Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)
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.” 1In an early story (“Inspiration,” 1917) the young narrator says to his friend, a would-be literary genius: “Well, Leo Tolstoy
This article draws on my research for a forthcoming book written jointly with Mikhail Yampolsky. The book focuses on three of Babel”s metaliterary stories–portraits of a budding writer as a young man undergoing professional and sexual initiation: “Giui de Mopassan” (“Guy de Maupassant,” henceforth “Maupassant”; 1920-1922, publ. 1932), “Moi pervyi gonorar” (“My First Fee,” henceforth “Fee”; 1922-1928, publ. 1963), and “Spravka” (“Answer to Inquiry,” better rendered–and hereafter referred to–as “Memo”; publ. 1937 [in English], 1966). The latter two texts are competing versions of one and the same plot: in response to a professional inquiry, the mature writer narrator recounts his experience as a twenty-year-old with a prostitute, whose love and free services, and thereby his first royalties, he earns by improvising on the spot a harrowing tale of his life as a boy prostitute to older men–and hence a “sister” to his “first reader.” Critics and publishers have often treated “Fee” as the definitive version; for arguments to the contrary, see Alexander Zholkovsky, “A Memo from the Underground,” Elementa1, no. 3 (1994): 305-20. In “Maupassant” the young narrator impresses with his verbal prowess a rich woman who has hired him to edit her translations from Maupassant and makes love to her in what amounts to translating Maupassant’s fictions into real life; back in his attic, he reads Maupassant’s biography and, contemplating the agony of the syphilitic writer on all fours, glimpses life’s nonfictional “truth.” Not only do all three texts share the same art-into-life archeplot, but “Maupassant” also contains a passing reference to the surface plot of “Fee”/”Memo”: “I couldn’t prevent myself from telling her all about my childhood. To my amazement, the story turned out to be very sordid. From under her moleskin cowl her gleaming, frightened eyes stared at me. The rusty fringe of her eyelashes quivered with pity” (333).
Babel”s texts are quoted from the following English translations (referred to by publication date and page): Collected Stories, ed. and trans. rev. Walter Morrison (New York: Meridian [Penguin], 1960); The Lonely Years, 1925-1939: Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence, trans. Andrew MacAndrew and Max Hayward, ed. Nathalie Babel (New York: Farrar and Straus, 1964); You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915-1937, trans. Max Hayward, ed. Nathalle Babel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966). The translations have been emended, where necessary, according to the two-volume Sochineniia, comp. and ed. A.N. Pirozhkova (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990). The unexpurgated text of “Giui de Mopassan” appeared in the last lifetime edition: Rasskazy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1936, 298-306). “Spravka” was published in Izbrannoe (Kemerovo: Kemerovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1966, 320-23) and is absent from the 1990 edition, where only “Moi pervyi gonorar” is included. For a bibliography and publication history of Babel”s texts, see Efraim Sicher, Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaak Babel’ (Columbus: Slavica, 1986), 137- 69.
[672] [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. “And suddenly it turned out that uncle Pantelei had been a coachman in Khamovniki, near the home of Leo Tolstoy, and more than once had conversed with the Count… had traveled with his master to Paris, and at this master’s home gathered Turgenev, Hugo, Flaubert and Zola.” 2
In letters, Babel’ often expressed a half-joking wish for a Yasnaya Polyana of his own. As for the real Yasnaya Polyana, Babel’ did go there, and Shklovsky remembered him dressed in a blue tolstovka 3 Babel’ admired Tolstoy’s capacity for work, testified to by “the thick oak crossbeam of his desk [in Yasnaya Polyana], reduced to splinters… So did Tolstoy kick [it] with his small, steely legs in search of the necessary word.”4In this surrealistic portrait of Tolstoy as a verbal magus-dwarf with steel legs one discerns Babel”s own “infantilism” and his emphasis on the “steel-like” nature of genuine literature. On another occasion Babel’ said:
Lev Nikolaevich weighed only three and a half poods. But… these were three and a half poods of pure literature [… T]he world wrote through him… as if the existence of a great many… people, animals, plants, clouds, mountains, constellations poured through the writer onto the page… Tolstoy was the ideal transmitter precisely because he was wholly made of pure literature… When Tolstoy writes, “during dessert it was announced that the horses were ready,” he doesn’t worry about the structure of the sentence, or, more precisely, he takes care that its structure go unnoticed by the reader.5
Critics have remarked upon affinities between the two, in particular between Red Cavalry, on one hand, and The Cossacks and Hadji-Murad, on the other,6 the latter being especially relevant to Babel”s cruel ecriture. Tolstoy’s influence has been suspected even in the famous line in “Maupassant” about the well timed period piercing the human heart more chillingly than iron, which can, indeed, be seen as an extreme case of “infection with art,” as well as in the preceding remark about turning the lever “once, not twice”– in the spirit of the “all too neglected [673] page [of “What Is Art”] where Tolstoy says, that all art is merely a matter of a ‘wee-bit’ less or a ‘wee-bit’ more ….”7
Tolstoy also played an unexpected role in the reception of Babel’. In the harsh polemics over Red Cavalry, Tolstoy was used by critics as an aesopian pseudonym for Nietzsche. Babel”s kinship with the philosopher was obvious to many, but concealed in order to spare his already dubious reputation. References to Tolstoy’s subversion of culture made it possible to discuss, in a positive key, Babel”s (and others’) nietzscheanism without naming it outright.8
Yet, Babel”s attitude toward Tolstoy was far from genuflectional. Even where he clearly seeks identification with the classic, for instance, in his emphasis on Tolstoy’s light weight and small legs (Babel’ himself was “not tall,” even “stunted [nizkorosl’] 9), there is a note of belittlement. A more open defiance marks Babel”s assertion “that Herzen wrote better than Leo Tolstoy. 10 Especially informative in this connection is Babel”s 1937 interview.11Having oft reiterated his opinion of Tolstoy as “the most marvelous writer who ever lived,” through whom “the world writes,” bypassing any “leger-de-main [… of] technical skill” (213-14), Babel’ nevertheless openly admitted the ambivalence of his feelings:
[W]hen I reread Hadji-Murad… I was shaken quite beyond description… I don’t think I have the powers, the equipment, or the urge to record the typical as voluminously [takim potokom] as Tolstoy did. I like to read him, but I have no interest in trying to write in his manner… And so, although I’m a devotee of Tolstoy, I have to work in a way opposite to his (213, 216).
Babel’ then proceeded to outline carefully the field upon which he intended to throw down a challenge to Tolstoy.
