Cavalry
How Babel’s attitude towards the cavalrymen changed can be judged from his diary. At first, he tried to find in them the features of a new, spiritually reborn people, but gradually became disillusioned, called the fighters “a beast with principles” and awarded them with a whole cloud of unflattering associations: “junk, daring, bestial cruelty, velvet caps, rape, forelocks, battles, revolution and syphilis." The Cossacks who joined Budyonny were particularly cruel, and in addition, they had to get their own horses, weapons and food. Once in peaceful settlements, they robbed, burned houses and killed anyone who tried to resist them. At the same time, Babel’s cavalrymen are both robbers and heroes, not devoid of peculiar ideas of honor, which partly compensate for causeless cruelty. Mikhail Weiskopf even claims that “under the pressure of censorship and self-censorship, he incredibly ennobled the cavalrymen”
6 Weiskopf M. Between the walls of fire. Book about Isaac Babel. M.: Knizhniki, 2021. P. 427. .
The best illustration of who Babel’s character is is the story “Salt,” written in the form of a letter from a cavalryman to a newspaper (“Dear comrade editor. I want to describe to you the women who are harmful to us for their lack of consciousness”). He talks about how the soldiers let a woman with a baby on the train and treat her with unusual respect, as if they were the collective mother figure that every Bolshevik has. However, it turns out that the woman is not carrying a child, but contraband - a bag of salt. Having discovered the deception, the soldiers throw the woman off the train and kill her with a rifle. The main principle of the cavalrymen is revolutionary justice, understood, of course, in its own way. Everything that benefits the revolution deserves life, but beyond this usefulness, human personality and life, including their own, are worth nothing. Another striking illustration of the cavalrymen’s ideas about the value of human life is the “Letter,” in which a boy, interspersed with everyday details and concern about his horse’s mange, talks about the murder of his White Guard father (“... and Semyon Timofeich sent me away from the yard, so I can’t , dear mother Evdokia Fedorovna, to describe to you how they killed dad, that’s why I was sent away from the yard. <...> I remain your dear son Vasily Timofeich Kurdyukov. Mom, look until Styopka, and God will not leave you"). Another important story is “The Death of Dolgushov,” in which Lyutov does not dare to finish off a mortally wounded soldier, although this is necessary so as not to leave him to be torn to pieces by the Poles: “Afonka... shot Dolgushov in the mouth. “Afonya,” I said with a pitiful smile and drove up to the Cossack, “but I couldn’t.” “Go away,” he answered, turning pale, “I’ll kill you!” You, bespectacled ones, pity our brother like a cat does a mouse...” Here Babel clearly contrasts the humanism of his alter ego with the cavalry soldiers in such a way that it becomes clear: the destruction of the value system that the revolution brings requires a deeper analysis; values are no longer universal - principles are more important. The “economic justice” of the cavalrymen is reflected in the stories about how they get their horses: “There is a groan in the village. The cavalry poisons grain and changes horses. In return for the attached nags, the cavalrymen take the draft animals. There is no one to scold here. There is no army without a horse” (“Chief of the Reserve”). In the story “The Story of One Horse,” you can also see how the fighters understand communism: “The Communist Party... was founded, I believe, for joy and solid truth without limit.” Their ideas about honor are reflected in their own way in the story “Prischepa”, in which a fighter who fled from the whites massacres the entire village for plundering the property in his house, and then burns the house.
“CACONARMY” by I. Babel The work was completed by a student of class 11B Nikita Dorofeev. - presentation
“CACONARMY” by I. Babel The work was completed by a student of class 11B Nikita Dorofeev
The Cavalry of I. E. Babel is a collection of short stories connected by the theme of the civil war and a single image of the narrator. Cavalry is written based on Babel's diaries (when he fought in the First Cavalry Army). Babel himself fought under the name Lyutov. Based on this, we can conclude that the main character expresses the worldview of Babel himself.
Upon closer examination, the diary and the stories turn out to be different. But this is understandable. The form of the diary author’s detachment from reality, dictated in a situation of civil war by the need for self-preservation, in Cavalry turns into an aesthetic device that makes it possible, on the one hand, to expose the rudeness and barbarity of the Cossacks, and on the other hand, to emphasize the alienation of the Jewish intellectual trying to live in an alien world. , monstrously cruel life
Frankness "Cavalry" is one of the most merciless and frank books. The reader is presented with life in war, in which truth-seeking and spiritual blindness, the funny and the tragic, heroism and cruelty are intertwined. A fighter kills a woman who went for salt (salt was then a “bargaining coin” that could be used to buy something, and was valued very highly), because she “deceived” the Cossacks: in order to return home and bring the loot, she gave a bag of salt for a child: “... and you, vile citizen, are more counter-revolutionary than that white general who, with a sharp saber, threatens us on his thousandth horse... You can see him, that general, from all roads, and the worker has his own idea -the dream is to cut it, but you, countless citizen... you are nowhere to be seen, like a flea, and you sharpen, sharpen, sharpen...
