Under An Orange Sun Like A Severed Head: Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry

When you first take up Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry — probably seated in your favorite velvet armchair in front of a roaring fire far from the Polish front and even further from the year 1920 — you may wonder where this small book will lead you. For here’s a collection of stories and impressions that made its author a star in post-revolutionary Russia, the toast of other writers from Moscow to Paris to New York, and beloved by everyone from Gorky to Stalin. Given its title and these “credentials,” you may expect a collection of dashing cavalry charges, devil-may-care Cossacks, and glorious victories for the Motherland. And you’d be wrong.
Instead, Red Cavalry is a singular book with a title perhaps designed to inspire such thoughts — and then, with a twist of the saber, twist your head around.

Red Cavalry poster.

Babel was a stranger in a strange land. Jewish in anti-Semitic Russia, an intellectual from Odessa, an aspiring writer, and not exactly the physical specimen that made for the ideal horseman. And so, in all their wisdom — or more likely, as a cruel joke — the Russian government sent him to the Russian–Polish front as a correspondent and propagandist for YugRosta (the Russian Telegraph Agency’s southern branch) and embedded him (to use a much more modern term) with the legendary Semyon Budyonny’s Cossack First Cavalry Army. He filed news reports — and kept a diary, which, following his return from the front, he turned into short stories, the first of which was published in 1923. Red Cavalry, or Konarmiya, was published in 1926, revised into a new edition in 1931, and enlarged with additional stories in 1933. 

First Russian edition of Konarmiya, 1926.

The first English-language edition was published by Alfred Knopf in subtly different versions in New York and London in 1929.

Blood-red covers:
First English-language edition, 1929.

Knopf title page from the American edition.
The British edition featured a different design.

The stories may take you by surprise, both in terms of the lack of heroic daring and the intimate beauty of the descriptive prose. The juxtaposition is startling and stunning.

There are no thunderous cavalry charges, no great victories, no hard-won laurels. Instead, there is destruction, confusion, disarray, horrors, folly, brutality, and characters struggling not to make sense of it all but simply to survive.

And there’s the writing. Babel’s prose mirrors the confusion in its impressionistic style. “An orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head.” “The moon hung from the sky like a cheap earring.” “Evening laid its palms across my burning forehead. “The scent of yesterday’s blood and dead horses seeps into dusk’s coolness.

Dust jacketed U.S. edition, 1929.

Spanish-language edition, 1929.

Ultimately, it’s probably fair to call this an antiwar book. But it’s not so in quite the way of others of the epoch, such as Hemingway’s In Our Time or Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. There’s no judgment cast on war per se, no attempt to make sense of it all. Instead, Babel’s scenarios and descriptions and characters just are.

It’s easy to see why Gorky — then the most celebrated of Russian writers — hailed Red Cavalry and how Babel was celebrated in the modernist era of Pilnyak and Bely. But why was Stalin himself so staunch an admirer? Did he actually read it? Did he understand it?
Or perhaps he savored the horrors that Babel described.

After the fall from grace: Mugshots of Isaac Babel taken by the NKVD after his arrest, circa 1939.
He would be shot in Moscow's Butyrka Prison by the Cheka in January 1940.

Pavel Korchagin, Soviet Huckleberry Finn

Whether seen from the red-hearted Soviet or the red-blooded American point of view, it’s probably sacrilegious to suggest that Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered is the Soviet Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But so be it: This post may just land the royal “we” in a frozen Siberian literary gulag, or back in Aunt Polly’s frigid civilized clutches.

Each novel represents the peculiar zeitgeist of its culture. And each is beloved by its readership (or was, in the case of Soviet readers).

First editions of Huckleberry Finn and Pavel Korchagin's adventures.

How the Steel Was Tempered’s iron-willed hero, Pavel Korchagin, struggles to shuck off the yoke of cultural imperialism, while Huck Finn escapes from both his drunken, abusive Pap and the insidious despotism of Aunt Polly. Korchagin survives torments as a child at the hands of blindered, stupid schoolmasters; as a menial employee at a railroad-depot cafeteria; as a Red Cavalry man fighting the Poles, the White Guard, Ukrainian bandits, Cossacks, Letts, Germans, and about everyone else; as a factory worker; as a hard laborer laying a railroad line in the midst of winter to save the whole city of Kiev from freezing due to lack of firewood; as a burgeoning Bolshevik battling the political stupidity of too many of his fellow Russians; and finally, as a 24-year-old combating the ravages of illness and wounds that eventually confine him to his bed — his body paralyzed, his eyes gone blind, and his soul frustrated to not be on the front lines of Communism.  Still, as Korchagin vows, “So long as my heart beats in my chest, no one will be able to tear me away from the Party.”

