From Kafka To Babel

On May 15, 1939, Isaac Babel, a writer whose distinction had earned him the Soviet privilege of a dacha in the country, was arrested at Peredelkino and taken to Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, headquarters of the secret police. His papers were confiscated and destroyed--among them half-completed stories, plays, film scripts, translations. Six months later, after three days and nights of hellish interrogation, he confessed to a false charge of espionage. The following year, a clandestine trial was briefly held in the dying hours of Jan. 25; Babel recanted his confession, appealed to his innocence, and at 1:40 the next morning was summarily shot by a firing squad. He was 45. His final plea was not for himself, but for the power and truth of literature: “Let me finish my work.”

What Kafka’s art hallucinates--trial without cause, an inescapable predicament directed by an irrational force, a malignant social order--Babel is at last condemned to endure in the living flesh. Kafka and Babel can be said to be the 20th century’s European coordinates: they are separated by language, style, and temperament; but where their fevers intersect lies the point of infection. Each was an acutely conscious Jew. Each witnessed a pogrom while still very young, Kafka in enlightened Prague, Babel under a Czarist regime that promoted harsh legal disabilities for Jews. Each invented a type of literary modernism, becoming a movement in himself, indelible, with no possibility of successors. To be influenced by Kafka is to end in parody; and because the wilderness of an astoundingly vari egated experience is incised, unduplicatably, in the sinews of Babel’s prose, no writer can effectively claim to be his disciple.

But of course they are opposites: Kafka, ingrown, self-dissatisfied, indifferent to politics; hardly daring, despite genius, to feel entitlement to his own language; endlessly agonizing over a broken engagement; rarely leaving home. And here is Babel, insouciant, reckless, a womanizer, half a vagabond, a horseman, a propagandist, the father of three by three different women, only one of them legally his wife. Then why bring up Kafka when speaking of Babel? Kafka at least died in his bed. Babel was murdered by the criminal agency of a cynically criminal government. Kafka requested that his writing be destroyed, and was not obeyed. Babel’s name and work were erased--as if he had never written at all--until 1954, when, during a “thaw,” he was, in Soviet terminology, rehabilitated.

Yet taken together, they tell us what we in our time are obliged to know about the brutal tracings of force and deception, including self-deception. Kafka alone is not enough; his interiors are too circumscribed. Babel alone is not enough; his landscapes are too diffuse. Kafka supplies the grandly exegetical metaphor: the man who thinks but barely lives, the metaphysician who is ultimately consumed by a conflagration of lies. Babel, by contrast, lives, lives, lives! He lives robustly, inquisitively, hungrily; his appetite for unpredictable human impulse is gargantuan, inclusive, eccentric. He is trickster, rapscallion, ironist, wayward lover, imprudent impostor--and out of these hundred fiery selves insidious truths creep out, one by one, in a face, in the color of the sky, in a patch of mud, in a word. Violence, pity, comedy, illumination. It is as if he is an irritable membrane, subject to every creaturely vibration.

Babel was born in Odessa, a cosmopolitan and polyglot city that looked to the sea and beyond. It was, he wrote, “the most charming city of the Russian Empire. If you think about it, it is a town in which you can live free and easy. Half the population is made up of Jews, and Jews are a people who have learned a few simple truths along the way. Jews get married so as not to be alone, love so as to live through the centuries, save money so they can buy houses and give their wives astrakhan jackets, love children because, let’s face it, it is good and important to love one’s children. The poor Odessa Jews get very confused when it comes to officials and regulations, but it isn’t all that easy to get them to budge in their opinions, their very antiquated opinions. You might not be able to budge these Jews, but there’s a whole lot you can learn from them. To a large extent it is because of them that Odessa has this light and easy atmosphere.”

There is much of the affectionate and mirthful Babel in this paragraph: the honest yet ironic delight in people exactly as they are, the teasing sense of laughing entitlement (“so as to live through the centuries”), prosperity and poverty rubbing elbows, ordinary folk harried by officialdom, confusion and stubbornness, love and loneliness. As for poor Jews, Babel began as one of these, starting life in the Moldavanka, a mixed neighborhood with a sprinkling of mobsters. What he witnessed there, with a bright boy’s perceptiveness, catapulted him early on into the capacious worldliness that burst out (he was 29) in the exuberant tales of Benya Krik and his gang--tough but honorable criminals with a Damon Runyon-esque strain.

