Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T06:43:35.020Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How A Russian Maupassant Was Made in Odessa and Yasnaya Polyana: Isaak Babel' and the Tolstoy Legacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Alexander Zholkovsky
Alexander Zholkovsky*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages, University of Southern California
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The sage of Yasnaya Polyana haunted Babel'‘s imagination as a paragon of professional greatness: "What Tolstoy knows and may do–may we do that? You read Tolstoy and it seems: one more…page and you'll finally understand the secret of life…After you know what Tolstoy thinks of death, there is no reason to know what a Fedor Sologub thinks on this issue." In an early story ("Inspiration," 1917) the young narrator says to his friend, a would-be literary genius: "Well, Leo Tolstoy [Lev Nikolaevich], when you write your autobiography, remember me" (1966: 32). Living at one time near a stud farm in Molodenovo, Babel' cultivated the acquaintance of an aged local horseman.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , Fall 1994 , pp. 671 - 693
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Sergei Bondarin, “Prikosnovenie k cheloveku,” Vospominaniia o Babele, comp. and eds. A. N. Pirozhkova and N. N. Iurgeneva (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1989), 97; further references to this edition will be to Vospominaniia.

2. Makotinskii, M, “Umenie slushat',” Vospominaniia, 107 Google Scholar.

3. “Chelovek so spokoinym golosom,” ibid., 190.

4. Tat'iana Tess, “Vstrechi s Babelem,” ibid., 228.

5. G. Munblit, “Iz vospominanii,” ibid., 91-92. The memoirist (or Babel’ himself) misquotes Tolstoy, probably, by conflating two different, but similar fragments: “During dessert Yakov was sent for and orders were given about the carriage, the dogs and the saddle horses—all in great detail, each horse being mentioned by name ” ; “Foka entered, stopped at the door and in exactly the same tone with which he announced ‘Dinner is served’ said ‘The horses are ready.'” ( “Childhood,” chs. 6 and 14; in Leo, Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, trans. Rosemary Edmonds [London: Penguin], 30, 50)Google Scholar. Note Babel''s interest in Tolstoy's autobiographical text.

6. See Lionel Trilling, “The Forbidden Dialectic: Introduction to ‘The Collected Stories of Babel, Isaac,” Isaac Babel: Modern Critical Views, ed. Bloom, Harold (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 29 Google Scholar; and Renato Poggioli, “Isaak Babel in Retrospect,” ibid., 52-53.

7. Poggioli, op. cit., 55-56.

8. See Gregory Freidin, “Isaac Babel,” European Writers, vol. 11Google Scholar, The Twentieth Century. Walter Benjamin to Yuri Olesha, ed. George Stade (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), 1910, and, in more detail, his “Revolution as an Aesthetic Phenomenon: Nietzschean Motifs in the Reception of Isaac Babel (1923-1932),” Nietzsche in Russia, vol. 2, ed. Bernice Glatzer-Rosenthal (forthcoming).

9. See Lev, Slavin, “Ferment dolgovechnosti,” Vospominaniia, 7 Google Scholar, and Shklovsky, op. cit., 185.

10. Konstantin, Paustovskii, “Rasskazy o Babele,” Vospominaniia, 23 Google Scholar.

11. “Babel’ Answers Questions about His Work: An Interview of September 28, 1937,” Babel', 1966: 205-21.

12. It was written in 1903 but published only posthumously in 1911. I use the Chamberlain, Lesley translation in The Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories, ed. Richards, David (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 239–50Google Scholar, referring to it by year and page. On “After the Ball,” see Alexander, Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text: Rereadings in Russian Literary History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994 Google Scholar.

13. See “My First Goose,” “The Death of Dolgushov,” “A Letter,” “The Life and Adventures of Matthew Pavlichenko” and others.

14. In the context of “Fee” as a whole, the narrator's fictional story of his childhood should, in fact, be construed as an answer to this challenge.

15. Zholkovsky, , Text Counter Text, 64 Google Scholar.

16. Incidentally, unnoticed by critics, the story's Giovanni seems to be a thinly disguised Don Giovanni, to whom Di Grasso's shepherd plays a Masetto-cum-Commendatore— the nietzschean man-god wreaking his silent vengeance this side of the grave.

17. Stakh, T, “Kakim ia pomniu Babelia,” Vospominaniia, 156 Google Scholar.

18. See his 1910 poem “She has not yet been born.. .” and its contextualization in I. Paperno's “O prirode poeticheskogo slova: Bogoslovskie istochniki spora Mandel'shtama s simvolizmom,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 1 (1991): 29-36.

19. On this intertextual cluster, see Alexander Zholkovsky, “'Slaughterhouse’ Motifs in Mandelstam's ‘The Egyptian Stamp’ and Environs,” The Language and Verse in Russia, eds. Henrik Birnbaum and Michael Flier (Los Angeles: UCLA Slavic Studies, forthcoming).

20. To be sure, the picture is not quite so simple: Tolstoy's protagonist refrains from condemning the colonel, settling for an embarrassed conscientious objection to his serene ruthlessness; while Babel', rather than praising D'iakov, admires him with detachment.