Pavel Korchagin, Red Cavalry hero.

Huck — as well as his partner on the raft, the escaped slave Jim — are both in search of freedom, that peculiarly American obsession, and something that Korchagin would not only never understand but likely despise. No doubt Korchagin would have written Huck off as one of the bourgeois and his search as selfish, petty, and not of assistance to the betterment of mankind — which is so far from the American mindset as to simply be incomprehensible.

Huck Finn, all-American rascal.

As Korchagin promises his mother in a statement that sums up his both his raison d’être and the theme of the novel, “I’ve given my word to keep away from the girls until we’ve finished with all the bourgeois in the world.” And while such a statement was the genesis for literature in Soviet Russia (maybe not great literature, but exceedingly popular and best-selling literature), it would have been a boat anchor of a plot in the USA. (And this, despite the alluring vision in the novel of that comrade-cum-vixen, Rita Ustinovich — the 18-year-old appartchik with the oh-so-modern bobbed raven-colored hair and suggestive khaki tunic and “narrow leather belt” who is so far removed from the Madonna–whore dichotomy of so much western bourgeois literature.)

Third printing title page.

First (left) and third printing.

How the Steel Was Tempered was indeed the fictionalized autobiography of Ostroksky, albeit carefully burnished by Soviet censors. And as with Huckleberry Finn and the fledgling American world, How the Steel Was Tempered was a novel that spoke to the Soviet psyche. Ostrovsky became a worker-hero of Soviet socialist-realism authors, just as Mark Twain was the personification of an American Homer: He was literary yet down-home; smart and at the same time, smart-assed. Huck Finn spoke to Americans while Ostrovsky’s Korchagin avatar became a cultural saint to the masses — and not just in the USSR, but also in translation behind the Iron Curtain, in communist China, and other politically enlightened countries.

The bedridden Nikolai Ostrovsky on the front lines of Soviet literature.

The powers that be in Moscow kept How the Steel Was Tempered eternally in print and translated it for the bourgeois English-speaking world in 1952 as part of the Foreign Languages Publishing House propaganda offerings. Several film versions were made over the years, starting in 1942, when Korchagin’s story helped keep the inspiration alive during the war years, and continuing with 1957’s Pavel Korchagin remake.

Korchagin comes to the big screen.

Huck Finn and Pavel Korchagin were worlds apart and likely would not have understood each other should they have ever met. Yet they both stood for the zeitgeist of their culture, and made for great stories on their own.

A Comparative Dialectical Analysis of Paternal-Filial Intergenerational Relationships in Russian Tsarist and Post-Revolutionary Literature 1862-1922

The title of Turgenev's masterpiece Fathers and Sons published in 1862 largely served as a plot spoiler. The title also established one of the most intriguing and enduring themes of Russian literature for the future; in particular, it was a subject that was central to Dostoyevsky's The Devils (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family (1876), and Andrei Bely's Petersburg (1913; revised in 1922).

At heart, these stories read like a parenting guidebook gone wrong. And gone wrong with the kinds of horrifying, louche, salacious, juicy variations that make Russian literature so sublime.

The figurative Father: Ivan Turgenev

The symbolic Son: Andrey Bely

The father-and-son theme breaks down into two basic, simplistic categories:

1. Rebel With A Cause: The son who will do anything to uphold his strongly held beliefs;

2. Rebel Without A Clue: The son who will do anything to uphold beliefs that are bouncing around in his head but which he can’t quite fathom.

To wit:

Fathers and Sons title page

The Rebel With A Cause theme was first unveiled in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. The father (in this case, Nikolai Kirsanov) represents the grand old order — the landowning, tsar-following, Mother Russia-blindered, Slavophile class that needs to be overthrown by the sons (Arkady Kirsanov and his University friend, Yevgeny Bazarov), who look to the West and Europe for the latest, enlightened ideas of social change. The son is a Rebel Without A Clue; he’s under the influence of Bazarov, but only halfheartedly and his own views are only partially formed. For his part, Bazarov’s views are at best modern and developed; at worst they’re cynical and, yes — drumroll, please! — nihilistic.

