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Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel

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Overview

Hailed as the first great Soviet writer, Isaac Babel was at once a product and a victim of violent revolution. In tales of Cossack marauders and flashy Odessa gangsters, he perfectly captured the raw, edgy mood of the first years of the Russian Revolution. Masked, reckless, impassioned, charismatic, Babel himself was as fascinating as the characters he created. At last, in renowned author Jerome Charyn, Babel has a portraitist worthy of his quicksilver genius.

Though it traces the arc of Babel's charmed life and mysterious death, Savage Shorthand bursts the confines of straight biography to become a meditation on the pleasures, torments, and meanings of Babel's art. Even in childhood, Babel seemed destined to leave a mark. But it was only when his mentor, Maxim Gorky, ordered him to go out into the world of revolutionary Russia that Babel found his true voice and subject. His tales of the bandit king Benya Krik and the brutal raids of the Red Cavalry electrified Moscow. Overnight, Babel was a celebrity, with throngs of admirers and a train of lovers.

But with the rise of Stalin, Babel became a living ghost. Charyn brilliantly evokes the paranoid shadowland of the first wave of Stalin's terror, when agents of the Cheka snuffed out artists like candle flames. Charyn's chilling account of the circumstances of Babel's death-hidden and lied about for decades by Stalin's agents-finally sets the record straight.

For Jerome Charyn, Babel is the writer who epitomizes the vibrancy, violence, and tragedy of literature in the twentieth century. In Savage Shorthand, Charyn has turned his own lifelong obsession with Babel into a dazzling and original literary work.

Editorial Reviews

This portrait of Babel by the prolific Charyn (The Green Lantern, etc.) is confounding for reasons he himself elaborates on: it's difficult to know much for certain about the life of the great Russian Jewish short-story writer (1894-1940), whom Charyn emphasizes was a self-mythologizer. Charyn begins the book by seeming to appropriate Babel's qualities for himself by describing how an editor said Charyn's first book called Babel's writings to mind. Ellipses at the end of paragraphs to indicate uncertainty in the narrative underscore the lack of hard facts; using the word "some" as a modifier, as in "Mandelstam would die in some transit camp," has the effect of lessening the horror being described. Babel's death at Stalin's hand remains legendary for the reported sighting of the writer that followed his murder, but Charyn gets so caught up in such myths that he forgets to give us the man. "Even as he bares himself, it's hard to figure Babel out," Charyn notes. So perhaps one would do best to read Babel himself; his collected works have been reissued by Norton.
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than thirty books, including Darlin' Bill, which received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His latest novel The Green Lantern, is a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner award. He is a frequent contributor to Le Monde and the City section of The New York Times. He lives in New York and Paris, where he is Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

839.33 KB

Number of Pages

224

eBook ISBN

9780307431790

Excerpt from: Savage Shorthand by Jerome Charyn

MINGLED BIOGRAPHIES AND MANGLED LIVES: A FIRST GLANCE

1.

In 1955, lionel trilling published a dazzling introduction to the collected stories of Isaac Babel, a writer who'd become a ghost in his own country, his books removed from libraries, his name scratched out of encyclopedias, as if he'd never existed. Babel had written the first masterpiece of the Russian Revolution, Red Cavalry, a cycle of stories about Cossack horse soldiers fighting against the Poles in a brutal and bloody campaign; these stories had the "architecture" and complexity of a novel, a Cubist novel built on a wild geometry where the missing pieces were an essential part of the puzzle. Babel was idolized and attacked for the same reason: rather than celebrate the Revolution, he galloped across it with a cavalryman's panache. He was the one Soviet writer who was read abroad. That made him an infidel in the Party's eyes. And he had to walk a curious tightrope for the rest of his life--revere the Revolution and write a prickly, personal prose that was like a time bomb to the Revolution's dull, pragmatic songs.

Babel fell into silence, wandered the Soviet Union; in the few photographs we have of him, he looks like a man wearing the mask of a grocery clerk. The rebellious writer had to be hidden at all cost. And so Babel became the jovial pal of the proletariat, who'd rather talk with jockeys and whores than with a fellow writer. Whereas he'd talked about literature day and night with his first wife, Zhenya, while he was with her in Batum, would read his stories to her until they were burnt into her heart and she could recite them twenty years later, he wouldn't even show his manuscripts to his second wife, Antonina. He was practicing to become a man of the people who hung out at a stud farm, but he'd used up his own interior space. He was one of the voiceless men--"Ten steps away no one hears our speeches"--in Osip Mandelstam's poem about Stalin, a poem that got Mandelstam arrested, exiled, and killed. Babel never attacked the Kremlin's "mountaineer" with "cockroach whiskers." Stalin was one of his readers, but that couldn't save him.

He was given a dacha in the writers' colony of Peredelkino, and he disappeared from that dacha in May 1939. The secret police had moved him and his manuscripts to their own "dacha" in the middle of Moscow, otherwise known as the Lubyanka. And when Lionel Trilling wrote about him sixteen years later, his death had become only one more enigma in a land of enigmas. He'd been declared an enemy of the people, a spy for Austria, England, and France, and was finished off in 1940, shot twice in the head--the bullet holes were stuffed with rags--and cremated, his ashes emptied into a communal pit. Neither Stalin nor his Cheka bothered to tell anyone, and the myth of Babel languishing in some Siberian camp lingered for years. There were constant sightings of Babel, campmates who swore he was still alive. The Cheka itself manufactured these tales. It was imitating the artistry of Isaac Babel. . . .

By 1954, a year before Trilling's introduction, Babel was "resurrected" in the Soviet Union, pronounced a person again, though the Cheka persisted in giving him a phony death date, March 17, 1941, and wouldn't reveal how or where he had died. It was the United States that had to reinvent Babel in the person of Lionel Trilling, a godlike figure on Columbia's campus. Trilling abhorred violence. And here he was writing about Isaac Babel, the poet of violence, who touched upon a primitive, amoral madness and seemed deeply ambivalent about it.