Red Cavalry

March 2, 2015
The stories in this classic collection are set in the summer of 1920, when Babel was 25 and sent to cover the Polish-Soviet War for the Red Cavalryman newspaper. Sympathetic to the revolution yet having a satiric eye, he describes the newspaperâs writers who âroam about in the barren dust of the rear and spread the riot and fire of their leaflets.â Babel was a Jew assigned to a Cossack regiment; his stand-in first-person narrator overcomes the soldiersâ animosity when, in the story âMy First Goose,â he breaks a fowlâs neck and orders it to be roasted up. In âThe Story of a Horseâ and âThe Story of a Horse, Continued,â a dispute between a squadron commander and a division commander over a horse produces an exchange of letters full of heartfelt (though jargony) prose and brutal honestyâthe commanders have more of an emotional connection to the horses than to other people. Casual violence (â grabbed her hair, bent back her head and smashed her face with his fistâ) alternates with beauty, sometimes in the same sentence (âWe fled without staining our swords crimson with the wretched blood of traitorsâ). The stories, which are often not much more than anecdotes, mostly focus on characters like Apolek, an itinerant painter; squadron commander Trunov; and a rabbi in Zhitomir, as well as the occasional flashes of battle. This translation is of the first 1926 edition, before censorship and the authorâs own revisions altered the text.