Lionel Trilling, among the first to write seriously about Babel in English, mistook him for “a Jew of the ghetto.” If “ghetto” implies a narrow and inbred psyche, then Babel stands for the reverse. Though he was at home in Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with the traditional texts and their demanding commentaries, he added to these a lifelong infatuation with Maupassant and Flaubert. His first stories were composed in fluent literary French. The breadth and scope of his social compass enabled him to see through the eyes of peasants, soldiers, priests, rabbis, children, artists, actors, women of all classes. He befriended whores, cab drivers, jockeys; he knew what it was to be penniless, to live on the edge and off the beaten track. He was at once a poet of the city (“the glass sun of Petersburg”) and a lyricist of the countryside (“the walls of sunset collapsing into the sky”). He was drawn to spaciousness and elasticity, optimism and opportunity, and it was through these visionary seductions of societal freedom, expressed politically, that he welcomed the Revolution.

He not only welcomed it; he joined it. In order to be near Maxim Gorky, his literary hero, Babel had been living illegally in St. Petersburg, one of the cities prohibited to Jews under the hobbling restrictions of the Czarist Pale of Settlement. With the advent of the Revolution the Pale dissolved, discriminatory quotas ceased, censorship vanished, promises multiplied and Babel zealously attached himself to the Bolshevik cause. In 1920, as a war correspondent riding with the Red Calvary to deliver Communist salvation to the reluctant Polish villages across the border, he fell into disenchantment. “They all say they’re fighting for justice and they all loot,” he wrote in his diary. “Murderers, it’s unbearable, baseness and crime.... Carnage. The military commander and I ride along the tracks, begging the men not to butcher the prisoners.” Six years later, Babel published his penetratingly authoritative “Red Cavalry” stories, coolly steeped in pity and blood, and found instant fame.

With Stalin’s ascension in 1924, new tyrannies began to mimic the old. Post-revolutionary literary and artistic ferment, much of it experimental, ebbed or was suppressed. Censorship returned, sniffing after the subversive, favoring the coarse flatness of Socialist Realism. Babel’s wife, Evgenia, whom he had married in 1919, emigrated to Paris, where his daughter Nathalie was born in 1929. His mother and sister, also disaffected, left for Brussels. Babel clung to Moscow, hotly wed to his truest bride, the Russian tongue, continuing his work on a cycle of childhood stories and venturing into writing for theater and film. The film scripts, especially those designed for silent movies, turned out to be remarkable: they took on, under the irresistible magnetism of the witnessing camera and the innovation of the present tense, all the surreal splendor of Babel’s most plumaged prose. Several were produced and proved to be popular, but eventually they failed to meet Party guidelines, and the director of one of them, an adaptation of Turgenev, was compelled to apologize publicly.

Unable to conform to official prescriptiveness, Babel’s publications grew fewer and fewer. He was charged with “silence”--the sin of Soviet unproductivity--and was denied the privilege of traveling abroad. His last journey to Paris occurred in 1935, when Andre Malraux intervened with the Soviet authorities to urge Babel’s attendance at a Communist-sponsored International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace--after which Babel never again met with his wife and daughter. Later that year, back in Moscow, he set up a second household with Antonina Pirozhkova, with whom he fathered a second daughter; through an earlier liaison, he was already the father of a son. But if Babel’s personal life was unpredictable, disorganized, and rash, his art was otherwise. He wrested his sentences out of a purifying immediacy. Like Pushkin, he said, he was in pursuit of “precision and brevity.” His most pointed comment on literary style appears in “Guy de Maupassant,” a cunning seriocomic sexual fable fixed on the weight and trajectory of language itself. The success of a phrase, the young narrator instructs, “rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.” But even this is not the crux. The crux (Babel’s severest literary dictum) is here: “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”

A writer’s credo, and Babel’s most intimate confession. Stand in awe of it, yes--but remember also that this same master of the white bone of truth, this artist of the delicately turned key, was once a shameless propagandist for the Revolution, capable of rabid exhortations: “Beat them, Red Fighters, clobber them to death, if it is the last thing you do! Right away! This minute! Now!” “Slaughter them, Red Army fighters!, Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins!” While it is a truism that every utopia contains the seeds of dystopia, Babel, after all, was granted skepticism almost from the start. Out of skepticism came disillusionment; out of disillusionment, revulsion. And in the end, as the tragic trope has it, the Revolution devoured its child.

Babel’s art served as a way station to the devouring. He was devoured because he would not, could not, accommodate to falsehood; because he saw and he saw, with an eye as merciless as a klieg light; and because, like Kafka, he surrendered his stories to voices and passions tremulous with the unforeseen. If we wish to complete, and transmit, the literary configuration of the 20th century--the image that will enduringly stain history’s retina--now is the time (it is past time) to set Babel beside Kafka. Between them, they leave no nerve unshaken.