The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
by Isaac Babel; Nathalie Babel, ed.
Peter Constantine, translator
W.W. Norton, 2001 1076 pp $45    

He was a squat man. He wore thick glasses. Photographs captured him badly-none make it clear why he was so popular with women. Memoirists insist that his seemingly benign, even flabby looks could inspire intense fear. Some fifty years ago Lionel Trilling judged Isaac Babel as looking rather like either a "Chinese merchant," or a "successful Hollywood writer," or a "typical" Jewish intellectual. "It is," wrote Trilling of Babel's face, the kind "which many Jews used to aspire to have, or hoped their sons would have." Babel's close friend Konstantin Paustovsky is still more vivid and more than mildly deprecating: "Stooping, almost neckless . . . with a duck's bill of a nose, a creased forehead and an oily glint in his little eyes, he was anything but fascinating." Why so many who write about him write so much about his appearance is by no means the greatest mystery surrounding Babel and his brilliant but still much debated literary legacy.

The release of this meticulously edited, well-translated, and apparently definitive volume of Babel's is, of course, a cause for celebration. Until now, Babel's fiction had appeared in the English language in mostly thin, tentative volumes, awaiting always the inclusion of his unpublished work, hundreds and hundreds of pages, one hoped, which he had hidden away until the time of his arrest in 1939. It seems that this plump, handsome book contains all his existing writing, including the very few unpublished manuscripts-screenplays, fragments of an unfinished novel-located once the implosion of communism made thorough literary research into his life and work possible. Beautiful to hold, and a meticulous work of scholarship, it is more complete than the two-volume Russian edition of his work that appeared in the early nineties. It includes two valuable essays by his daughter, Nathalie Babel, a very useful chronology of his life by the eminent Slavic scholar Gregory Frieden (there is no full-length biography of him in any language), and a characteristically probing, ferociously intelligent introductory essay by Cynthia Ozick. The translation is a bit stiff at times, but, on the whole, impressive.

Still, the book's publication is more than a bit dismaying. It means that his remaining unpublished writings (twenty-seven folders of manuscripts that were seized at the time of his arrest) have been deemed unrecoverable, and, consequently, it is unlikely that the many uncertainties that surround him-literary, biographical, even, on some level, moral- will be put to rest. Trilling, in his essay on Babel- an essay packed with errors mostly because of misinformation supplied by Babel himself in several coy sketches of his own life-perceived even then that what most set Babel's work apart was its extraordinarily artful use of secrets.

The secrets Trilling had in mind, in particular, were the uncertainties left in the wake of Babel's stunning, mosaic-like portrait in Red Cavalry of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920. How he felt here about the Russian Revolution, the goodness of man, Jews, violence, bourgeois values, or values at all he leaves unclear. The book was built around its contradictory, confounding stances toward these and other critical and (in Soviet Russia already at the time it appeared in the mid-twenties) rather dangerous topics. Babel leaves the reader often stunned by his intermittent inhumanity, his incorrigible sentimentality, his deep attachment to Jews, his breezy indifference to Jews, and his love and horror in the face of revolutionary upheaval. In Red Cavalry, he has his protagonist-who seems, at least at times, very much an autobiographical stand-in-muse about how keenly he wishes for the ability to kill his fellow man. The sentence pierces the heart like the power Babel attributes elsewhere, in his story "Guy de Maupassant," to the uncanny, stunning resonance of skillful punctuation: "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place." Picking out stray lines from Babel stories in an effort to encapsulate his essential message is, if you will, as useless as choosing stray passages from the Talmud to illuminate the fundamental teachings of the rabbis.  

