Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-09T12:26:40.781Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Some Themes and Archetypes in Babel'‘s Red Cavalry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Yuri K. Shcheglov
Yuri K. Shcheglov*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is an established fact that the so-called "Southern" (mainly Odessabased) school of writers enriched Soviet literature of the 1920s with a number of "European" dimensions neglected by the then dominant Russian realist tradition, such as (to name but a few) intertextuality, a focus on language and style, and a sharpened sensitivity to plot and composition. It can be said that in Babel' criticism some of these aspects are just beginning to receive the full measure of attention that they merit. However, the rich fabric of Russian and western cultural subtexts in Babel''s prose and its intricate relationships with various literary and mythological prototypes remain largely unexplored. Among recent studies that begin to fill this gap, the forthcoming monograph in Russian by Yampolsky and Zholkovsky deserves special mention as one of the most comprehensive to date.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , Fall 1994 , pp. 653 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Carol, Luplow, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982), 32 Google Scholar.

2. Markish, S, “Russko-evreiskaia literatura i Isaak Babel',” in Babel, I.', Detstvo i drugie rasskazy (Jerusalem: Biblioteka “Aliia,” 1979), 332, 343 Google Scholar.

3. Lionel Trilling, “Introduction,” in Isaac, Babel, The Collected Short Stories (New York: New American Library, 1975), 20 Google Scholar.

4. Ibid., 37.

5. A.N. Pirozhkova and N.N. Iurgeneva, eds., Vospominaniia o Babele (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1989), 62, 64, 181, 198, 274, 289, etc.

6. Falen, James E., Isaac Babel: Russian Master of the Short Story (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), 126–27Google Scholar.

7. Patricia, Carden, The Art of Isaac Babel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 11 Google Scholar.

8. Vospominaniia o Babele, 62.

9. Ibid., 63.

10. Ibid., 15.

11. Mandel'shtam, N., Vospominaniia (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1970), I: 341 Google Scholar.

12. Carden, 130-31. The analogies between Liutov and the landlady are also noticed by Andrew, who adds important nuances to their interpretation: “The narrator and the old woman are quite clearly linked: they both wear glasses, they are both pushed around… By pushing the Old Woman around, the narrator is rejecting what he sees of himself in her, he is deciding that he will not be an Eternal Victim.” See Joseph Andrew, “Structure and Style in the Short Story: Babel's ‘My First Goose',” Occasional Papers (Colchester: University of Essex Language Centre, 1974), 14: 18.

13. The relationship between the ideal and real, “earthly” socialism in Il'f and Petrov is discussed in Iu. K., Shcheglov, Romany I. Il'fai E. Petrova (Wien: Wiener Slawistischer Almanack, Sonderband 26/1 and 26/2, 1990-91), 11–24 Google Scholar.

14. In a similar manner the hero of Babel''s “My First Honorarium” (1928) wins a prostitute's personal sympathy and successfully passes his sexual initiation by making her believe a fictional story of his life (note the parallelism of titles).

15. Ironically, it is the same duality of Lenin that enables Liutov to maintain his inner distance: far from merging with his audience in a cathartic co-experience, he leaves it to the Cossacks to enjoy the sheer force and directness of Lenin's speech ( “he goes and strikes at it straight off like a hen pecking at a grain ” ) while secretly relishing Lenin's more recondite dialectics ( “I read on and rejoiced, spying out exultingly the secret curve of Lenin's straight line ” ). The issue of “straight line” vs. “curve” in connection with Liutov's duality and with the compromise between him and the Cossacks is convincingly discussed by Andrew ( “Structure and Style in the Short Story,” 19).

16. Gogol, Nikolai', The Complete Tales, ed. Kent, Leonard J. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), I: 136 Google Scholar.

