beer good
Well-Known Member
Born in Odessa in 1894. Executed in one of Stalin's prison camps in 1940. (Declared innocent in 1954, so that's OK.) Russian. Jewish. OG Bolshevik, though clearly not enough. Friend of Maxim Gorky. One of, and according to some people who've read more than me the greatest of, a group of young writers from Odessa (Olesha, Kataev, Inber, Ilf & Petrov).
I stumbled across him only recently thanks to Elif Batuman's Possessed, thought he sounded interesting and started seeing how much I could dig up. There's not a lot to dig up, for starters; his production was infamously sparse in his lifetime, and the NKVD burned most of what they found when they arrested him. What remains are a few short story collections (Odessa Tales, Red Cavalry), a couple of plays, a number of essays and journalistic pieces, a diary from the 1920 Soviet-Polish war. That's about it.
The first thing I found was a collection of his articles, most of them written between 1917 and 1920. Hard times: war, revolution, revolution, civil war. And he a member of the Bolsheviks, writing for official newspapers. Should be propaganda, shouldn't it? It is, once or twice. But most of all, it's incredibly sharp-eyed, dirty realism, never blinded by a supposedly bright future, but focusing on what had to be done - and what he wasn't entirely sure could, or even would, be done. He was a russian Jew; whatever his ideals, his faith in the benevolence of authority and the power to change things with shiny slogans was never all that strong. So while the others write about ideology, he walks the streets, knocks on doors, sketches the details.
I've got a hold of Red Cavalry now, interwoven short stories inspired by his time as an embedded journalist (yes, they had them back then) with Budyonny's cavalry during the 1920 war. Travelling through a Ukraine in complete disarray, with at least three different armies fighting at least each other, with civilians caught in the crossfire and, strangely enough, not always impressed with the promises of liberation and equality. He's a chubby, bespectacled Jew; the soldiers fighting for the Internationale and a classless society refuse to take him seriously until he proves himself a man by killing a goose. He writes letters for traumatized soldiers who've turned on their own parents. He comes across other Jews, tries to figure out which side he can be on here, how he can tell people whose lives have gone from shit to broken shit that it's an improvement. Almost Borchert-like at times.
A bullet in the back of the head and papers burning in a furnace somewhere.
But hey, books. If you can find them.
Red Cavalry:
Ravaged countrysides, ravaged people turning on each other. Cosacks weeping over dead horses while corpses pile up. Civilians trying to survive. Hayrides armed with machine guns. Our hero finds himself pissing on a dead Polish soldier, covered in ripped up propaganda leaflets. Synagogues burning, 20 years before Hitler made it official. The word "Czernobyl" pops up once or twice for extra emphasis. Even harsher in hindsight.
I stumbled across him only recently thanks to Elif Batuman's Possessed, thought he sounded interesting and started seeing how much I could dig up. There's not a lot to dig up, for starters; his production was infamously sparse in his lifetime, and the NKVD burned most of what they found when they arrested him. What remains are a few short story collections (Odessa Tales, Red Cavalry), a couple of plays, a number of essays and journalistic pieces, a diary from the 1920 Soviet-Polish war. That's about it.
The first thing I found was a collection of his articles, most of them written between 1917 and 1920. Hard times: war, revolution, revolution, civil war. And he a member of the Bolsheviks, writing for official newspapers. Should be propaganda, shouldn't it? It is, once or twice. But most of all, it's incredibly sharp-eyed, dirty realism, never blinded by a supposedly bright future, but focusing on what had to be done - and what he wasn't entirely sure could, or even would, be done. He was a russian Jew; whatever his ideals, his faith in the benevolence of authority and the power to change things with shiny slogans was never all that strong. So while the others write about ideology, he walks the streets, knocks on doors, sketches the details.
He visits pregnant war widows, blind veterans, starving children. Slaughterhouses that used to be empty and now work 24 hours a day - butchering horses for food. Travels through the southern states like a 1920s Kapuscinski, the frontiers, the cities where electricity is something brand new. And he describes it all in often heartrending detail, with a dark sense of humour and a wish to believe that this will all get better. Any day now, any day now. (Dylan's a russian Jew too.) He describes armistice day 1917 in Petrograd; a lone firework, mist hanging from silent mouths, a paltry celebration of a victory that's yet to come. He describes the reestablishment of the Moscow Patriarch, all pomp and patriotism and prayers, and in passing mentions: "Around the corner lay a dead horse, all four legs pointing at the sky."
I've got a hold of Red Cavalry now, interwoven short stories inspired by his time as an embedded journalist (yes, they had them back then) with Budyonny's cavalry during the 1920 war. Travelling through a Ukraine in complete disarray, with at least three different armies fighting at least each other, with civilians caught in the crossfire and, strangely enough, not always impressed with the promises of liberation and equality. He's a chubby, bespectacled Jew; the soldiers fighting for the Internationale and a classless society refuse to take him seriously until he proves himself a man by killing a goose. He writes letters for traumatized soldiers who've turned on their own parents. He comes across other Jews, tries to figure out which side he can be on here, how he can tell people whose lives have gone from shit to broken shit that it's an improvement. Almost Borchert-like at times.
It's literature from and for a certain time, absolutely. But the eye he has for the little things, for the lives of individuals in the midst of a supposedly great paradigm shift, the way every word wants to believe in a better world, wants to find some way to reconcile the ideal and the real...
A bullet in the back of the head and papers burning in a furnace somewhere.
But hey, books. If you can find them.
Red Cavalry:
Ravaged countrysides, ravaged people turning on each other. Cosacks weeping over dead horses while corpses pile up. Civilians trying to survive. Hayrides armed with machine guns. Our hero finds himself pissing on a dead Polish soldier, covered in ripped up propaganda leaflets. Synagogues burning, 20 years before Hitler made it official. The word "Czernobyl" pops up once or twice for extra emphasis. Even harsher in hindsight.