Short stories
Red Cavalry
Конармія
Isaac Babel · 1926
Synopsis
During the summer of 1920, the narrator, Lyutov, a young Jewish intellectual with glasses, follows Budyonny's cavalry as a correspondent in its campaign against Poland, across Volhynia and Galicia. From one brief tale to the next, he crosses the Zbruch, lodges with Jews ruined by the war, tries to win acceptance from the Cossacks, who despise him for his books and his glasses, and sees at close quarters the brutality of both armies, looting and pogroms included.
Context
The stories appeared in magazines from 1923 to 1926, and thirty-four were collected in 1926 in Moscow by Gosizdat; the book went through eight editions in its author's lifetime, and he added one story in 1933. They are drawn from the diary he kept during the campaign. Budyonny, who considered his troops slandered, attacked the author for years. In France, the first translation, by Maurice Parijanine, appeared in 1928; Babel revised it with his translator during a stay in Paris.
Who it is for
Thirty-four very short stories, which can be read separately but are linked by a single narrator, whose outlook changes from the first to the last.
Prizes and reception
Regarded, with the Odessa Tales, as its author's masterpiece, and as one of the great books of twentieth-century Russian literature.
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