21. On Mayakovsky's fixation on such metaphors, see Aleksandr Zholkovskii, “O genii i zlodeistve, o babe i vserossiiskom masshtabe,” in Zholkovskii, A. K. and Shcheglov, Iu. K., Mir avtora i struktura teksta (Tenafly: Hermitage, 1986), 269, 273–74Google Scholar. As for Nietzsche, a hidden quote from him seems to underlie an important compositional pattern in “Maupassant.” The final “foreboding of the truth” is foreshadowed several pages earlier by the famous line about no iron entering the heart so chillingly as a well timed period. Indeed, both the “literary placing of a period” and “entering a heart” materialize in the finale: “I read the book to the end… My heart contracted. I was touched by the foreboding of the truth” (338). Although it appears not to have been prepared in the foreshadowing, the “truth” element is, in fact, overdetermined subtextually. The maxim about “iron” is preceded by the sentence, “Then I began to speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons are on the move” (331), which may go back to Nietzsche's provocative (and nowadays highly fashionable) answer to Christ's famous question to Pilate: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms… which have been… embellished poetically and rhetorically…” ( “From: ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, '” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Viking, 1968], 46-47). The nietzschean allusion is relevant to Babel''s focus, particularly in “Maupassant” and “Fee'TMemo,” on the problematic of “lie, truth, art and power ” ; note also the “[anti-]Christian” aspect of the subtext.

22. Babel’ even borrowed its title for one of his own autobiographical stories.

23. Recall the “silence as piercing as the whine [svist] of a cannon ball” that accompanied “at night the heaving and moaning of [the narrator's] neighbors” in “Fee” (1964: 22), and the “wheezing whistle [svist]” of the asthmatic church warden in “Fee'TMemo” (1964: 27, 18).

24. “And he began to whip [pletif] Dad…” ( “A Letter,” 1960: 50); “Then I… trampled on him for an hour or maybe more” ( “The Life and Adventures… ,” 1960: 106).

25. On the Babel'-Gor'kii personal and intertextual relationship, see A. Zholkovskii, “Spravka-rodoslovnaia: K teme Babel’ i Gor'kii,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanack (forthcoming).

26. Incidentally, as far as Tolstoy's own verbal strategies are concerned, the title “After the Ball,” which replaced the draft versions, “Father and Daughter” and “Story of the Ball and through the Gauntlet,” boasts intertextual, albeit intra-tolstoyan, origins, being a variation on the title of Childhoods chap. 23: “After the Mazurka” (see Zholkovsky, , Text Counter Text, 60 Google Scholar).

27. A propos of literary overcoat-making, recall the narrator's pondering in “Fee” of how to sew/make beautiful clothes for his creations.

28. Parallels with Gogol''s “Overcoat” (cf. note 27) could be drawn along thematic lines as well: with Akaky's stammering, paper fixation, facing an establishment figure, that figure's magical humbling and even the anachronistic use of the word pokoinik/-itsa, “the deceased,” in reference to a still living but soon to die person.

29. Interestingly, the same phrase introduces the flogging scene in “After the Ball,” defamiliarized by the hero's incomprehension: ‘“What's that they're doing﹜’ I asked … ” (1981: 247).

30. Such are the figures the narrator gives in “Fee'T'Memo” for the price of the heroine's sexual services and for the ages of the hero (at various points in the plot) and heroine.

31. Remarkably, this “Foreword” ( “Predislovie k sochineniiam Giui de Mopassana ” ) has been translated into English as “Guy de Maupassant,” Tolstoi, L. N., The Novels and Other Works: Essays, Letters, Miscellanies (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), 2: 161–84Google Scholar.

32. See, for instance, Tolstoy's “Sviatochnaia noch'” ( “Christmas Eve ” ), a sort of early sketch for “After the Ball. ”

33. See Alexander Zholkovsky, “Isaac Babel, Author of Guy de Maupassant,” in the special Babel’ issue of Canadian Slavonic Papers, eds. Robert Busch and Allan Reid (forthcoming).

34. In this early story (1879), the son of a fallen woman, despised by classmates for being fatherless, finds a father for himself and a husband for his mother in the person of a good-hearted blacksmith.

35. On that novel's subtextual presence in “Maupassant,” see Zholkovsky, “Isaac Babel, Author.” References below are to the pages in the Heritage Press edition (New York, 1968).

36. Maupassant, Guy de, Conies et nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothéque de la Pleiade], 1974, 1979), 2: 1125–33Google Scholar.1 quote (and emend) the English version, “The Port,” De Maupassant Short Stories (New York: Book League of America, 1941): 280-87.

37. “Frangoise” appeared in Novoe vremia in 1891; see Tolstoi, L. N., Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1953), 12: 122–29Google Scholar. The English version is quoted from Leo, Tolstoy, The Devil and Cognate Tales (New York: Oxford University Press [Humphrey Milford], 1934): 361–70Google Scholar.

