The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Isaac Babel · Конармия (Konarmiia) · a cycle of thirty-four stories, written and printed in Odessa and Moscow journals from 1923 to 1925 and first gathered as a book by the State Publishing House, Moscow, in 1926 · scored on the book of 1926 and on Babel’s Russian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beneath, and the translations of Peter Constantine (2002) and Boris Dralyuk (2015) used for sense and not quoted
Mode
The story cycle as war chronicle: ornamental lyric prose and Cossack skaz in one book, each story a fragment cut off at its moment of shock, no story judged
Mythos
The initiation by sacrifice; the Cossack as the figure of animal grace and natural violence against which the man of books measures himself; Christ present only in broken forms; the Hasidic fathers and the last son, in whose dead body the two faiths of the age lie together
Phase
One campaign, the summer of 1920, from the crossing of the Zbrucz and the taking of Novograd-Volynsk to the burial of the rabbi’s son, through the towns of Volhynia and Galicia
Presentation
Prose fiction in thirty-four short stories, most of two to five pages and several of a single page; a first-person narrator, Liutov, in most, and in several the letters and testimonies of Cossacks in their own speech
Register
From the flat report of a military dispatch to an ornamental Russian burning with violent tropes, a prose lament for a cemetery, and the boasting, self-justifying skaz of the men who kill
Scale
A cavalry army and the country it crosses: the revolution and its political work, the old Polish and Jewish Volhynia, synagogue and church, fathers and sons, the landscape, and one divided consciousness
Governing Proposition
In the summer of 1920 Kirill Liutov, a Jewish intellectual in spectacles, rides with Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army through Volhynia and Galicia as a propagandist on the divisional staff, among Cossacks he envies and fears and among Jews whom the campaign ruins. The wager of the book is that this war can be known only in fragments: thirty-four flashes, each cut off at the moment its meaning is unbearable, told in a prose more violent than its events and in the flat voices of the men who did them, none of them judged; and that what the revolution carries with it, the old pogrom and the narrator’s longing to be able to kill, can be shown in no other way.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book is made from one campaign. In the summer of 1920 Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army rode west into Volhynia and Galicia in the war against Poland, through Novograd-Volynsk, Brody, Berestechko, Zamość and Czesniki. Isaac Babel rode with it as a correspondent under the name Kirill Vasilievich Liutov, and that is the name of the narrator who tells most of the stories: a Jewish intellectual and propagandist attached to the divisional staff, a man in spectacles among Cossacks. From 1923 to 1925 the stories appeared in Odessa and Moscow journals, among them Lef and Krasnaia nov’. In 1926 the State Publishing House gathered them as a book: thirty-four stories, most of two to five pages, several of a single page.
The first, “Crossing the Zbrucz”, begins as a report: “Начдив шесть донес о том, что Новоград-Волынск взят сегодня на рассвете”
(The commander of the Sixth Division reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn). Within a page the prose is burning: “Оранжевое солнце катится по небу, как отрубленная голова”
(The orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head). The army crosses the river, and night comes.
He learns that he has slept beside a dead old man, a Jew with his throat cut, and the man’s pregnant daughter puts her question about her father. The first story ends there, without comment. The book has given its method in a page or two: the flat dispatch, the violent metaphor, the atrocity found rather than witnessed, and a meaning left standing at the moment it becomes unbearable.
Movement II
On the eve of the Sabbath the narrator finds Gedali, an old man keeping a shop of curiosities, and Gedali puts a question to the revolution. He wants “Интернационал добрых людей”
(an International of good people). No story in the book answers him. The plea stands as the book’s open question to its own cause, and the Jews of the towns the cavalry crosses are its answer in fact: in “Berestechko” and elsewhere the army that comes to free them carries the old pogrom with it.
The Hasidic fathers stand against the horsemen. Gedali is one of them, and in “The Rabbi” Rabbi Motale is another: the old Jewish piety of Volhynia, met by a narrator who rides with the army that is ruining it. The sacred of the other faith is in ruins too. The Catholic churches of Volhynia are desecrated by the army, and Christ appears in the book only broken: as Sashka Christ, the syphilitic shepherd boy, and as the Christ of Pan Apolek.
