soviets had created. He tried to publish, again and again, and unlike the first group of writers above, he succeeded from time to time. Yes, he was usually forced to make amendments, and yes, it did happen that a few of his works were simply too radical to see the light of day, but the very fact of publication shows that he was unique among the Soviet writers. He had his own Truth, and it was not as far from the Soviet dream as we might want to say.

Soul and other stories

“Soul”and the other stories of this collection were written in the late 1930s, with the exception of the final story, “The Return”, which was written in 1946. Though they vary in setting and theme, they are all tied together by Platonov’s concern with the idea of the Revolution. That is, the hope of a new and better world.

“Soul”

“Soul”, the title story, is the longest, taking up almost half of the book. Set in the deserts and drylands of Soviet Central Asia, it follows the return of Nazar Chagataev to his homeland. He belongs to the Dzhan nation, whose name means “soul”. They are an itinerant, nomadic group who he had been sent away from by his mother so that he might receive an education in Moscow. His task as he comes home is to bring Communism to this people, but the simplicity of the statement distorts the nebulous nature of the job itself. The people are scattered, and it is only through constant searching that Chagataev is able to locate a few of them, including his own mother. The nation is spiritually broken, after hundreds of years of cruelty and starvation, and no longer wishes to live. Platonov painfully describes the way that men and women had to keep reminding themselves to breathe, lest they drift away by accident.

Chagataev’s goal is only on the surface to bring Communism to his people – more crucially it is to return a sense of life’s purpose and happiness to them. Thus begins a journey to gather together his old acquaintances and teach them to move on from scavenging into living full lives, eating well and living in houses. Platonov describes in detail the starvation of the characters, the constant recourse to the barest of grass soups, and the way they are forced to suck the blood out of each and every animal they meet. Platonov’s world, much like Varlam Shalamov’s, is one of survival at all costs. Animals are given a special place in it, but it seems not to be because they are human-like, but more because the humans have entered such a fallen state that the differences between them are scarcely marked. Chagataev’s own mother scarcely remembers him, and many of the people are struggling with deformities, or have gone mute.

Photo of the desert in Central Asia around the Aral Sea. — The desert of Central Asia where Chagataev finds himself is far less bountiful in “Soul” than in the photograph here.

At one level Platonov’s story is about Chagataev’s struggle to recreate civilization, but Platonov’s stories always work beyond their surface level as well. Soul is no different. Chagataev becomes over the course of the work a father to his nation, just as Stalin was styled in the Soviet Union. His successes – and his failures – become implicitly a critique of the man himself, and his own nation-building process. There is another Communist in the story, a man sent to the Dzhan people a few months before Chagataev was. This man is dangerous and cruel, and the relationship between the two educated men in their remote wilderness reminds me more than a little of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, another work that asks whether the civilizing mission is ultimately worthwhile.

The Other Stories

“Among Animals and Plants” is another story where the layering is important. On one level it is about a railway worker in the remote forests of the north who is hoping to go and work in a nearby village, and listen to music and educate himself. On another, familiar to any reader at the time but now revealed (at least to me) only by the lengthy introduction and notes to the edition, the work is about the slave labour existent under the Gulag system. The village where the worker wants to be is so cultured precisely because it is full of educated prisoners. But there are plenty of other hints in the work that all is not as it seems. The sounds of whimpering in the forest, or considerations about punishment as the worker’s mind wanders off, all take on a bleaker tone once the reader is aware of the second level of meaning. This was a story Platonov struggled to get published.

Perhaps the two most well-known stories here are “The River Potudan” and “The Return.” Both of them deal with a homecoming – the first, after the Civil War, and the second, after the Second World War. The act of returning home is hugely significant. Through going back to our homes after time away we always encounter that sudden jolt of disassociation as we find that our memory and the reality are not entirely in line with one another. In “The River Potudan” Platonov shows how Nikita Firsov, after time spent fighting in the war, deals with the difficulty of reconstruction at home. Though he finds himself a wife, a hard working young lady, their marriage is unhappy and unconsummated. It is also marked by the death of her young friend, a girl who was studying hard for a new life in the Soviet world. As is the case elsewhere, it seems that the people who suffer most are those believe in the Soviet ideals the most.