Criticism "Cavalry" was immediately met with harsh, embittered criticism. Over the years, Babel's name has been stigmatized, even by critics in the 70s. did not dare to recognize his works. He was invariably accused of “deliberate down-to-earthness, depiction of the gray everyday life of the revolution,” and reluctance to depict the heroism of the First Cavalry. There is too much “nature” that obscured the truth about the revolution and the civil war - such was the verdict of Soviet criticism. And yet, Babel’s stories are a vivid chronicle of those years, reflecting real reality, and not life in the legendary army of Budyonny, varnished with the romance of battles.
The first editions of Cavalry contained thirty-four short stories; at the end of his life Babel added two more. The narrator is correspondent Lyutov Kirill Vasilyevich, whose last name is Russian, but, as it turns out in the short story “Rabbi,” he is Jewish. He is a very educated person, graduated from the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University, speaks fluent French, and understands Latin well. Turning to Babel’s biography, one can find similarities with the main character; it is interesting that he himself served as a correspondent in the First Cavalry under the name Lyutov. “Cavalry” is partly an adaptation of the author’s diary entries, but mainly the writer was guided by his memories. Although the image of Lyutov is quite autobiographical, the author is still not identical to him; he is at a certain distance from both the hero and the events depicted.
Hero of the Civil War The image of Lyutov did not correspond to the image of a hero of the civil war. The literature of the 20s needed a hero who was firmly confident in his position, not burdened with doubts and unnecessary thoughts about humanism, in whose ideology the idea of a bright “tomorrow” was important, and not the reality of a terrible and inhumane “today.” What was dangerous for criticism was that the reader, through the eyes of Lyutov, could see the other side of the revolution and civil war.
Lyutov remains a stranger in the army environment - his intelligence prevented him from understanding the need for cruelty in the civil war. He found himself in an environment in which no moral human norms worked. Lyutov draws attention to facts that another fighter would never take so to heart. In the chapter “My First Goose,” Lyutov kills a goose in order to somehow rise in the eyes of the Cossacks, but even this brings him experiences: “I saw dreams and women in my dreams, and only my heart, stained with murder, creaked and flowed.” In the short story “The Path to the Fords” Lyutov says: “I grieve for the bees. They are tormented by warring armies. There are no more bees in Volyn. We have desecrated the hives. We stained them with sulfur and blew them up with gunpowder. The smoking stench produced a stench in the sacred republics of bees. Dying, they flew slowly and buzzed barely audibly. Deprived of bread, we extracted honey with sabers. There are no more bees in Volyn.” These lines cannot be read without shame for the gross ignorance and senseless cruelty of people. But are we talking about people here? Only a person with a sensitive heart and a subtle soul could write about bees like that. How much suffering the sight of the death of people, innocent ordinary people who were subjected to torture and torture, which are narrated in almost every chapter, brings to this sensitive heart.
Cruelty in Cavalry always finds justification. It is aimed at revolution, at achieving victory, but it cannot find justification in Lyutov’s soul. He always tries to obey her, but at the same time experiences involuntary resistance: “With vague poetic brains I digested the struggle of classes...” He cannot shoot the dying Dolgushov (“The Death of Dolgushov”), he is hurt when he sees the destruction in the temple (“At St. Valentine’s "). Lyutov did not believe in God, he treated religion as part of culture, and suffered while observing the mockery of its shrines.
Some chapters are entirely written in the manner of skaz, that is, the narration is told on behalf of people who do not speak the literary language. These short stories (“Salt”, “Letter”) cannot be read without experiencing horror from what is written. The short story “The Letter” tells about the life of a father and his three sons, whom the revolution made enemies. The son writes to his mother about how their father first killed his Red Army son Fyodor, and then another son Semyon killed his father. A simple village guy, in his own way, in a language accessible to him, along with everyday requests (for a wild boar, for soap for Styopka’s horse), writes about the most terrible of murders.
Analysis of the work “Cavalry” by I.E. Babel.
