The Triumphant Merriment of Isaac Babel

If Saint Peter should ever locate the keys to the Lubyanka and release all the writers slaughtered there, the only ghost in the procession likely to be wearing a smile would be Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel. As his second wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, tells us in At His Side, her memoirs of their last years together, "Babel ascribed great importance to merriment."


Pirozhkova wrote this book in secret decades ago, but it was published, in uncensored form, for the first time in 1989, on the crest of the glasnost wave in Moscow. The book does not pretend to do the heavy lifting of a biography, and yet it is especially rich with the evidence of Babel's good humor in a dark time. The handsome English edition includes pictures of Babel smiling with his young wife and his various children. Especially striking is a photograph of Babel in 1938, at the height of the purges, sitting cross legged, his head resting in the palm of his right hand: He is smiling blissfully, a Jewish Buddha in wire-rimmed glasses.


One can only begin to imagine the levels of irony, the fatalism, in that smile. The next year, in May 1939, Babel would be arrested at the order of the head of the secret police, Lavrenty Beria. The writer was keenly aware of the possibility, even the inevitability, of this end. As early as 1920, when he was working as a war correspondent on the Bolshevik side during the civil war, Babel made clear in his diary that the ideals of the revolution, in which he had initially believed, had been trampled by the cruelties committed in their name. And in 1936, when his friend and protector Maxim Gorky died, Babel told Pirozhkova, "Now they won't let me live."


Born in 1894 in the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea, Babel had a mostly secular Jewish education. Disappointing his parents, who wanted him to become a violinist, Babel pursued secular studies and then moved to St. Petersburg and began writing. In 1916, at the age of 20, he published his first stories in Gorky's literary journal, Letopis, and began writing for the anti-Bolshevik paper Novaya Zhizn, or The New Life. When the paper was shut down by Lenin in 1918, Gorky advised his protege to dirty his hands with life. Babel responded immediately.


He served briefly in the army on the Romanian front, joined a grain requisitioning expedition intended to stave off starvation in the cities along the Volga, and then, in 1920, he joined Budyonny's pro-Bolshevik Cossack contingent as a journalist. His job was to write news dispatches for both ROSTA, the state news agency, and for Krasny Kavalerist (The Red Cavalryman), the army's daily newspaper.


The idea of a plump and bespectacled Jewish reporter riding with a Cossack unit was, in itself, a variety of Babelian merriment. The first time Babel had ever ridden a horse was the day he saddled up with the First Cavalry. But he was clearly thrilled by the immediacy and the authenticity of the experience. As a reporter, Babel wrote little more than rote propaganda in praise of the revolution and fallen comrades. But, as Gorky had hoped, the job provided Babel with a view of the world in its rawest form and an understanding of human cruelty and his own vexed identity which he would use in his stories.


Returning once more to Odessa in 1921, and now married to the daughter of a once wealthy Odessa manufacturer, Yevgenia Gronfein, Babel began writing and publishing the stories of his Odessa childhood and the Red Cavalry series. But although his work was greeted with immediate acclaim, writing the stories themselves was no easy process.


Babel would labor over a story of 500 or a 1,000 words for weeks, even months. He would write and rewrite them dozens of times until he had committed them to memory. A story, Babel felt, should have the precision of a military communiqu? or a bank check, and "a simile must be as precise as a slide rule and as natural as the smell of dill."


"Writing is very hard for me," he once told his friend Konstantin Paustovsky. "Somewhere I once wrote that I'm rapidly aging from asthma, that strange illness which lodged itself in my puny body when I was a child. But I was lying. When I'm writing the shortest story, I still have to work at it as if I were required to dig up Mount Everest all by myself with a pick and shovel. ... I have heart spasms when I can't manage a sentence."


To relieve the tension of writing, writes Pirozhkova (who married Babel in 1934 after his first wife, Gronfein, left him and Russia in 1925 and emigrated to Belgium), Babel indulged in merriment and the company of friends. Nothing made him happier than, say, visiting his friend and collaborator, the great filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein; using a magnifying glass, they would examine Eisenstein's superior collection of Mexican fleas. Pirozhkova describes Babel as a man in love with simple experience: his talks with fishermen and the baker, his delight in the ironic idiom of Odessa, his constant storytelling. It was his habit in life, as it was in his art, to take incidents from his childhood and improve them: "I had been around Babel long enough to know that, for the sake of a piquant or funny story, he would never spare friends and relatives -- or me, either," wrote Pirozhkova.


But for all his evident humor, Babel's smile has long been as enigmatic as La Gioconda's. During the years subsequent to 1925, Babel practiced primarily the "genre of silence" and his politics seemed a muddle of outward compromise and private dissent. He not only paid ritual obeisance to Stalin, he also became friends with the head of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda. And his behavior as a public actor was neither completely toadying nor purely heroic.


In August 1934 Babel delivered a speech at the first Soviet Writer's Congress, which was reprinted in Pravda. Ostensibly, the speech was of a piece with so much of what was published in Pravda at the time; in fact, it was an immensely complicated performance, part ritual tribute to Stalin and the regime, part Aesopian critique of "triteness" and "vulgarity."


By 1935 Babel already had clear intimations of his fate. His play about the impoverished family of a White Guard officer in St. Petersburg just after the revolution, "Mariya," was denounced and withdrawn from two theaters. And his collaboration with Eisenstein on a film version of Turgenev's "Bezhin Meadow" was criticized so severely that Eisenstein was forced to distance himself from the project. Nevertheless, Babel made Antonina Pirozhkova, a talented transport engineer who had helped build the Moscow subway system, his second wife. He also resisted the temptation to emigrate, believing that a "writer mutilates himself and his work by leaving his native country."


Babel was arrested on May 15, 1939, at his dacha in Peredelkino. Babel and Antonina sat together on a bed holding hands and watched as the secret police officers ransacked the house, confiscating 15 folders of manuscripts, 18 notebooks and 517 letters; an enormous cache for a writer known for his silence. They took away an almost complete collection of "New Stories"; a novella called "Kolya Topuz" about an Odessa gangster who tries to adapt to Soviet era collectivization; essays about collective farm life in the Ukraine; and Russian translations of Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish stories; a completed screenplay; and an incomplete second one. "Ne dali konchit," Babel whispered to his wife. "They didn't let me finish."


Babel's trial took place Jan. 26, 1940, in one of Beria's offices. It lasted 20 minutes. Babel was convicted of "active participation in an anti-Soviet-Trotskyite organization" and of "being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and the Austrian governments." His last words were: "I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others. ... I am asking for only one thing: Let me finish my work..." Babel was shot at 1:30 the next morning.


Antonina Pirozhkova did not learn of her husband's death until 1954, 14 years after the fact. For years, she would go begging for information and receive elliptical, but promising, replies. Always, the hope was held out to her that Babel was in the gulag system somewhere in Siberia and that he would return. His anonymous ashes were buried in Donskoi monastery in Moscow.


I began by saying that merriment was dear to Babel, that he had the gift of masking the cruelty he had witnessed and the cruelties he knew were coming with a sense of comedy and fatalism: a classic pose of Jewish humor. That was true even in his last moment with Pirozhkova. As they were being driven to the Lubyanka, Babel turned to one of the officers of the secret police and said, "You don't get much sleep, do you?"





"At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel" by A.N. Pirozhkova. Steerforth Press, 171 pages, $22.00.





David Remnick contributed this article to the New York Review of Books.