Eventually, Firsov flees his home out of shame and starts to live in another village, doing menial tasks to support himself. It is only when he meets his father unexpectedly at the market that he considers going home, all the more so when the man tells him that his wife has attempted suicide by drowning herself in the river of the title. Firsov does return home, and together with his wife they succeed in forming a more successful, consummated, marriage than there had been before. But the conclusion is hopeful, optimistic more because of Firsov lowers his utopian expectations of the world than because these revolutionary hopes were met. The new world will take a long time to make.

“The Return” is similar to “The River Potudan”. Here, a soldier returns to his wife after a long absence. After spending time flirting with a girl from a nearby village he leaves the train they were both on to walk home. There he finds wife and his two children much as before. But the children reveal, unintentionally, that their mother has sought the comfort and protection of other men while their father was away. Caring little for hypocrisy, the father brutally insults his wife, before being reprimanded by his own son, a boy who has totally absorbed the teachings of the CPSU. Angry at his reception at home, the father leaves the next morning, hoping to find the girl from before. But as the train is departing his town he sees his two children running after him and his conscience takes control of him, making him jump from his carriage down to them.

In both stories Communism, and belief more broadly, are revealed to be of little use. In “The River Potudan” it is guilt that makes Firsov return to his wife, not ideals, just as in “The Return” the man’s son’s Communist ideas are worthless in convincing him to stay. If anything, the son is shown as a ridiculous figure, unable to understand his parents’ quarrel even as he thinks he understands the statutes of the CPSU. No, what makes the man return home for the second time in “The Return” is the realization that he must move beyond his own pride. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Judgements and Conclusions

Platonov writes in a simple way, but his concerns are serious. Ultimately, they are about the spiritual future of humankind under the Soviet system, indeed about whether spirituality will survive at all. Using clever allusions and vast learning he is able to keep the reader on their toes and constantly challenged. But that’s not to say these stories are perfect. In fact, there were a lot of times when I found myself struggling to keep going. Like his contemporary, Isaac Babel, Platonov is an intellectual writer at heart, and just as with Babel I found myself unsatisfied by the stories themselves, once their animating ideas had been scraped out of them. Platonov doesn’t really write with urgency, leaving many moments of action or climax a little unconvincing. In a sense he’s, disappointly, more enjoyable as someone to write essays on, or to think about, than to actually read.

Isaac Babel (1894-1940) is another writer who, like Platonov, deals with the complex cultural and spiritual consequences of the Revolution. But that doesn’t always make for compelling stories. My review of Babel’s Red Army Cavalry is here.

But he is worth reading. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s important to read him. Platonov is a key representative of the middle ground between writers who were against the state, and those who functioned as part of it by following closely the demands of Socialist Realism. He widens our awareness of Soviet literary culture from the stereotypes we’re so used to in the West. But there again, I’m almost recommending him as education rather than pleasure. There is pleasure to be had, and most of these stories do work as stories, and some of them are even good as stories. But I can only recommend the collection with these warnings, lest a reader expect to be gripped by the stories in any way other than an intellectual one.

Isaac Babel is another challenging, ambiguous, and highly intellectual chronicler and interpreter of the Soviet Union’s early days – my review of his Red Army Cavalry is here. Alternatively, compliment Platonov’s ambiguous portrayal of Soviet life with Varlam Shalamov’s bleaker tales of the Gulag here.

Photo of Platonov comes from Maria Andreevna Platonova; Photo of Maxim Gorky is in the public domain; Photo of the desert by Dmitriy A. Pitirimov is also in the public domain; Photo of Isaac Babel is also in the public domain