The Review of Contemporary Fiction
1920 Diary by Isaac BabelThomas Hove
Isaac Babel. 1920 Diary. Ed. and intro. Carol J. Avins. Trans. H. T. Willetts. Yale Univ. Press, 1997. 192 pp. Paper: $13.00.
During the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, concealing his Jewish identity under a Russian pseudonym, Babel served as a war correspondent for the predominantly Cossack First Cavalry branch of the Red Army. This diary, which contains several of the germs for Babel’s celebrated Red Cavalry stories (1926), documents his experiences, observations, and reflections for about four months of that war. Its entries catalog the everyday realities of sweat, blood, excrement, flies, rain, mud, dust, fatigue, homesickness, forced billeting, looting, and ethnically motivated brutality. Also included in this volume are four articles Babel wrote for his army newspaper, the Red Cavalryman; they are propagandistic in tone and stand in striking contrast to his sometimes ambivalent and detached, sometimes outraged and despairing diary entries. Avins’s introduction provides a thorough overview of the diary’s historical and biographical context, as well as an illuminating discussion of some of its key preoccupations. Chief among these preoccupations are Babel’s anxieties over hiding his ethnic identity, his uncertainties regarding the future of the Bolshevik cause, and his compassion for the unfortunate people caught up in this violent transitional moment—not only Jewish villagers, victims of several atrocious pogroms, but also female nurses and Polish prisoners. Even horses and cows receive his sympathetic attention. Much of the diary consists of hastily written reminders to develop or describe certain people, impressions, or incidents. But Babel’s more detailed reflections and anecdotes, considered in relation to both his fiction and twentieth-century Soviet and Jewish history, make wading through the rest of the diary highly worthwhile. [Thomas Hove]