17. Ibid., 79.

18. Ibid., 40.

19. Ibid., 199.

20. Ibid., 82.

21. This scene seems to have been a persistent personal symbol in Babel''s life. It reappears with a somewhat different meaning in “Argamak,” a story written several years after “My First Goose.” “Every night I had the same dream. I am dashing along on Argamak at a fast trot. By the roadside bonfires are burning, the Cossacks are cooking their food. I ride past them, and they do not raise their eyes to me. Some salute, others pay no attention: they're not concerned with me. What's the meaning of all this? Their indifference means that there is nothing special about the way I ride. I ride like everybody else, so there's no point in looking at me. I gallop on my way and am happy” (my emphasis). Note the multiple bonfires around which the Cossacks are sitting— a more explicit parallel with the Walpurgisnacht scene in Faust than the single fire of “My First Goose. ”

22. Gogol, ', The Complete Tales, 83 Google Scholar.

23. Propp, V. la., Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki (Leningrad: Izd. LGU, 1946), 52–53 Google Scholar.

24. Oliver Evans and Harry Finestone, eds., The World of the Short Story: Archetypes in Action (New York: Knopf, 1971), 446.

25. In two scenes of Goethe's Faust (part 1, sc. 6, with the witch; scene 14, with Faust) Mephistopheles “makes an indecent gesture” ( “macht eine unanstandige Gebarde ” ; “mit einer Gebarde ” ), provoking his partner's admiration in the former case, shock and disgust in the latter. The character of the gesture is not specified.

26. The inversion of human and earthly phenomena typical of the otherworld is discussed and illustrated in S. Lu. Nekliudov, “O krivom oborotne (k issledovaniiu mifologicheskoi semantiki fol'klornogo motiva),” in Problemy slavianskoi etnografii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979); and in Lu. K. Shcheglov, “Dve variatsii na temu smerti i vozrozhdeniia: Chekhov, ‘Skripka Rotshil'da’ i ‘Dama s sobachkoi, '” Russian Language Journal (1994, forthcoming).

27. Vladimir, Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961), 71 Google Scholar.

28. Gogol, ', The Complete Tales, 84 Google Scholar.

29. White in some initiatory rites is the color of a neophite who is forcibly painted white from head to toe; white represents blindness and invisibility; see Propp, , Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki, 60 Google Scholar.

30. Ibid., 58, 75.

31. Mircea, Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975), 81, 83, 109 Google Scholar.

32. In Wright's story the actual shooting of the horse is preceded by a long episode of buying the gun. The instrument of initiation is thereby “enlarged,” the reader's attention is drawn to it, its presentation is “prolonged.” Would it not be right to see a similar function in the sword episode of Babel''s story? The narrator picks up the sword without any practical need, just for the sake of pomp (he does not use it to kill the goose). Again, we have explained it “realistically” as showing off but it may also pertain to a ritualistic archetype.

33. Propp, , Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki, 58–59 Google Scholar.

34. See Nekliudov, “O krivom oborotne… ”

35. Propp, , Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki, 58-61, 65Google Scholar.

36. V. N., Toporov, “Prizha,” Mify narodov mira (Moscow: Sovetskaiia entsiklopediia, 1982), 11: 344 Google Scholar. Andrew has perspicaciously pointed out the symbolic and mythical connotations of the old woman's figure: “The Old Woman is even more emblematic and mask-like than the other characters, and she seems to fulfil a purely symbolic role in the story. It is rather difficult to be precise as to exactly what she symbolizes, but… she is central to the narrator's Fate, almost as if she were a supernatural being, meeting the hero at the symbolic cross-roads of his life” ( “Structure and Style in the Short Story,” 17).

37. Ibid., 12-13.

38. Interestingly, in one of later Chekhov's prose masterpieces, “At Christmas Time” (1899), a pose similar to that of Babel''s Cossacks is associated with blindness: “He stood staring fixedly ahead of him like a blind man” ( “on stoial i gliadel nepodvizhno i priamo, kak slepoi ” ; the sentence is later repeated). It can be said that the “whites of [the old woman's] purblind eyes,” the Cossacks sitting “motionless [and] stiff” and Liutov reading “like a triumphant man hard of hearing” form a chain of details that subtly “infect” each other with the seme of blindness through a series of intra-and intertextual similarities and transitions.

39. Gor'kii, M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), I: 189–201, 545-48 Google Scholar.

40. Iurii Tynianov used the term “convergence” for this kind of spontaneous growth of identical motifs out of similar thematic functions. He says that in such cases “the chronological question—'who was the first to say it?'—turns out to be irrelevant.” See Iu.N.Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia Literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 280 Google Scholar.