Apolek paints the townsfolk as saints, and his is a blasphemous gospel of Jesus and Deborah. His icons carry a heretical beauty: the saint painted from the sinner. The two faiths of Volhynia, Hasidic and Catholic, are both present in the book and both passing under the cavalry. What the book discloses here can be stated as true: the revolution that promises a new world rides through the old one as the pogrom always did.
Movement III
The narrator arrives among the Cossacks with spectacles and a trunk. They throw the trunk into the street. He wants to belong among them, and in “My First Goose”, a page and a half, he finds the price. He crushes a goose under his boot, and the old woman of the house says she wants to hang herself. Then the Cossacks make room for him at their cabbage soup, and Lenin’s speech is read aloud among them. The longing to belong to the men of violence is a desire to be capable of killing, and the capacity is bought with a creature’s life.
The story ends on one line: “Сердце мое, обагренное убийством, скрипело и текло”
(My heart, stained crimson with murder, creaked and flowed). The verbs are those of a thing, not a heart. The sentence carries the moral of the whole book and states none: it does not repent, and it does not exult. The initiation is complete, and its cost is recorded in the grammar.
“The Death of Dolgushov” turns the question round. A dying man, Dolgushov, asks for a bullet. The narrator cannot give it. Afonka does, and his friendship with the narrator ends. Mercy and murder are not opposites in war, and the man who cannot kill has failed at mercy. The narrator is never whole in these stories, and the book never makes him whole: the cycle of fragments is the form of a self divided between the books he came from and the men he cannot become.
Movement IV
Several stories are given in another voice. In “A Letter” a Cossack’s letter reports how a father killed his son across the lines of the Civil War, and how a son took his revenge on the father. In “Salt” a Cossack writes to the editor to boast of shooting a woman who had carried salt in place of a child. “Treason” and “The Life of Matvei Rodionych Pavlichenko” are testimonies in the same skaz, the men’s own speech, given their own syntax and self-justification.
Pavlichenko tells how he trampled his old master for an hour. His account rises to a terrible exultation, and the book lets it rise. None of these voices is judged. The narrator who cannot shoot a dying friend sets beside his own voice the voices of men who kill with gladness and explain it as justice, and he does not master them.
At the other pole stands “The Cemetery at Kozin”, a prose poem of a paragraph or so, a lament built on a few repetitions. The lyric and the boast obey one law: the war is seen in flashes, nothing is explained, and the voice that admires and the voice that kills are set side by side without a judgment the book will state. Not every story holds that law at full strength. In the middle of the book a few campaign stories carry the war forward without the fusion of the best, and there the narrator sometimes vanishes unmarked.
Movement V
The book closes on the son of Rabbi Motale, the last of the rabbi’s princes, dead as a soldier of the Red Army. His trunk holds Lenin’s portrait and Maimonides together, the two faiths of the age in one dead body. The narrator buries him. The book that opened on a dead Jew found in the night ends on a dead Jew of the Red Army, and the narrator, who woke beside the first, is now the one who buries the second. Each story was cut off at its moment of meaning; the cycle is cut off at the last.
Its life was fought over from the start. Budyonny attacked the book in print in 1924, while the stories were still appearing, and Gorky defended it. Babel was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940, and his books were withdrawn until his rehabilitation in 1954 and a censored selection in 1957. Outside Russia its presence was continuous. Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the Collected Stories (1955) made the Jew among the Cossacks its central question, and the publication of the 1920 diary showed how much the book had cut and changed.
Beside the war-haunted cycle of the same years, Hemingway’s In Our Time (8.6), it is the deeper book and the narrower in reach, its Russian line cut by its author’s death. Beside Jesus’ Son (8.4), the nearest form on the desk, a short cycle in one damaged first person, it stands above on the deep axes. Dubliners (9.0) stands over it as a story book of the summit, and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (8.8), the Soviet montage of revolutionary violence from the same two years, stands level with it. It holds its place by the goose and the heart that creaked.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test on a single story is nearly unanswerable. “My First Goose”, a page and a half, cannot lose a sentence: the newcomer’s spectacles, his trunk thrown into the street by the Cossacks, the goose crushed under his boot, the old woman, the shared cabbage soup, Lenin’s speech read aloud and the closing line of the heart form one chain. “Crossing the Zbrucz” is as tightly bound. The arrangement is required too: the first story opens on an old Jew with his throat cut, and the last closes on a dead Jewish soldier of the Red Army. The test bites in the middle of the book, where a few campaign stories carry the war forward without the fusion of the best, and their order could be varied without loss.