38. The translations appeared in Giui de Mopassan, Sobranie sochinenii, trans. I. Babel', 3 vols. (Moscow: Zemlia i fabrika, 1926-1927).

39. Tolstoi, L. N., Sobranie, 12: 307Google Scholar.

40. The “sister” motif is part of an entire literary topos of “prostitute redemption” in Russian literature.

41. The expression “first fee” connotes, in this context, “first sexual experience ” ; cf. the themes and titles of “First Love” and “My First Goose.” The archaic “initiation” paradigm, discernible underneath the story's plot, features Baba Iaga with her izba, huge breasts, rotting body, and the function of interrogating and testing the hero (cf. the prostitute Vera, her room and behavior) and other parallels; see Propp, V. la., Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki (Leningrad: Izd-vo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1946)Google Scholar.

42. Even “The Kiss,” admittedly “the only story about Liutov's successful seduction, ends in the narrator cruelly betraying the woman that he has won by displays of sentimental humanity” (Freidin, “Isaac Babel,” 1990).

43. The narrator's “spying out, exultingly, the mysterious curve (or ‘twist’ [tainstvennuiu krivuiu]) of Lenin's straight line” ( “My First Goose,” 1966: 76) epitomizes his voyeuristic identification with an ambiguous authority figure. A mysterious fusion of “curvilinearity” with “straightforwardness” lies at the core of Babel''s poetics.

44. In folktale wedding-night tests, these “teeth” are usually broken by the hero's helper, who tames the obstinate bride by whipping her with birch rods (Propp, Istoricheskie, 308).

45. For instance, it appears in Kuprin's The Pit, when a group of respectable young men, after parting with their virginal but sexually arousing girlfriends, decide to go to a brothel. “[W]ithin man, in the infinite depth of his soul, [there] secretly awakene[d\, because of the care-free contact with earth, grasses, water, and sun, the beast—ancient, splendid, free, but disfigured and intimidated of men” ( Alexandre, Kuprin, Yama: The Pit [Westport: Hyperion Press, 1977], 72 Google Scholar; emphasis added). Small wonder that Tolstoy, “having read the first chapter of the novella, said ‘Very bad, vulgar, unnecessarily dirty'” ( Kuprin, A. I., Sobranie sochinenii [Moscow: Pravda, 1964], 6: 456Google Scholar).

46. James, Falen, Isaac Babel': Russian Master of the Short Story (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), 171nGoogle Scholar.

47. The title protagonist of Maupassant's early tale “Doctor Heracles Gloss” (1875) goes insane, interacts only with animals, and walks on all fours; this subtext to “Maupassant” is discussed in Zholkovsky, “Isaac Babel, Author. ”

48. Cf. the syphilitic title hero of “Sandy [Sashka] the Christ. ”

49. According to the testimony of the artist M. A. Gluskin, Babel''s junior schoolmate at the Odessa School of Commerce, the fourteen-year-old Babel’ “assigned” him his favorite Resurrection and then tested his comprehension of it (communicated by Gluskin's pupil, E. A. Kompaneyets, to whom he spoke in the early 1960s).

50. Nilsson, N. A., “Isaac Babel''s Story ‘Guy de Maupassant, '” Studies in 20th Century Russian Prose, ed. N. A. Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wicksell International, 1982), 218 Google Scholar.

51. The novel is cited with references to book and chapter, as well as to page in Leo, Tolstoy, Resurrection (London: Oxford University Press [Humphrey Milford], 1928 Google Scholar [Tolstoy Centenary Edition, vol. 19]).

52. See Edward, Wasiolek, Tolstoy's Major Fiction (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1978), 191–92Google Scholar.

53. Note a parallel with what has been said above on the verb delat'.

54. In “Notes from the Underground,” a similar money-giving episode is also dictated by symbolic rather than practical reasons, except that where Tolstoy blames commeil-faut conventionality, Dostoevsky targets bookishness and pride. On the interplay of “Fee'TMemo” with “Notes,” see Zholkovsky, “A Memo.”

55. Note this word in Wasiolek's interpretation of Resurrection.

56. Also mentioned is the eternal (since Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done) “student, who had promised to buy her out” (II, 13; 252).

57. In this, Babel’ echoes Maupassant, who adored prostitutes, and Bel-Ami's protagonist Duroy, who “did not despise them with the innate contempt of a well-born [family] man” (I, 1; 1968: 4).

58. “Tea-drinking” is an integral component of the “redemption of a prostitute” topos in Russian literature. It underscores the woman's transition from debauched venality (signified by addiction to alcohol) to regained dignity. Tolstoy gives this motif an original twist: towards the end oi Resurrection Maslova and Nekhliudov have tea not one-on-one, but in the company of a large group of exiled revolutionaries. Babel “s variation in some sense includes a similar element of ” collectivism.” For more detail on “tea-drinking,” see Alexander Zholkovsky, “On Tarts and Teas in an Isaac Babel’ Story and Its Intertexts,” Thematics Reconsidered: Essays in Honor of Horst S. Daemmrich, ed. Frank Trommler (Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming).