Horse bled

To the 115th anniversary of Isaac Babel

115 years ago, a boy, Isaac, was born in Odessa, the son of a businessman Emmanuil Bobel.
The boy had a hard life. At first, Isaac was not taken to the Odessa Commercial School (the Jewish percentage quota was not enough: 10% for the "Pale of Settlement", 5% - outside it and 3% - for both capitals). I had to study at home for a year. Then they didn’t take me to Odessa University (again because of quotas), I had to study at the Kiev Institute of Finance and Entrepreneurship. The future Babel learned 3 languages, a bunch of subjects, and in addition he mastered the Bible, the Talmud and music. But for this right had to fight and stand in line. In the Russian Empire, Jews were invariably put at the tail end of this very queue, and in the USSR glorified by Babel, too.

But the worst thing happened to the boy in the year of the Great Manifesto. In 1905, 11-year-old Babel fell under a pogrom and miraculously survived. Babel had something to avenge on the old world. And when the time comes, he will saddle the Pale Horse in the Cavalry and ride across the earth as the Horseman of the Apocalypse, and his Muse will become a candidate (if not something worse) with the revolutionary troops. Gorky, who in 1916 encouraged and released the young writer (almost convicted of pornography), advised him to go "to the people." Babel obeyed and went to "non-humans", according to one of his contemporaries.

He was not a "fellow traveler" of the revolution, his pale horse galloped ahead. His sharp and caustic gift, his brilliant deadly pen was beyond the categories of good and evil. He wanted to see close to the era, full of horror and blood, greatness and despair, the era of "the last day of Pompeii." He voluntarily goes to the Cheka, then to the detachments, real Sonderkommandos, who did not allow the starving people to buy bread, millet or salt from the peasants (the story "Salt"). In 1920, he, a Jewish intellectual, went to serve in the Cavalry, to the pogromists, bandits and marauders, to the real “wild hunt” of the King of Fear (Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky and Co.), and after all, the Cavalry soldiers killed Jews by tens and hundreds. Out of this will arise the stories of Cavalry. Deadly horror without any attempt at judgment. Naked reality, which Budyonny himself considered slanderous.

The eternal problem of a realist of terrible times: was Eisenstein admiring or horrified? With Eisenstein, the question remained open; with Babel, alas, the question can be closed. Evil fascinated him, he reveled in destruction and, of course, betrayed the Bolsheviks with his head. There was too much truth in Cavalry, and in Jewish and Odessa stories. Serving in the foreign department of the Cheka, he went down to the cellars and eagerly watched torture and executions. He had such an attitude: “A person should know everything. It's not tasty, but it's interesting." He didn't just save his own life: he participated with voluptuousness.

When collectivization began, he asked to be appointed chairman of the village council in a village near Moscow. Made a contribution. When the Great Trials began in the late 1930s, he wrote the article "Lies, betrayal and smerdyakovism" - with indecent enthusiasm, which no one forced him to. He tried to return his little daughter from France to the USSR, "so that they would not make a monkey out of her." Thank God it didn't work. He looked into the abyss, and in 1939 the abyss came for him. The very Chekists, whom he called saints and wanted to write a novel about them, brutally tortured him and shot him in the basement he already knew. Evil cannot be tamed or incited only on others. Great writer I.E. Babel died by his own hand. We have his stories. And the Cavalry is evidence and a weapon of crime!