In one of Goethe’s letters to Eckermann, I came across a definition of the… short story–the form [zhanr] in which I feel more at home than in any other [… I]t is a story about an unusual occurrence… Tolstoy had it in him to describe what happened to him minute by minute, he remembered it all, whereas I, evidently, only have it in me to describe the most interesting five minutes I’ve experienced in twenty- four hours. Hence the short-story form… And if I wanted to make my life a misery by wondering who writes better, Tolstoy or I… I would probably loathe and detest him (215-16). [674]
Focusing further on the genre of the short story, Babel’ seemed to repudiate his previous–“Tolstoyan”–indifference to “technical skill.”
It would be good to talk a little about the technique of short- story writing, because the form is not very popular with us. It must be said that it has never really caught on in this country–the French have always been ahead of us there. Actually, our only real short- story writer is Chekhov. Most of Gorky’s stories are condensed [sokrashchennye] novels. Tolstoy’s short stories are also condensed novels–except for “After the Ball,” which is a real short story (217).
The choice of “After the Ball,” which appeared during Babel”s formative years,12 is telling in many ways. its very tight narrative design is pressed in the service of a quite “Babelian” thematic cluster. “After the Ball” tells the story of the failed sexual and military initiation of a “timid” hero, of his oedipal conflict with a father figure and of phys- ical cruelty–a Calvary of sorts, featuring a tortured body. Babel”s oeuvre contains numerous variations on these themes,13 among them one with a suspiciously similar title: “After the Battle” (Posle boia). What is more, the bipartite formula of Tolstoy’s story–“first, happy communion with a woman, then horror at the sight of a suffering male body”– underlies the composition of “Maupassant.”
Yet another detail that unexpectedly ties “After the Ball” to Babel”s apprenticeship under and rebellion against Tolstoy is the motif of “clothing.” In “Maupassant” we read: “Half-soused, I began to berate Tolstoy. ‘… His religion is–fear… Scared by the cold, by old age, by death, your Count made himself a warm shirt out of faith…’” (1960: 332). In “Fee” the hero, in dreaming of emulating Tolstoy, also links “fear” and “clothing”: “I thought it was a waste of time not to write as well as Leo Tolstoy did.14 My stories were intended to survive oblivion. Fearless thoughts and consuming passions are worth the effort spent on them only when they are dressed in beautiful clothes [odezhdy]. How can one make these clothes?” (1964: 22). The same clothing metaphor reappears in Babel”s 1937 interview:
As I read Hadji-Murad again, I thought: this is the man one should learn from. Here the electric charge went from the earth, through the hands, straight to the paper, with no insulation [sredosteniie], quite mercilessly stripping off any and all outer shrouds [pokrovy] with a sense of truth, a truth, furthermore, which was clothed in garments <e,>[odezhdy] both transparent and beautiful (1966: 213). [675]
Once formulated in dress-code terms, Babel”s notion of Tolstoy’s artlessness exhibits a characteristic paradox: there occurs simultaneously a “tearing off of shrouds” (a locus communis of Tolstoy criticism) and a “clothing of truth in beautiful garments”; a compromise is found in the transparency of the latter. This paradox cannot be dismissed as a product of verbal carelessness or pure rhetoric. It is rooted in the very essence of all radical subversion of norms, which eventually leads to the replacement of previously accepted conventions with new–for instance, tolstoyan–ones.
In “After the Ball,” this contradiction surfaces in the interplay of the programmatically disembodied society belle–not only dressed up for the ball, but also clothed, by the hero, in metaphorical “bronze garments”–with the flogged soldier’s bloodied flesh. This literal embodiment of “naked truth” is, of course, “only physically bare, while semiotically it is clothed in cultural garb–that of the Christian myth.” 15This is echoed by the story’s style–its masterfully constructed effect of “artlessness.”
Babel’ went further than Tolstoy in each of these opposite directions. His own poetics combines factual reporting, harsh to the point of shocking cynicism, with the whimsical ornamentality of its linguistic and narrative dressing; the baring of man’s corporeality is accompanied by verbal embellishment. In “Fee”/”Memo” the interplay of these extremes is especially pronounced. The “documentary” account of the hero’s first literary earnings turns upon a daringly implausible and thickly stylized literary tale of an unhappy childhood, which wins the full confidence of his listener–a prostitute, i.e., someone steeped, it would seem, in life’s most genuine “reality.” She listens naked and it is in bodily terms that the trajectory of her reactions is traced: from prosaic indifference to emotional and erotic arousal, elicited by the power of artistic invention.
A large woman with drooping shoulders and a crumpled stomach stood before me. Her flabby nipples pointed blindly sideways… My head shook against her breasts which stood up freely above me. The taut nipples thrust against my cheeks. They were moist and wide-eyed like baby calves. Vera looked down at me from above (“Fee”; 1964: 25, 28).
The relations between the narrator and his “first reader” sound almost like a self-parody of Babel”s own authorial strategies, as laid out in his interview: “I feel that a short story can be read properly only by a very intelligent woman… Just as I choose my reader, I also think how I can best get around [obmanut’] this clever reader… knock him unconscious” (1966: 220). That is precisely the effect achieved by the narrator of “Fee”/”Memo,” who gets Vera to whisper: “The things they do…” [676]
“After the Ball” anticipates Babel”s favorite motifs in yet another respect related to the paradox of “nakedness/clothing.” Tolstoy’s story is not simply short but also essentially spare of words. The unfolding of its plot is built upon the sequence of two “pantomimes”: the hero’s and father- colonel’s dances with Varenka at the ball, and the colonel’s danse macabre with the soldier running the gauntlet on the parade grounds. The characters’ speeches are sparse, serving to clarify rather than drive the events. The programmatic preference for “actions” (as embodiments of genuine and unconditional reality) over “words” (as bearers of cultural conventions) was an invariant in Tolstoy. A similar opposition, albeit with a twist, was also characteristic of Babel”s poetics.
The speechless pose down on all fours assumed by the great French wordsmith at the end of “Maupassant” is but one in a series of babelian variations on the theme of “word, language” vs. “animal corporeality.” This opposition is connected with that between the “bookish humaneness” of Jewish runts and the “cruel strength” of the Cossacks, bandits and pogromists; both are often treated with ambiguity. In his quest for provocative mediations, Babel’ lingered with especial interest upon the hybrid states of “nonverbal expressiveness”: mime, ballet, gymnastics. Recall
- the flying leap of the shepherd played by Di Grasso, who “plunged down on Giovanni’s shoulders and having bitten through the latter’s throat, began, growling and squinting, to suck blood from the wound” (“Di Grasso”; 1974: 379);
- Kikin’s handstand after a naively crude discussion of a gang rape (“With Old Man Makhno”);
- the resumed speechlessness of the autobiographical narrator at the close of “Awakening”;
- the silent, clenched-teeth lovemaking of the narrator’s neighbors in “Fee”; and, finally,
- the sans paroles act with the whip by which D’iakov, “who had formerly been an athlete in a circus and was now a red- faced, gray- mustached remount officer… a vigorous Romeo in the prime of his life,” succeeds in making the moribund nag get up (“The Remount Officer”; 1960: 53-54).