The mysteries surrounding Babel are far thicker and far less tractable now than Trilling could ever have known. Especially in the wake of the discovery and publication about fifteen years ago of the diary he kept while first sketching out Red Cavalry, the various, jagged interconnections in Babel between fact and fantasy, conviction and opportunism, decency and elusiveness, between art and life remain painfully, probably chronically unclear. (The diary, included in this volume, amply shows, for example, how far more deeply attached Babel felt to the pillaged Jews of Galicia than he revealed in Red Cavalry, where, for both artistic and, perhaps, political reasons the narrator maintained a sometimes puzzling, and also tantalizing distance.) It is not surprising that his daughter, Nathalie Babel, who, along with his second wife has done so much to sustain literary interest in Babel over the years, admits in an essay on her father not included in this volume:

I grew up wishing that someday, somewhere, a door would open and my father would come in. We would recognize each other immediately, and without seeming surprised, without letting him catch his breath, I would say: "Well, here you are at last. We've been puzzled about you for so long; although you left behind much love and devotion, you bequeathed to us very few facts. It's so good to have you here. Do sit down and tell us what happened."

His daughter (who lived with her mother, Babel's first wife, in Paris, and who knew her father only distantly, and saw him only during his sporadic stays abroad) hungers here for knowledge not altogether different from that which bedevils still Babel's biographers and literary critics. The two, in Babel's case, at least, seem less at odds with one another than is typical these days, both aware that the insistence on sequestering this man's life from his art would render both hollow, even inexplicable. Biographical chasms here make literary analysis particularly slippery-Babel lied often, skillfully, even joyfully about the details of his life and, in the meantime, wrote fiction that was profoundly, but by no means transparently autobiographical.

To the extent to which sense might be made of such things, Babel was killed because he was unwilling or unable to sacrifice literature on the altar of expediency in a Soviet world where, by the late thirties, the absence of principle was a principle itself. (He was taken away in the middle of the night, in May 1939 and shot several months later after a hurried trial.) He had tried hard to fit into the new Russian reality; at the time of his arrest he was deputy chairman of the editorial board of the State Literary Publishing House. He had a dacha in the writer's colony Peredelkino, a driver for his car, and a maid. He knew well powerful politicians; his close friend-the consummate fellow traveler, Maxim Gorky-shielded Babel from harm, until his death in 1936. As Babel wrote his family abroad, in the mid-thirties, "Nowadays, writing doesn't mean sitting at one's table. It means rushing all over the country, participating in active life, doing research, establishing close contact with some enterprise, and suffering a constant sense of impotence at one's inability to be everywhere one ought to be."

His letters abroad were, not surprisingly, cautious, carefully coded, written for many, different eyes to see. He spoke frankly, particularly in his acknowledgment of the desire "to be everywhere one ought to be." This was born, no doubt, out of his uncommonly intense curiosity-Babel would, as a matter of course, ask women he met if he might rifle through their purses to inspect their contents. It was also a byproduct of what Babel took away from his Jewish childhood in late czarist Russia. His was a childhood punctuated by random, sometimes brutal humiliations and especially by a gnawing sense of exclusion from membership in a larger community that would eat at him and inspire him as a writer in the new, at first vigorously, eventually intrusively inclusive reality of the Bolshevik twenties.

These influences meant that he sought-despite a penchant for the bohemian, a taste for life on the edge that he could not quite abandon-never to be excluded again. They conspired to keep Babel in Stalin's Russia even after so many close to him were exiled or silenced. And they conspired also to keep him willing to render himself useful, an ever-elusive, but nonetheless active presence in the Soviet literary world where the ambiguous position he insisted on occupying became, as time passed, less and less credible. In particular, the "unbridled curiosity with which he scrutinized life and people" (this is how Nadezhda Mandelstamm summed him up) spelled all-but-certain doom. Eager to interrogate, to probe those who lived at the edge, he even sought out, in the late thirties and shortly before his own arrest, the much-feared secret police. He explained that he consorted with them "to have a sniff and see what it smells like," much as he had years earlier in Red Cavalry gravitated toward the violence, the interplay, as he saw it, between grace and intuition among the justly feared Cossacks. 