Not surprisingly, it’s those darn nihilists who become responsible for the really good stuff down the road.

Dostoyevsky picked up on Turgenev’s theme and naturally twisted and contorted it in The Devils (aka The Possessed and The Demons) beyond anything Turgenev could likely have foreseen. And Dostoyevsky wasn’t happy with just one father-son theme: he constructed multiple variations of the “son” figure, most ending (fittingly) in perdition.

Stepan Verkhovensky is the father figure, a rather silly old man; he’s the spiritual double of the Jim Backus character in the film Rebel Without A Cause. Stepan is a poet, philosopher, lover, and fool — although you can’t help but secretly root for him.

His son Pyotr is Devil #1, a big fan of influential founding Devil #2, Nikolai Stavrogin. Their revolutionary followers include Shigalov, who preaches that millions will need to be murdered before a just society can be realized (always a good start); the doomed religious figure Shatov; the atheist Liputin; and Kirillov, who believes suicide will turn him into a god. Great stuff.

As a former revolutionary himself, Dostoyevsky returned to this theme in other stories and novels throughout his career. After The Devils, his most interesting look at the father-son variations came in The Brothers Karamazov, which was a grand slam, offering a bit of each of our father-son categories.

 

Yul Brynner as that lusty guitar-hero, Dmitri Karamazov

Father Fyodor Karamazov is a lecherous, drunken, greedy buffoon. Fyodor has four sons: Dmitri, a Rebel Without A Clue; Ivan the revolutionary nihilist and Alyosha the saint, both Rebels With A Cause; and the illegitimate Smerdyakov, another Rebel Without A Clue. Talk about trouble waiting to happen.

The only Russian novel that could truly rival The Brothers Karamazov in familial dysfunction was Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family. Father Vladimir was good for nothing at best. His sons include Stepan, better known as The Nitwit, and Pavel, who was a bit of a worthless Oblomov-esque dreamer.

Then there’s Porfiry Golovlyov, affectionately called either Little Judas or simply, The Bloodsucker. Porfiry is a fine example of all-consuming greed, back-stabbing jealousy, hypocritical doubletalk, and good old spiritual vacuity, making him an exemplary Rebel Without A Clue.

There’s also a daughter, Anna, but she’s really only an embarrassment due to her elopement and not nearly up to the standards set by the rest of the family.

As discussed in more detail in another post, the Golovlyovs are like the Snopes but with a funny accent. And rumors that The Golovlyov Family was the inspiration for TV’s Dallas are deserving of further study. All in all, the doom and gloom running throughout the novel out-Dostoyevskys Dostoyevsky. Phenomenal.

Which brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation to Andrei Bely's Petersburg, some thirty years later. (Bely is also sometimes translated as Biely, the penname of Boris Bugaev.) The father here is Apollon Ableukhov, an official in the Tsarist government. His son is Nikolai, a revolutionary Rebel With A Cause who has been ordered to assassinate his own father by planting a bomb in his study as part of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Dostoyevsky would have given anything to have dreamed up this plot.

 

The English-speaking world had to wait until
1959 for the first translation of Bely's Petersburg

And in many ways, with Petersburg, Bely himself assassinates all of the Russian writers who came before him. Much like Joyce (whose own Ulysses from several years on followed its own father-son theme), Bely’s writing style assimilated the writers of the past, toyed with and even parodied their styles and themes, and created a new style, chock full of poetry, modernism, symbolism, word play, and — gasp! — even humor. A fine twist to the father-son theme.

For more on Petersburg, see the exemplary website http://petersburg.berkeley.edu/bely/bely_content.html

For a discussion of Petersburg translation, see the fine blog http://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/translation-translation-translation/

Crime and Punishment: The Comic Book

When you think about it, there should be no surprise that Crime and Punishment makes a great comic book. And film. And TV series. So, just for fun, here’s a collection of Crime and Punishment adaptions in myriad mediums that Dostoyevsky probably never foresaw.

A clean-cut Raskolnikov

My fave remains the Classics Illustrated edition of Crime and Punishment (No. 89), first issued in November 1951. This brought Dostoyevsky to the masses—masses of prepubescent kids, that is. My dad was a fond reader and collector of Classic Illustrateds; we still have his collection up at the family lake cabin, including rare, exceedingly valuable first editions—all in tatters because they been read literally a thousand times over by three generations now. The way they should be. And thanks to the message in issue No. 89, we do not have any axe murderers in the family. So far.

A simple moral message for those 1950s boys and girls

Post-modern pastiche

Here’s a more recent adaption, Dostoyevsky Comics, originally printed in Drawn and Quarterly (No. 3) in 2000. Crime and Punishment is adapted here by Robert Sikoryak, giving Raskolnikov some spiffy pajamas and a cape and turning him into Batman. But in retrospect, this has it all wrong: It’s not Raskolnikov that should be turned into Batman. The batty tale of Gotham City’s Caped Crusader—losing his parents at an early age, growing up all alone in a gothic mansion, devoting his life to fitting crime with a secret identity based on a bat—seems somehow tailormade for Russian Literature.

True crime, true punishment

In the late 1940s and 1950s during the Golden Age of Comicbooks, there was a Crime and Punishment series of “Illustories” that publisher Lev Gleason promised were “Packed with Thrilling Suspense!” Each told what were purportedly true historical crime stories.

2009 Graphic novel with Alain Korkos art

Crime and Punishment has also been made into a movie at least twenty times over, from France to India, Croatia to Mexico. The earliest was probably a 1913 silent filmed in Russia, followed soon after in 1917 by an American silent. 

Raskolnikov does Mexico

Bollywood epic

Peter Lorre grabs an axe in 1935 

Accused!

Film tie-in edition, 1935

Glorious recent Russian theater poster

"Porter, what made you do it?"

My favorite, though, is the 1959 adaption of Dostoyevsky’s tale as Crime and Punishment USA with the characters Sally, Porter, and Debbie bringing the story to the modern-day mean streets of SoCal. And Dostoyevsky’s dialogue was translated into Hardboiled speak à la Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane: “Is that how you get your kicks? Out of killing?” Maybe they didn’t quite get the original storyline...

Svidrigailov Was Right!

I am most pleased to report that I have not spent a decade in a Siberian gulag, half my life on Devil’s Island, or even a night in the local lockup. Beyond a couple cuffings for hopping freight trains and a detainment in the Seattle airport for my purported resemblance to an arch evil-doer named Kruger, I’ve been mercifully free of incarceration. But memoirs and novels about prison have long intrigued me. Or perhaps, chilled me is a better explanation: The descriptions of another side of history, the lack of freedom, and of course the escapes all make for the most exciting vicarious reading I know.

Buried Alive—an early
translation of The House of the Dead

I just finished Dostoyevky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, and found it hard to put down.

The literary genre of prison writing has a long, strange history. Searching about on the web, I compiled this short and curious list of famous prison tales—or other works that may not have seen the light of day except for prison time.

Jail provided writing hours for many a famous memoir or philosophical musing. Roman philosopher Boethius wrote his treatise The Consolation of Philosophy during a one-year sentence while awaiting execution; his conversation with Lady Philosophy examines the nature of free will and bemoans humankind’s evil doings. Conversely, Napoleon Bonaparte dictated his memoirs will exiled on the island of St. Helena and Adolf Hitler penned his autobiography and call to arms, Mein Kampf, during his imprisonment following the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

Marco Polo finally found time to chronicle his travels to China while in jail back home in Genova. Similarly, during his incarceration John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German while locked in Wartburg Castle, and the Marquis de Sade used his eleven years in La Bastille as quality time to write prolifically. 

Errol Flynn, galley slave

Cervantes found inspiration for Don Quixote during his days as a galley slave during the years 1575-1580. Working the oars on galleys was of course a jail sentence for the times—and one which few were expected to survive. (One of my fave Hollywood visions of galley slavery is in the 1940 Michael Curtiz swashbuckler The Sea Hawk [the dastardly Spaniards!] with the insurmountable Errol Flynn [although the film bears no resemblance to Sabatini’s novel].)

For Dostoyevsky, his time in Siberia informed all of his being and his subsequent writings. He was arrested in 1849 as part of the Petrashevsky circle of political dissidents and sentenced to death for attempting to foment revolution. Taken to Semyonovsky Square in the heart of St. Petersburg to be shot by a firing squad, he was reprieved by Tsar Nicholas I moments before his execution—a reprieve that Dostoyevsky came to believe was planned all along as a punishment and ultimate mockery. He was sent to four years of hard labor in the prison fortress in Omsk in western Siberia, then released into compulsory military service for five more years in the Seventh Line infantry battalion at Semipalatinsk in southwestern Siberia.

Dostoyevsky’s years in the Omsk prison was the source for the thinly veiled novel, Notes from the House of the Dead. In these pages, he describes many events and encounters that would re-appear in Crime and Punishment, The Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. He learned prison slang that he used in his later books. But most of all, he overcame at least some of his nobleman status and worldview to better understand the muzhik, allowing him to write with verisimilitude about Russian life in a way of which Tolstoy could never truly conceive.

Reading Notes from the House of the Dead restoked my long-running fascination for prison tales, prompting me to list some of my favorite vicarious reads:

Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo has to be among the best—if also, the most fanciful. His descriptions of Edmond Dantès’ years in the Chateau d’If (now a tourist attraction!) are spine-tingling and make my palms sweat even now, thinking about it all again. And Dantès’ subsequent escape and revenge are of course the perfect ending—although how he could ever turn his back on the beautiful Mercédès as an act of punishment still is simply not possible in this book of impossibilities. (See the recent film version from 2002, which convincingly rights this wrong.) Dumas based the novel on the true story of one Pierre Picaud, but I remain curious where he uncovered the rich details about life within Chateau d’If. Perhaps other accounts of the day? Or his own chilled imagination?

Chateau d'If postcard to the beautiful Mercédès back home

Henri Charrière’s Papillon and the sequel Banco are his purported memoirs of his fourteen years sentenced to French Guiana and Devil’s Island as well as several thrilling escapes. True or not, it’s still stunning. (Stay away from the excreable film adaption with Steve McQueen, unless you want to be as bored as Papillon himself in solitary confinement.)

There are of course numerous more prison memoirs, but my other favorites include Brendan  Behan’s Borstal Boy (the dastardly English!), Oriana Fallaci’s A Man about Greek revolutionary Alexandros Panagoulis, Jean Genet’s novels, even Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (the dastardly Mexicans!). 

And then there’s Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962), based on the author’s imprisonment from 1945 to 1953 as a Soviet political “offender” in a labor camp at Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan. Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing a letter to a friend with less-than-complimentary remarks about Stalin—in particular, calling him “Old Man Whiskers”—and sentenced to an eight-year term. In describing just one simple day of prison life, Solzhenitsyn leaves it to your own imagination to stretch that sentence out for what seems to stretch away into eternity. 

Think of good old Svidrigailov’s description of that spider-filled room—and shudder.

The Golovlyovs and the Snopes: Separated at Birth?

Call this comparative lit ad absurdum, but it remains an essential question for our times: Were Porfiry Golovlyov and Flem Snopes separated at birth?

Separated at birth? Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

William Faulkner

In this corner: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family was crowned “the gloomiest novel in all Russian literature” by none other than Prince D. S. Mirsky, which of course must mean it’s one of the best. The book chronicles the all-consuming greed, hypocritical existence, and spiritual vacuity of Porfiry Golovlyov—known to all as simply The Bloodsucker—and his fine family of wastrels, cheats, alcoholics, and wanton women. Reading the book, I always wanted to wash my hands after setting it down. It has a pervading mood of gloom, unctuous smarm, and claustrophobic evil. Even Dostoyevsky can’t match it. Great stuff.

A tale told by a
sewing-machine salesman...

And in the other corner: William Faulkner’s The Hamlet remains one of my favorite novels of all time. In the Faulknerian universe, it’s one of his “easy” books, and thus I think doesn’t get the acclaim of the “difficult” ones, but that’s missing the point. The characters and the multiple plots that all tie together into one long chronicle are unforgettable. Enter the Snopes, led by Flem, who marries the beauty of Frenchman’s Bend, sells the townsfolk on his wild mustangs, and helps secure nothing less than the collapse and downfall of the proud old South. Contrary to The Golovlyov Family, The Hamlet is ripe with humor, and I literally laugh out loud every time I read the book.

So, separated at birth or not? 

Either way, The Golovlyov Family may just be the first book in a long and distinguished tradition of White Trash belles lettres.