Babel”s position is pointedly ambiguous. He did not so much offer his ballet- like hybrids as ideal solutions as he savored the energizingly paradoxical game of value oppositions. Thus, the Makhnovite youth who walks on his hands combines the cruel cynicism of the Red Cossacks with the voyeurism of Babel”s autobiographical hero (e.g. in “Through the Fanlight”). In the end of “Awakening” the hero’s memory lapse on the names of trees and birds, which he seemed to have learned from his mentor, Smolich, better than the bodily art of swimming, throws him back in his attempts at literary composition. No less dubious are the moral underpinnings of the brilliant leap of Di Grasso the actor, whose athletic “supermanism” matches the supernatural role [677] of the noble vampire he plays.16 Remarkably, Babel’ saw his own cre- ative process in ballet terms: “I walk around and spit. And there–with a careless gesture, he pointed to his high forehead–there at that time something is dancing itself into existence [samo vytantsovyvaetsia]. And then, in one breath, I recreate this ‘dance’ on paper.17
Literature’s treatment of the theme of “ineffable, unutterable truth and, hence, silentium” is always ambiguous, indeed, a contradiction in terms, for prose and poetry are by definition busy “uttering.” This antinomy preoccupied the romantics, Tiutchev and the symbolists. In his poetic contribution to this ongoing argument, Babel”s contemporary, Mandeltshtam, enjoined the word to revert to music (and Aphrodite, to foam) and admired a paradisiacal preverbal state of things.18 The acmeist aestheticism of Mandel’shtam’s gesture (and of his later defiant loyalty to “the blessed, meaningless word”) is, however, essentially different from the symbolist views on the “magic of words” and their “life- creation” practices (zhiznetvorchestvo), which found continuation in the futurist and avant-gardist “life-making” (delanie zhizni)and socialist-realist “engineering of souls.”
Babel”s poetics is cognate to both Mandel’shtam’s and the avant-garde’s. Along with the self-sacrificial “pre-verbality” of the hero of “Awakening” and “post-verbality” of “Maupassant” ‘s title hero, Babel’ was fascinated by the aggressive “trans-verbality” of the remount officer. D’iakov’s ars whippandi combines the Bronze Horseman’s forcing Russia to rear up with the torture of the mare in Raskolnikov’s dream and Mayakovsky’s seducing a fallen horse into getting up in “Kindness to Horses.”19Art, sex and violence are woven into a hypnotic pantomime of the artist’s total power over life, and the aesthetic brilliance and practical success of this side-show eclipse all questions of morality.
In this Babel”s nietzschean aestheticism differs sharply from Tolstoy’s moralism. “The Remount Officer” reads as an unthinkably cynical variation on Babel”s favorite Tolstoy story. D’iakov is, in essence, none other than the colonel from “After the Ball” (who was also a handsome, gray- haired man) but, instead of shocking the sensitive narrator, he seems to evoke in him aesthetic, if not ethical, admiration.20[678]
The whip as a model means of silent and irrefutable communication is of a kind with other such babelian images as the well timed period that penetrates the human heart better than any bullet or bayonet (“Maupassant”). These, in their turn, are akin to the weaponry metaphors for poetry beloved by Mayakovsky, and boast nietzschean origins.21However, the whip (not a product of modern technology, and thus hardly a device from the futurists’ arsenal, but rather from Nietzsche’s own nineteenth century quiver) has a typically babelian cast–and not just because of its affinity with horsemanship.
Prominent among Babel”s few favorite works of Russian literature was Turgenev’s “First Love.” 22
At that time I was reading Turgenev’s “First Love.” I liked everything about it…, but… I was particularly thrilled by the scene in which Vladimir’s father strikes Zinaida on the cheek with his riding crop. I could hear the swish [svist] of the whip and feel the momentary keen and painful sting of its supple thong [ego gibkoe kozhanoe telo]. This upset me in some unaccountable way… Everything seemed weird to me at that moment, and I wanted to run away from it all but also to stay there forever. The darkening room, Grandmother’s yellow eyes, her tiny figure… silent in the corner… and the crack of the whip, its piercing swish [svist]–only now do I understand… how much it affected me (“You Must Know Everything”; 1966: 8-9).
The whip is located here at the nerve center of a characteristic pantomime that features reading, violence and silence, or rather a speechlessness-that is audible, swishing and heavily fraught with meaning.23 [679] Underlying this pantomime is the same oedipal theme as in “After the Ball”: there, too, the hero yields his beloved to a father (who first dances with her and later directs the flogging of the soldier who symbolically stands in for her) to the tune of Babel”s beloved whistling. “[T]he soldier standing opposite me took a resolute step forward and, swishing his stick through the air [so svistom], brought it down hard across the Tatar’s back… They continued to beat the writhing, stumbling man, and… the pipe went on whistling…” (1981: 248-49).
The “father-and-son combat” is also a recurrent theme in Babel’. But, where Tolstoy’s and Turgenev’s “Oedipi” suffer passively, Babel”s are more aggressive. They
- secretly, under a skaz disguise, relish the retaliatory torture visited upon the “fathers”;24or
- more openly, although still detachedly, admire the masters of the whip (e.g. D’iakov); or even
- admit envying them (“The Death of Dolgushov”) and aspire, in accordance with the famous nietzschean maxim, to wield the whip themselves, a feat in which they occasionally succeed (e.g. in “My First Goose,” with “someone else’s sword” instead of the whip; 1960: 75).
In “Maupassant” the motif of “body writing”–writing on the body of a father, son, woman–is present, but only figuratively: the weapon taken up by the hero in his battle for the mother figure (Raisa) is an “iron period” symbolizing his literary power. The story’s bottom line on “life-creating supermanism,” too, is rather skeptical: the closing pantomime is painfully far from triumphal. And yet, one cannot help being struck by the textual kinship of the well timed period chillingly entering the human heart and the swishing of the whip whose supple leather body instantaneously bites into that of the young reader of Turgenev. Metaphorical “body writing” also crowns the narrative structure of “Fee”/”Memo”: “I must break off my story at this point, Comrades, to ask if you have ever seen how thick and fast and happily [schastlivo] the shavings fly from the log a village carpenter is planing when he builds a house for a fellow carpenter [sobrata-plotnika]?” (1966: 19). Among the many important components of this famous digression is the direct physical sense of likening the sexual act to the planing of a log. In accordance with the “Fee”/”Memo” ‘s focus on “sex- role reversal,” the phallic log is shown not so much penetrating the female body as being hewn– not so much writing as written upon.