Score: 8.6 / 10
What the book brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. The intellectual’s longing to belong among the men of violence is a desire to be capable of killing, and the capacity is bought with a creature’s life. A revolution fought by a cavalry of Cossacks carries the old pogrom with it, so that the Jews of Volhynia are ruined by the army that comes to free them. Mercy and murder are not opposites in war: in “The Death of Dolgushov” the narrator cannot shoot the dying man, Afonka does, and their friendship ends. These are meanings, not a mood of horror. The axis stops short of the top because the narrator’s divided state is one great finding, returned to rather than extended; the disclosures of Anna Karenina, at 9.5 here, are many.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation is frequent, and of a cold, terrible kind. The first story gives “Оранжевое солнце катится по небу, как отрубленная голова”
(The orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head), and then its turn, when the narrator learns that he has slept beside a dead old man and the pregnant daughter asks her question about her father. “The Cemetery at Kozin” is a lament of great height built on a few repetitions. Pavlichenko’s account of trampling his old master for an hour rises to a terrible exultation in the man’s own voice. Pan Apolek’s icons, the townsfolk painted as saints, carry a heretical beauty. Height comes in most of the best stories; it stays below 9.0 because the mode is the abrupt flash, not the sustained ascent, and some campaign stories are level.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth is built, not only evoked. The Cossack is made a figure of animal grace and natural violence against which the narrator, the Jew in spectacles, measures himself, and that measurement is the book’s spine; in “My First Goose” initiation by sacrifice is enacted in a farmyard. Christ is present throughout and always broken: Apolek’s blasphemous gospel of Jesus and Deborah, Sashka Christ the syphilitic shepherd boy, the Catholic churches desecrated by the army. Against them stand the Hasidic fathers, Gedali and Rabbi Motale, and the rabbi’s son, dead with Lenin and Maimonides together in his trunk. What holds the axis at the gate is the battle pieces, several of which evoke the Cossack epic without building on it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The book departs from the Russian war novel as Tolstoy left it, with its breadth, its general in the private soul and its historical argument, and from the civil-war novel being written around it. In their place come thirty-four flashes, each compressed to the point of shock, in an ornamental prose whose metaphors are more violent than the events, set beside the flat skaz of the men who did them. The inheritance is real (Gogol and Leskov for skaz, Maupassant for the cut, Bely and Pilnyak for ornament), so the swerve is a fusion and a compression rather than an invention, and is held below 9.0. The stake was very high: the book refused the heroic account of the Red Cavalry while its commander was alive and powerful, and Budyonny attacked it in print in 1924.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. A continuous novel of Liutov’s campaign would supply what the cycle withholds: causes, transitions, a resolved narrator. The fragments are the instrument of the knowledge. The narrator is never whole, the war never makes a story, and each piece ends at the moment its meaning is unbearable. The juxtapositions do the arguing: a lyric prose poem beside a Cossack’s letter reporting a father’s murder of his son and a son’s revenge on the father, the narrator’s voice beside voices he cannot master. The close answers the opening. A book that began on Jewish death ends on a Jewish death in the Red Army, and the narrator is now the one who buries. The form is the knowledge.