The exploration by Russian writers in the twenties of the tension between old and new, between a collectivist personality and the rebellious pre-revolutionary intelligent, even the rapid move (that so many have seen as distinct to Babel's prose) from sordidness to lyricism were themselves typical features of the period. Babel's fascination with Odessa, whose half-Russian, half-Ukrainian, and also Jewish intonation he recreated in stories about Jewish childhood and graceful, improbably articulate gangsters, was itself part and parcel of the standard literary scene (Ilf and Petrov, Paustovsky, and Katayev all probed, in various ways, much the same terrain). Babel's relationship with Odessa was especially intense (he was, as one of his more astute interpreters, Shimon Markish, put it, "caressed by the Odessa accent"), and it is now almost impossible to recall the city without mentioning him. His relationship to it is akin to Joyce's relationship to Dublin, although immeasurably more affectionate, more alert to its cramped and provincial but abiding charms.

While his themes are, on the whole, familiar, it is his stunning, unlikely juxtapositions that render Babel's work most distinct. As the critic V. Shklovsky put it, "Babel's principle device is to speak in the same tone of voice about the stars above and gonorrhea." This commitment to reconcile apparent contradictions-between Jews and Cossacks (he creates in Benya Krik, of course, a Jewish Cossack hero of sorts), between humanism and Leninism, between a profound commitment to the past and a belief in the power and promise of the future, underlines all his work. He insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, on conflating the essential teachings of the Jews and the Cossacks: "The wisdom of my forefathers," he writes, "was ingrained in me: we have been born to delight in labor, fighting, and love. That is what we have been born for, and nothing else."

This vision could not flourish in the thirties, when Babel went, effectively, silent as a writer producing much that was stored away in a trunk in his Moscow flat, but that never saw the light of day. Yet he never abandoned any of it, though this increasingly meant he published less and less, and what he did publish in the last decade of his life missed often his characteristic panache. Never could he abandon his preoccupation with Jews; he was, in the late thirties, translating Sholem Aleichem into Russian, which, he admitted, was one of the very few literary tasks at the time that he thoroughly enjoyed. As Markish puts it, Babel was as much a Russian Jewish writer as Saul Bellow is an American Jewish one.

Babel offered the promise of engagement in community, but always at a distance, never without the ability to measure the ambiguity of one's deepest, most sustained relationships. In "The Awakening," perhaps Babel's most widely reprinted story, the child protagonist abandons violin lessons (which his desperate Jewish father prays will rescue the family from obscurity, which, in his mind, is immeasurably worse than poverty) for the pleasures of swimming and consorting with Gentile waterfront urchins. He learns that, though he hopes to write, he knows nothing of nature, nothing of the names of trees, the stars, or the sea. "In my childhood, nailed to the Gemara, I led the life of a sage, and it was only later, when I was older, that I began to climb trees." His sin discovered, his family humiliated, his father brought to the verge of violence as the child locks himself in the bathroom, he is then escorted in the dead of night by his aunt through the streets of the city:

I sat in my fortress till nightfall. When everybody had gone to bed, Auntie Bobka took me to my grandmother's. It was a long walk. The moonlight froze on unknown shrubs, on nameless trees. An invisible bird whistled once, and then was quiet, perhaps it had fallen asleep. What kind of bird was it? What was it called? Was there dew in the evenings? Where was the constellation of the Great Bear in the sky? On what side did the sun rise?

We walked along Pochtovaya Street. Auntie Bobka held my hand tightly so that I wouldn't run away. She was right. I was thinking of running away.

It is just this moment, this longing to escape while clutching tightly at the hands he will never entirely flee, to which he will turn repeatedly in his fiction. He did so with an astonishing facility to probe its complexity, its poignancy, and, always, its mysterious beauty, which, for him, wasn't the same as nostalgia. Many of his interpreters have sought somehow to firm up, never with any success, his stance toward specific, concrete aspects of politics, or culture, or ethnicity that he only knew to explore in their manifold shades. Babel had no hidden, secretly cherished position on the revolution, or on Jews, or pleasure, or sin; he explored these themes, all close to his heart and at the core of his literary imagination, by circling around them, picking at them, but never resolving them. He studied closely, and with great intensity and often startling acuity, those who resolved contradictions with the sweep of a sword, with the barrel of a gun, or the penning of an ideological pamphlet. He examined their resolve, it fascinated him deeply, and he sought to understand it thoroughly. That, however, was not what he himself would ever do.