Worth note in that context is Babel”s treatment of the titles of his favorite classics. The title of “After the Ball” resounds in that of “After the Battle,” while “First Love” ‘s was appropriated verbatim for a thematically cognate story (one of violence and oedipal anxiety). Babel’ [680] seems to have used the formula of Turgenev’s title twice more: for “My First Goose” and “My First Fee,” probably borrowing the added pronoun “my” from another of his literary fathers, Maxim Gorky, the last part of whose autobiographical trilogy was entitled “My Universities” (1923).25 Moreover, two titles in Red Cavalry–“The Story of a Horse” (Istoriia odnoi loshadi) and “The Story of a Horse, Continued”–sound like variations on the subtitle of Tolstoy’s “Strider: The Story of a Horse” (Istoriia loshadi). “The Story of My Dovecot” (dedicated to Gorky), in turn, combines “story” with “my.” Thus, even as Babel’ developed the theme of “a-verbality,” he revealed a fixation on at least one verbal aspect of the classical texts he rewrote. The point of his gesture is in demonstrating that he was not indifferent to “words,” which he might problematize but still considered his indispensable tools. And most importantly, he did so in pursuit of the most “transparent,” unconditional, magical, “divinely” motivated words–a role best performed by classical titles.26
Babel”s deliberate metaliterariness is underscored by his wordplay with the verb delat’, “to do/make,” in the title “How It Was Done [delalos’] in Odessa” (1923) recalling Eikhenbaum’s “How Gogol”s ‘Over-coat’ Was Made [sdelana] (l919)27 and Shklovsky’s “How Don Quixote was Made [sdelan]” (1921). Relevant here is not only the mere fact of title interplay, but also that of word and deed. The verb delat’ tends to appear at key points in Babel”s narrative, more often than not in the context of literary or artistic activity. “How It Was Done in Odessa” consistently foregrounds the interaction between word and deed.
“Cease playing the rowdy [skandalit’] at your desk and stammering in public. Imagine for a moment that you play the rowdy [skandalite] in the streets and stammer on paper… You can spend the night with a Russian woman and the Russian woman will be satisfied …. You want to live, and he makes you die twenty times a day. What would you have done in Benia Krik’s place? You would have done nothing. But he did something”… “Benia says little but what he says is tasty. He says little and one would like him to say more”… “What are you going to do, young man?”… “I want to make a speech [skazat’ rech’],” replied Benia Krik (1960: 212, 220-21).28 [681] The “say/do” opposition is threaded here through an entire babelian cluster of motifs: on the one hand, the fragile bookish word and stammering in public, on the other, the power of the now tight- lipped, now eloquent, but always ready for violence con- artist/gangster, whose reward is the ability to please–in defiance of murderous paternal control-the archetypal Russian woman (cf. in “Fee”/”Memo,” the prostitute Vera).
The same verb delat’ appears also in other texts, often in the char- acteristic conjunction with chto, “what.” “‘Let’s do it [Seichas sdelaemsial… The things they do [Chego delaiut]… God, the things people do…’” (1964: 17, 19). The repeated reference to the “deed” is further dramatized by the fact that its first, very matter-of- fact instance (“the client’s sex with the prostitute for money”) fails to materialize, whereas the second and third (“sex between ‘siblings’ “) does eventually take place, despite, or rather owing to, its being a product of writerly imagination.
Similar paradoxes of “word-making” and “making things happen with words,” in particular “making love,” are evident in the two following examples, of which one concerns Tolstoy, the other Maupassant.
I thought it was a waste of time not to write as well as Leo Tolstoy did [eto delal] (“Fee”).
Now it may be that Maupassant doesn’t know anything–or perhaps he knows everything… A carriage is clattering down a road scorched by the heat and in this carriage there’s the fat, sly youth Polyte and a strapping, ungainly peasant girl. What they’re doing in there and why they are doing it, is their own business [delo]” (“Odessa”; 1966: 30).
In highlighting the chto delat’ component in some of the examples, I do not claim a direct connection with Chernyshevsky’s novel; the phrase is too universal to be declared the exclusive property of a particular author.29 In fact, Babel”s fixation on this pronominal and proverbial formula is in tune with his general interest in various “universal equivalents”–extratextual, such as money, and linguistic, such as numerals, especially round numbers (“ten roubles,” “two rivers,” “ten- fifteen-twenty- thirty years old”30) and pronouns. Yet, all this does not preclude an interplay between Babel”s verbal motifs and the corresponding items of avant-garde culture (and their antecedents in nihilist and symbolist enthusiasm for “new deals/doings”). Moreover, Babel’, so attentive to every word escaping his pen, could hardly have missed the inevitable parallels with the titles of formalist articles and works of Chernyshevsky and Lenin. Characteristically–in his general [682] spirit of ambiguity- -he seemed to exercise an equal adherence to the “realistic” pronoun chto, “what,” and the “formalistic” kak, “how.”
Babel’ maximized the inherent contradictions in Tolstoy’s themes of clothing, naked body, nonverbalism, pantomimes and violence, thereby changing the ideological equation. For him, art was not a quest for but rather the creation of Truth, not the baring of reality, but its transformation. The archetypal challenge for the artist is not the tabooed naked body but its need for galvanization by an aesthetic miracle. The way out is not in renouncing life (family, military service, worldly interests or even biological existence itself) but in creatively mastering it (in particular, a woman’s soul and body) through an artistic word-deed in which silent body movements often predominate. This aesthetic action may be violent, even armed: at issue is not its immorality, only its success–that is, its “how” rather than its “what,” after all.
And the inclusion of Tolstoy in “Maupassant” is not accidental. Maupassant’s death, which crowns the story’s plot, occurred on 6 July 1893, antedating by a year Babel”s birth (13 July 1894) and the appearance of Tolstoy’s “Foreword to the Works of Guy de Maupassant” (1894; hereafter “Foreword”).31Babel”s obsession with both authors makes his unfamiliarity with “Foreword” highly improbable. In fact, the critical gauntlet thrown down to Maupassant by Tolstoy and picked up by Babel’, as well as some textual correspondences, make “Foreword” a likely subtext of “Maupassant,” especially of its finale:
He was twenty-five when he was first attacked by congenital syphilis. His productivity and joie de vivre resisted the onsets of the disease …. He struggled furiously, dashed about the Mediterranean in a yacht… and wrote ceaselessly. He attained fame… cut his throat, lost a great deal of blood, yet lived through it. He was then put away in a madhouse. There he crawled about on his fours, devouring his own excrement. The last line in his hospital report read: Monsieur de Maupassant va s’animaliser (“Monsieur de Maupassant has turned into an animal”). He died at the age of forty-two… A foreboding of truth touched me [Predvestie istiny kosnulos’ menia] (1960: 337-38).
