Red Cavalry
(Babel, Isaak)
A bespectacled, bookish Jew in the company of the Red Calvary raids during WWI, Liutov chronicles outrage, devastation and the horror of war in the short stories collected in Red Calvary Tales. The author's forte is a type of slow-motion collage, where images mix inside the unsettled, unsentimental pictures of war. Themes of ethnicity and masculinity pervade the stories and the reader beholds the dead and dying with the same sense of intimacy as meeting the living. Colorful imagery in complex metaphors delivers the poignancy of love and anguish without the intervention of a personal view. Even when the plot involves Liutov, it is his personality, his effeminacy or his Jewishness that is involved, and there is never a shed tear even when he feels inadequate. In one story, he acts in consonance with his conviction that it is immoral to kill, and as a correspondent, he does not carry arms. But the soldier dying on the road with his abdomen rent open calls it immoral when Liutov cannot shoot him and relieve him from his misery. The conflict between civilized humanity and necessary violence tears into the reader's consciousness because universals such as "thou shalt not kill" -- like everything in war -- reflect the enlightened world, not the echoes of primitive imperatives and raw human organisms struggling to survive under constant seige, where such rules cannot make sense. Babel is most recognized for his use of epiphany, a kind of awakening or revelation that transpires in the drama as the narrative climaxes, yet his epiphanies are not of one type, they do not elevate or even enrich the reader so much as wrench cliche from its grip and pour all new significance into the plot. For this, Babel still, almost one hundred years later, is unique and compelling, and reading Red Calvary is an original experience in Russian or in translation.
Resumos Relacionados
- Red Cavalry
- Foundation
- Strange Pilgrims
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- Foucault's Pendulum
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