Babel’s talent is a “cruel” talent: the writer is attracted to scary and bloody, sometimes even pathological material, the author does not spare the reader’s feelings: severed heads, ripped open bellies, the smells of blood, sweat and dirt create a certain specific flavor of his works, but not a morbid addiction to spicy cruel scenes guide him, and rejection of violence in any of its forms - revolutionary and anti-revolutionary.
The tragic reality of the civil war is the main theme of Babel’s collection of stories “Cavalry”. The book took a long time to write: having published it for the first time in 1926, the writer constantly emphasized that it was not yet completed and in the final version should contain up to 50 short stories. The last lifetime edition of Cavalry was published in 1936.
Babel called his work “Cavalry,” but, unlike contemporary writers Furmanov, Serafimovich and others, he did not try to capture the appearance of the heroic First Cavalry or trace its legendary path. The leaders of the First Cavalry, Voroshilov and Budyonny, appear very rarely on the pages of the work. In his book, Babel creates separate, at first glance, completely unrelated episodes, fragments of the civil war, introduces a kaleidoscope of individuals independent from each other, shows a variety of types, but in the context of the entire work, all this constitutes a single and integral picture of one of the most tragic eras in the life of our people. The fragmentation of the composition allows the author to show his heroes in different situations, ordinary and extreme, and to give different “slices” of the war: heroic and tragic.
All the short stories are united by the image of the narrator, on whose behalf most of the text is written. Lyutov plays a very important role in the work: he finds himself in the role of observer, witness and judge of the terrible events of the civil war. This hero is certainly close to the author - an intelligent, educated person who graduated from the Faculty of Law and has an excellent command of foreign languages. Lyutov finds himself in the First Cavalry not only by the will of fate, but also quite deliberately: he wants to see everything that is happening from the inside, with his own eyes, and form his own idea of epoch-making events.
Lyutov's attitude to everything that is happening is extremely contradictory. He is struck by the terrible cruelty of the cavalrymen. Squadron commander Trunov arbitrarily and unfairly deals with prisoners of war: “from twenty steps Pashka smashed the young man’s skull, and his brains fell” into Lyutov’s hands. And the same Trunov remains behind the machine gun to distract enemy planes from the squadron hiding in the forest. (“Squadron Trunov”).
Prishchepa, the hero of the story of the same name, takes revenge on the residents of the village for the murder of his parents and stolen goods: “Prishchepa walked from one neighbor to another, the bloody print of his soles trailed behind him. In those huts where the Cossack found his mother’s things or his father’s chibouk, he left stabbed old women, dogs hanging over a well, icons soiled with droppings.” But, having collected everything stolen, Prishchepa kills a cow with a pistol shot, burns his house and leaves - he “disappeared”, because he was looking not for revenge, but for the truth.
Nikita Balmashev from the story “Salt” allowed a woman and a child into the carriage with the Red Guards going to the front, protected her, but when it turned out that the speculator was carrying salt instead of the child, he threw her out of the carriage and shot her, thereby washing away “this shame from the face of the labor force.” lands and republics."
Senka Kurdyukov, the hero of the story “The Letter,” calmly “finishes” his White Guard “dad,” who, in turn, “finished” his own son Fedya.
Babel knows that cruelty is sometimes necessary, that it can be justified - both socially and historically, but both the writer himself and his hero Lyutov cannot accept this. You cannot justify a revolution based on blood, the senseless killing of people. Old Gedali (story “Gedali”) thinks aloud: “Revolution is a good thing for good people. But good people don't kill. This means that the revolution is being made by evil people.” And Lyutov knows what to answer to this.
The “chronicle of everyday atrocities” that make up the history of the revolution and civil war is reflected in the story “Crossing the Zbruch”. There is no description of the battles in the story, the narrator sees everything that happens in a special fantastic and symbolic light: fields of purple poppies are associated with seas of blood, the orange sun rolls across the sky, “like a severed head,” the “smell of yesterday’s blood and dead horses” drips into the cool of the evening, everything is “killed by silence.” An overnight stay in a poor Jewish family, a dream the hero had: the division commander puts two bullets in the brigade commander’s eyes and “both his eyes fall to the ground” - everything is phantasmogorical, surreal. And, awakened by a pregnant woman, he suddenly finds himself sleeping next to a dead old man, “his throat torn out, his face cut in half, blue blood lying on his beard like a piece of lead.” This is how Babel, an esthete and intellectual, shows the “collapse of humanism” that accompanies the process of great revolutionary transformations in Russia.