According to “Foreword,” Maupassant was a talented, but amoral writer.
[H]e loved and described that which one should not love and de- scribe… He described with great minuteness and fondness how women seduce men, and men women; he even, as in “La Femme de Paul,” referred to certain obscenities difficult to understand [i.e., lesbian love] (1907: 162-63). [683]
In Tolstoy’s opinion, Maupassant thus
commits a great mistake from the artistic point of view, because he describes his subject only from one, and that the most uninteresting, physical side, utterly leaving out of sight the other and most important, spiritual side (164).
Maupassant has evidently submitted to the theory… that for the work of art, it is not only unnecessary to have any clear conception of what is right and what is wrong, but that, on the contrary, the artist must totally ignore all moral questions, there even being a certain artistic merit in his so doing (173-74).
Maupassant wrote his novels, naively imagining that what is regarded as fine in his circle is indeed that beauty which art must serve… [i.e.,] principally woman, and sexual intercourse with her: woman young and pretty, woman for the most part stripped bare (174- 75).
In his righteous fervor, Tolstoy sometimes misread Maupassant, ignoring the moral, and even religious, overtones of his texts. Thus, in “La Maison Tellier,” Tolstoy noted the author’s talent, “notwithstanding the improper and trifling subject” (162), but failed or preferred not to notice the subtle but consistent linkage of prostitution (“the house of M-me Tellier”) and the church (“the house of God”). This connection allows both a negative, subversively defamiliarizing reading and a positive, redeeming one–both of which are, generally speaking, quite tolstoyan in spirit.
“Une partie de campagne” manifested for Tolstoy “[an] ignorance of the distinction between good and evil… In this story, as a most charming and amusing joke, is related a minute account of how two gentlemen, rowing with bare arms in a boat, seduced, at the same time, one of them an elderly mother, the other a young girl, her daughter” (163). The essence of the story, however, lies in the expose of the absurdity of marriage, the mother’s as well as the daughter’s, and of the doomed futility of the tender and lasting mutual feeling that arises between the daughter and her accidental lover–themes that were, once again, not alien to Tolstoy.32 But, then, “misprision” is the mother of invention, and Babel’ would misread Maupassant no less radically.33
Yet, certain things in Maupassant did meet with Tolstoy’s approval: the more sentimental stories with happy endings, such as “Le Papa de Simon,”34in the first place. More often his praise was qualified: on one hand, on the other hand. [684]
[Maupassant] wished to praise… love, but the more he examined it the more he cursed it (180).
There has hardly been another writer who so sincerely thought that… all the meaning of life is in women, in love, and who… with such clearness and precision has shown all the awful phases of that same thing. The more he fathomed the question the more it revealed itself, all coverings fell from it, and left only its… awful essence (179).
A typical example of such contradictory discourse is, according to Tolstoy, furnished by Bel-Ami.35
Bel-Ami is a very unclean book [although it]… has for basis a serious idea and sentiment (167). The old poet [Norbert de Varenne] bares life before his young friend… as it is, with its eternal and inevitable companion, death… Duroy, the successful lover… hears and understands, but the source of lustful life gushes out from him with such power that this unquestionable truth, while predicting the same end for him, does not disturb him (168).
Tolstoy formulates–ostensibly on behalf of the moribund Maupassant, who is beginning to see the light–the harsh facts of biological life and death.
[T]he material world is not… the best of worlds… (180).
Woman… becomes disfigured; she becomes pregnant, and repulsively gives birth…; then come the… undesired children… then… old age; and then death… But not merely is there no life in what seemed to be life; one begins oneself to forsake life, one weakens, loses one’s beauty, decomposes… De Maupassant attained that tragic moment in life when the struggle began between the falsehood of the life about him and the truth of which he began to be conscious. The first throes of spiritual birth had already commenced in him… Let us therefore be thankful to this powerful, truthful man for what he has given us (183- 84).
Much in this text reads like a rough draft of Babel”s “Maupassant”-beginning with the mediatory role between Maupassant and the Russian public assumed by, on the one hand, Tolstoy and, on the other, Babel”s characters. “Foreword” predicates this mediation on sorting out such problems, pivotal also for “Maupassant,” as the delusions of sexual love, the inevitability of aging and death, and a young lover’s failure to be educated in these matters by his older writer-mentor, as well as on an interrelation between Maupassant’s works and his life/ death; even prototypes of “Maupassant”‘s punch line “foreboding of truth” peek through repeatedly.
Moreover, in light of “Foreword,” Babel”s self- determination as a short- story writer, polemical vis-a-vis Tolstoy, reveals an unexpected dimension, connected with the Tolstoy/Maupassant opposition. Tolstoy [685] preferred the French writer’s short stories to his novels, drawing an
essential distinction between the demands of the novel and of the short story. The novel’s object… is the description of one full human life, or of many; and therefore the novel writer must have a clear and firm idea of what is right and what is wrong in life. This De Maupassant had not; on the contrary, according to the theory he held, such was regarded undesirable (176-77).
But, fortunately, De Maupassant wrote short stories, in which he did not subject himself to the false theory… writing not “quelque chose de beau,” but what touched or revolted his moral feeling (178).
Tolstoy then listed Maupassant’s “best” short stories– “L’Hermite,” “Le Port,” “Monsieur Parent,” “L’Armoire,” “Miss Harriet,” “Un cas de divorce” and others. Remarkably, they treat typically “babelian” themes, such as incest, prostitution, corporeality and death, belonging in this sense to the set of patent or latent intertexts to “Maupassant” and “Fee”/”Memo.”