Score: 9.0 / 10
A century of return is the evidence. The book was argued over from its first appearance, Budyonny against Gorky in 1924. Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the Collected Stories (1955) opened the Western reading and made the Jew among the Cossacks its central question. The diary Babel kept with the army in 1920, published only decades later, brought a further reading, which showed how much the book cut and transformed. The questions of the narrator’s complicity, of Babel’s relation to the regime that killed him, and of the Jewish and Christian iconography stay open, and the stories reward slow rereading phrase by phrase. Held below 9.0: the book is short, and some of its yield lies in the life and the diary beside it rather than in the text.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The intrinsic force is high. The book reorganised what a short story about war could hold: lyric, atrocity and comedy in two pages, with the narrator’s moral failure as the subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Russian the field was the Soviet prose of the 1920s, and Babel’s line there was cut by his death and by the withdrawal of his books for nearly two decades, while Soviet prose after 1934 went the other way. Outside Russia the reach is wider and particular; Trilling’s introduction of 1955 set the book at the centre of an American reading of the Jewish writer among men of violence. Reach is strongest in the short story and narrower beyond it, and the broken Russian line is charged against it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
About a century has passed since 1926, and the text survives whole, with its variant later editions. Its presence is continuous in translation into the major languages, and it is taught as a central book of Russian modernism and of Jewish literature in Russian. At home that presence was broken: Babel was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940, his books were withdrawn until his rehabilitation in 1954, and a censored selection returned in 1957. The interruption holds the figure at the foot of its band and earns no lift from the wide presence elsewhere. The surface is fixed to one campaign of 1920, a war few readers know, yet the book has outlived the state that produced it and is read for what it shows, not for the history.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the sentence is the book’s most evident and least disputed quality. Babel’s Russian is compressed to the edge of breakage, its tropes violent and exact, its paragraphing a matter of rhythm. The book opens in the voice of a dispatch, “Начдив шесть донес о том, что Новоград-Волынск взят сегодня на рассвете”
(The commander of the Sixth Division reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn), and within a page the prose is burning. The skaz is as commanding as the ornament: the letter-writers of “A Letter” and “Salt” are given their own syntax and self-justification without a wink. The best sentences are load-bearing; the last line of “My First Goose” carries the moral of the whole. Now and then the ornament overreaches in the lesser pieces, and that keeps the figure from the top.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the lyric prose poem of “The Cemetery at Kozin” and the brutal comic skaz of “Salt”, a Cossack’s letter to the editor boasting of shooting a woman who carried salt in place of a child. One law governs both. The war is seen in flashes, nothing is explained, and the voice that admires and the voice that kills are set side by side without a judgment the book will state. Liutov’s irony, envy and horror hold the range together, and the skaz pieces are his opposite pole, not a breach. The law holds across a wide range of register. It falls short of the highest marks because the campaign pieces in the middle loosen it a little, and the narrator sometimes vanishes without the book marking it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
For a short book the range held is wide and integrated. The state and its revolution enter in Lenin’s speech read aloud and in the political officer’s work; history, in the old Polish and Jewish Volhynia passing under the cavalry; the sacred, Hasidic and Catholic both, and their ruin; the family, in “A Letter”, with fathers and sons killing each other across the Civil War, and in the dead father of the first story; consciousness, in Liutov’s divided self; the natural order, in landscapes the prose makes cosmic. The narrator and the campaign hold them together. Labour is little held beyond the horse-work of the army. What keeps the axis lowest is scale: a cycle of brief stories cannot encompass what the long novels do, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2: a Russian compressed to the edge of breakage, the dispatch and the ornament and the skaz each commanded, the best sentences load-bearing. Beside it The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.0: a cycle of fragments that is the instrument of what the book knows, closing on a Jewish death as it opened; and a century of presence in every major language, against an interruption at home.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.1: the state, history, two faiths, the family, consciousness and the natural order are held in one campaign, but labour hardly at all, and a cycle of brief stories cannot hold what the long novels hold. Next above it, The Inevitable, The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6: campaign stories in the middle whose order could change, battle pieces that evoke the Cossack epic without building on it, and a Russian line cut by the author’s death.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 9.0 and The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition clear it by a tenth, each at 8.6. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.8 from a sum of 105.0, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Isaac Babel’s Конармия (Konarmiia), scored as the book of 1926 published by the State Publishing House in Moscow: thirty-four stories in Babel’s order, from “Crossing the Zbrucz” (Perekhod cherez Zbruch) to “The Rabbi’s Son” (Syn rabbi). The stories had appeared from 1923 to 1925 in Odessa and Moscow journals, among them Lef and Krasnaia nov’. “Argamak”, added in later editions, is context and is not weighed; the diary Babel kept with the First Cavalry Army in 1920, published decades later, is context and not the work. Every axis is judged on Babel’s Russian. No text of the book was in hand; nothing was measured by script and no quotation was checked against a file. The book is known well as a whole and about a dozen of its stories closely; the rest are known in outline, and no argument rests on detail not known. The order of the stories between the first and the last is not relied on. Russian is quoted only where its words are certain, four passages, each with the desk’s own close English beneath; other passages are paraphrased. Translation · Peter Constantine’s English in the Complete Works (2002) and Boris Dralyuk’s (2015) were read for sense; neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged to the work. Matters that could not be verified, among them the book’s length in pages, the edition in which “Argamak” first appeared and the wording of the daughter’s question in the first story, are not given.