Among the nouvelles of Maupassant that Tolstoy liked, of particular interest to us is “Le Port”36–the story of a sailor, who, having returned from the seas, sleeps with a prostitute only to discover that she is his own sister. The following motifs in “Le Port” are germane to Babel”s “Fee”/”Memo” and “Maupassant”:
- visiting a brothel and hearing out the life story of a prostitute (death of parents, corruption by a series of employers, etc.); cf. the imaginary trials and tribulations of the “boy prostitute” in “Fee”/”Memo”;
- sibling incest with emphasis on the words “sister,” “brother” and “to do/make” (delat’): upon recognizing the prostitute .as his sister, the hero exclaims: “I have made a nice piece of work of it? (285; J’avonsfait de la belle besogne! [1131]), and then takes to “kissing her, as one kisses kindred flesh” (286; de la chair fraternelle [1132]); cf. the metaphorical contact between “fellow, lit. cobrother, carpenters” and physical between the two alleged “sisters” in “Fee”/”Memo” and also Vera’s exclamation: “The things they do!”;
- boat associated with the Mother of God (the hero’s three-master is called “Madonna of the Winds” (Notre-Dame-des-Vents); cf. the prostitute Vera, who “sailed along in front of the crowd like the Virgin Mary on the prow of a fishing boat” (1964: 16);
- hero’s “heavenly” name, Celestin; cf. in “Maupassant” the name Raisa’s raiskie, “paradisiacal,” connotations, reinforced by the intertextual presence of two more Celestes: from Maupassant’s “L’Aveu” (overt) and “Miss Harriet” (covert); [686]
- speechless finale, where the sailor “rolled about the floor, screaming, flailing with all his extremities [quatre membres] and uttering such groans that they seemed like a death rattle” (286); cf. the end of “Maupassant.”
As if Tolstoy’s praise for “Le Port” and the story’s striking similarities with Babel”s texts were not enough, in 1890 Tolstoy rendered it into Russian- -as “Francoise (A Story after Maupassant).”37 Thus he outstripped by far both Babel”s heroes (“Maupassant” ‘s Raisa and narrator, busy “working” on Maupassant in 1916) and Babel’ himself (the translator of “Idylle,” “Miss Harriet” and “Le Mal d’Andre”).38Babel’ could scarcely have failed to see in himself Tolstoy’s professional double.
As is well known, “Tolstoy corrected and shortened several times… the translation [of “Le Port”] made by a live-in teacher of the Tolstoy [children and] dissatisfied with the story’s ending… crossed it out and wrote his own.”39 Did, then, Tolstoy’s editing influence Babel”s later use of elements from “Le Port”/”Francoise” in his own “Fee”/”Memo,” especially given that in one of its variants (“Fee”) the narrator-hero means to rival the classic? Tolstoy’s corrections consisted for the most part in technical cuts, but not exclusively so. From the overview of the sailors’ activities in the brothel, Tolstoy prudishly deleted Maupassant’s sentence: “Each was… setting free the brute within” (283; la brute humaine [1128]). Nearer the end, he omitted the kissing of the “kindred flesh [chairfraternelle].” In the description of Celestin’s climactic paroxysm, he replaced Maupassant’s clearly bestial “four extremities [quatre membres]” with a fully human “hands and feet.” Finally, he transformed the sailor’s last words from a rather disjointed babble: “And this is you–this is you, Francoise–my little Francoise” (“The Port,” 286) into a programmatic statement: “‘Away! Do you not see that she is your sister! Each of them is someone’s sister. See, here is [my] sister Francoise! Ha, ha… ha…’ and he broke into sobs” (“Francoise,” 369-70).
Notably, these are the very items that Babel’ would accentuate in “Fee”/”Memo” to whip up its carnal, bestial and incestual effects. In particular, the preachy passage about “everyone’s sister” would undergo an especially oxymoronic transformation, acquiring on the lips of the prostitute an unexpected, playfully positive meaning.40As for censoring Maupassant’s “porn,” the late Tolstoy’s taboo on sex-be it venal, pre-, extra- or even intramarital–is well known, as is its [687] provocatively different treatment by Babel’. Yet, some fear of sex is present in Babel”s texts as well.
When the twenty-year-old initiate in “Fee”/”Memo” faces a threatening female, his fear of vagina dentata, aggravated by the distressingly prosaic setting and attitude of the woman, paralyzes him.41 As a way out (“it was too late to go back”; 1964: 17) he resorts to fictionalizing-wrapping himself in the androgynous persona of a boy prostitute. Confusion of sexual roles–voyeurism, obsession with the insatiable Russian woman, endowing a macho Cossack (Savitsky in “My First Goose”) with attributes of feminine beauty, etc.–and dearth in Babel”s oeuvre of “normal” love stories42 are all manifestations of a “mysteriously twisted”43 view of sex. “Fee”/”Memo”‘s happy ending is achieved in no less a crooked way. The hero overcomes his virginal fear by inversion. In the climactic digression on village carpenters, with its exchange of sexual roles, not only are the woman’s symbolic “vaginal teeth” not removed,44on the contrary, they are magnified into a car- penter’s plane, which, however, rather than mortifying the hero, yields the “happy” image of shavings planed off the phallic log. Tolstoy’s hero in “After the Ball” declined to partake of the symbolic taming of the bride (represented by the flogged soldier) and, subsequently, of the real bride herself. Babel’ combined paradoxically Tolstoy’s fear of sex with its celebration a la Maupassant.
The phrase about liberating the “human brute within,” deleted by Tolstoy from “Le Port”/”Francoise,” was very much in the spirit of the times.45 It was something Tolstoy fought in vain, and one of its har- bingers in Russia was Maupassant. Maupassant’s “human beast,” so [688] repugnant to Tolstoy, would most likely have been liked by Nietzsche. This is not an idle speculation–according to one of the most astute students of Babel’, “It]he French [were] the first to respond to Nietzsche’s profound aestheticism. It may be that Babel’ absorbed his own ‘Nietzscheanism’ partly through French intermediaries … [rather] than [from] a directly German source. Nietzsche himself preferred French over German culture, sharing with Babel’ even a particular fondness for Maupassant.”46
The relevancy of Nietzsche to the Maupassant-Babel’- Tolstoy triangle is not limited to this observation. To begin with, Nietzsche’s biography had a tragic end uncannily similar to that of Maupassant: insanity, possibly also caused by syphilis, that struck at the age of forty-five. Secondly, Tolstoy, as has been noted, was a sort of stand-in for Nietzsche in discussions of Red Cavalry. Thirdly, Babel’ himself, much as he may have tried, with help from Maupassant, to tear himself free of tolstoyan moralism, concluded “Maupassant” with a tormented image of his French mentor that resonated with potent Christian overtones, increasing in the order of their affinity with
- Maupassant’s defiantly anti-Christian, German brother-in- insanity;
- the humbled sinner on all fours from “Le Port”;47
- the same sinner further “christened” by Tolstoy’s rewriting;
- the fully Christ-like soldier from “After the Ball.”
Indeed, the entire pivotal shift in “Maupassant,” from enjoying a woman’s love to contemplating a male embodiment of suffering, has distinct Christian underpinnings–quite probably stemming from the influence of “After the Ball.” Not only Maupassant’s agony but the “celestial” Raisa’s curvaceous charm as well are suffused with connotations of Golgotha: “She pressed herself against the wall, stretching out her bare arms. Spots began to glow on her arms and shoulders. Of all the gods ever put on the crucifix, this was the most ravishing” (1960: 336). Thus Babel’ starts with a perversely Jesus-like image of lust to end with a still more sacrilegious–syphilitic– imitation of Christ,48while Tolstoy moves from a disembodied fiance to an archetypal bleeding martyr.
Tolstoy’s Resurrection was written roughly in the same period (1887-1899) as his “Foreword” and shares with it many elements that are relevant to “Maupassant,” while the “prostitute” topos makes the novel a natural background for “Fee”/”Memo.”49 An additional textual bridge [689] is thrown by the characterization of the Benderskys’ “high- breasted” and “nearsighted” maid (1960: 330), reminiscent of the high-bosomed and cross-eyed Katiusha Maslova,50 a “half- ward, half-servant” in the household of Nekhliudov’s aunts (I, 12; 43 51).
A particularly cynical role in the debauching of Katiusha after her initial seduction by Nekhliudov is played by a certain “old writer.”
And no one in the world cared for aught but pleasure. In this belief an old author with whom she had lived in the second year of her life of independence had strengthened her. He had told her outright that it was this that constituted the happiness of life, and he called it poetic and aesthetic (I, 37; 133).
This recalls the critique, in “Foreword,” of the “old poet” Norbert de Varenne from Bel-Ami and also of Renan, Maupassant himself and other immoral aestheticizers of sex.
The repentance that gradually leads Nekhliudov to “feel himself not the master, but a servant” (II, 8; 233) and to obey the master’s (God’s) will, first visits him in a characteristically tolstoyan debased form: “He felt himself in the position of the puppy, who had misbehaved in the rooms and whom his Master, taking him by the scruff of his neck, rubs with his nose in the mess he has made” (I, 22; 78). Similarly, the “foreboding of truth” in the finale of “Maupassant” consists in Maupassant crawling on all fours, like an animal, and devouring his own excrement.
Let us now turn to the more general affinities between Babel”s texts and Resurrection. The late Tolstoy pushed to its limit the contradictory unity of life and works, Truth and Beauty, masterfully playing the dual role of artist-prophet.52 In Resurrection this manifests itself in the constant alternation and combination of narrative prose with investigative reporting and religious sermonizing. Such was Tolstoy’s answer to Russian literature’s perennial preoccupation with the correlation of ideology, realism and artistic invention. Babel’ would offer his own recipe, fusing the same oppositions (“document/fiction,” “lifetart,” “desacralization/revelation”) in unexpected ways.
Characteristic in this regard are the two authors’ different treatments of inserted material, borrowed (as in Resurrection, so in “Mau- passant”) from French romance literature in counterpoint to the primary action. Nekhliudov says of Dame aux camelias (the play he is taken [690] to see by the flirtatious Countess Mariette, who then calls Katiusha a Magdalina): “This sort of thing does not touch me… I have seen so much real suffering today” (II, 28; 310). After he takes his leave of the countess, a streetwalker tries to pick him up.
This one was at least truthful, but that one [Mariette] lied …. The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting… But when that same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and aesthetic feeling and demands our worship–then we are swallowed up by it completely and worship animalism, no longer distinguishing between good and evil (II, 28; 311- 12).
Tolstoy’s consistent platonic preference for morality and reality over art finds itself inverted in Babel’, who has fiction materialize- -playfully but powerfully–in “real” life.
Tolstoy foregrounds the opposition between genuine, spiritual values and false–bestial, corporeal, societal–ones and focuses on the essence of an inspired individual choice or act. These issues both unite and divide Babel’ and Tolstoy. According to Tolstoy, Nekhliudov’s (and Katiusha’s) original sinful error was their straying from the innocent naturalness of their first kiss by the lilac bush. This was what set them irrevocably on the path of depraved societal stereotypes: “Believing others, there was nothing to decide; everything had been decided already, and always in favor of the animal ‘I’ and against the spiritual… And at last Nekhliudov gave in, that is, he left off believing his own self and began believing others” (I, 13; 48). In seducing Katiusha, Nekhliudov agreed to “behave as every one else did” (delat’ kak vse delaiut; I, 16; 59).53 Nekhliudov’s gift of money to Katiusha, too, was motivated by peer pressure (imitation of the dashing officer Shonbock): “Then he thought that he ought to give her some money, not for her, not because she might need it, but because it was the thing to do [potomu chto tak vsegda delaiut]… So he did give her money…” (I, 18; 64-65).54
Similar causes underlie the fateful miscarriage of justice, committed by the jurors with Nekhliudov’s inattentively mechanical participation, and also Nekhliudov’s subsequent behavior, as his good intentions take the impersonal form of institutionalized procedures, appeals, etc. Indeed, Nekhliudov’s very pursuit of redemption is guided by an abstract idea and is thus contrary to the genuinely personal principle. Sensing this, Katiusha decides “she would not give in to him–would not let him make use of her spiritually as he had done physically, would not let him turn her into an object of his magnanimity” (II, 13; 253). For his part, Nekhliudov keeps worrying that he might not “be able to bear” his rationally chosen–“artificial, unnatural”- -role of redeemer (II, 2; 298). The fatal nature of abstractions also manifests itself in the [691] use of money–the universal equivalent with which Nekhliudov attempts to right matters, hiring lawyers and supplying Katiusha with cash. In accepting money from him, she, too, takes part in a social practice murderous to the individual. “‘This woman is dead,’ Nekhliudov thought.”
His goal is to “awaken her soul … [so] that she might awaken again and become what she had been” (I, 43; 151-52). But in order to be reborn, she must renounce the self-assurance, typical of any professional (and which only “surprises us where the persons concerned are thieves… prostitutes… murderers”; I, 44; 154) in his/her societal necessity and usefulness. Furthermore, both of them will have to distance themselves from all that is earthly within them–physically and socially: from belief in the reforms of justice, in carnal love and marriage, and even in mutual sacrifice. In Wasiolek’s apt formulation,
Maslova does not need his sacrifice, for his sacrifice is part of her prison. Maslova does not need Nekhliudov, Nekhliudov does not need Maslova… For men relate best when they don’t relate… When they strive for brotherhood by way of conscious ideals and premeditated actions, they take brotherhood into abstraction, coercion, and separation. When they become themselves, they touch others with an immediacy that is not possible otherwise (199).
A striking parallel to these conclusions are the words spoken by Tolstoy’s favorite–the “old poet” in Bel-Ami:
[M]y body, my face, my thoughts, my desires will never reappear… Death alone is certain… Try to escape from everything that imprisons you, make a superhuman effort to get outside your body, your interests, your thoughts, and all mankind; try to look into the essence of things, and you will see how unimportant are the quarrels between the romantics and the naturalists or discussions of the Budget (98).
In this respect, Babel’ both echoes Tolstoy’s (and Norbert de Varenne’s) stance and rejects it. He shares with Tolstoy a creative quest aimed at liberating the individual from impersonal cliched routine, in particular at arousing a live feeling in an emotionally dead sex pro. However, Babel”s implementation of this creative impulse is in every way opposite to Tolstoy’s. Tolstoy the novelist is concerned with long-term spiritual labor, Babel’ the short-story teller, with instantaneous improvization. For Tolstoy, finding oneself means a departure from falsehood, society, art, marriage and sex, and a return to truth, nature, childlike innocence and God–a true resurrection. For Babel’, an individual finds himself only through aesthetic and erotic contact, culture, art, invention, even a premeditated55 perversion of the image of childhood and an artistic construction of “brotherhood.” The holy grail of Babel”s quest is not spiritual–to achieve resurrection, but rather artistic–“to survive oblivion” by “writ[ing] no worse than Leo Tolstoy” (“Fee”). An additional irony, this time probably unintentional, [692] lies in the fact that Tolstoy, whose literary immortality Babel”s hero covets, eventually rejected the worldly fame won him by his mas- terpieces. Tolstoy saw the way out in the maximal simplification of all structures and the liberation of people from one another, in particular, of Maslova from Nekhliudov’s manipulation and of both from competitive, mutual self-sacrifice. Babel’, on the other hand, welcomed the hero’s life-creational conquest of the heroine and the complex indirectness, improvised by him, of the mutual reflection of their various cultural and sexual roles. Indeed, Babel’ redrew radically the entire map of the hero-prostitute relationship set out in Resurrection.
Tolstoy’s prostitute is a former innocent girl, corrupted by society in the persons of her first seducer and subsequent clients. Her state is evil and she needs redemption. Her redeemer (in Resurrection, he is also her seducer)56attempts to open her eyes, tells her that she is “more than a sister” to him (I, 44; 153), proclaims his love, wants to marry her and helps her financially. The offer of money–just as in the first seduction, so in the attempts at redemption–meets with resistance, the money is rejected, imposed again and again refused, signaling the heroine’s liberation. In addition to her symbolic “brotherhood” with the hero, the heroine is a double of a “respectable” woman character, vis- a-vis whom she represents but a more straightforward type of venality. She is also mirrored by her seducer/redeemer, who, too, turns out to be weak, corruptible, venal, morally dormant. There arises between the two a duel of wills and self- sacrifice, from which the woman emerges victorious:
Katiusha does not wish to accept my sacrifice; she wishes to make a sacrifice herself. She has conquered, and so have I… (II, 34; 334). [S]he loved him, and thought that by uniting herself to him she would be spoiling his life. By going with Simonson she thought she would be setting Nekhliudov free, and she felt glad that she had done what she meant to do (III, 25; 451).
In Babel’, prostitution is taken for granted. A prostitute is a woman like all others, and the task lies in winning her love.57The hero and heroine are divided not by a moral chasm but by an aesthetic one, which is successfully bridged by the hero’s creative act. The necessity of remuneration for sex is taken for granted, without any qualms on the part of the hero or strictures from the author. Moreover, the heroine’s waiver of fee does not divide, but rather unites the two. Working towards unity is also the parodic twinship Of the two “sister”-prostitutes. Paradoxically, Tolstoy’s “brotherhood” is premised on dissolution of human bonds, while Babel”s results in festive communion. [693]
This communion, betokened in the final episode of sharing tea at the Tbilisi bazaar,58is rich in evangelical overtones, crowning the numerous Christian motifs of the story. The Christian component, implicit in Maupassant’s final pose in the story, is a separate topic. Even so, we may note that, for all his blasphemous maupassantian-nietzschean aesthetic experimentalism, Babel’ remained, in the final analysis, a hostage of what can be called Russian–tolstoyan–spirituality.
1. Sergei Bondarin, “Prikosnovenie k cheloveku,” Vospominaniia 0 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.M. Makotinskii, “Umenie slushat’,” Vospominaniia, 107.
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). Note Babel”s interest in Tolstoy’s autobiographical text.
6.See Lionel Trilling, “The Forbidden Dialectic: Introduction to ‘The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel,” Isaac Babel: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 29; and Renato Poggioli, “Isaak Babel in Retrospect,” ibid., 5253.
7.Poggioli, op. cit., 55-56.
8. See Gregory Freidin, “Isaac Babel,” European Writers, vol. 11, 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, and Shklovsky, op. cit., 185. 10. Konstantin Paustovskii, “Rasskazy o Babele,” Vospominaniia, 23.
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 Lesley Chamberlain translation in The Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories, ed. David Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 239-50, 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).
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.
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.T. Stakh, “Kakim ia pomniu Babelia,” Vospominaniia, 156.
18.See his 1910 poem “She has not yet been born…” and its contexmalization 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 Mandel’stam’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.
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”/”Memo,” 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”/”Memo” (1964: 27, 18).
24.“And he began to whip [pletit’] 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 Almanach (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 Childhood’s chap. 23: “After the Mazurka” (see Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text, 60).
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”/”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,” L.N. Tolstoi, The Novels and Other Works: Essays, Letters, Miscellanies (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 2:161- 84.
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.Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliotheque de la Pleiade], 1974, 1979), 2:1125-33. I quote (and emend) the English version, “The Port,” De Maupassant Short Stories (New York: Book League of America, 1941): 280-87.
37.“Francoise” appeared in Novoe vremia in 1891; see L.N. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1953), 12: 122-29. The English version is quoted from Leo Tolstoy, The Devil and Cognate Tales (New York: Oxford University Press [Humphrey Milford], 1934): 361-70.
38.The translations appeared in Giui de Mopassan, Sobranie sochinenii, trans. I. Babel’, 3 vols. (Moscow: Zemlia i fabrika, 1926-1927).
39.L.N. Tolstoi, Sobranie, 12: 307.
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 V. Ia. Propp, Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki (Leningrad: Izd-vo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1946).
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; emphasis added). Small wonder that Tolstoy, “having read the first chapter of the novella, said ‘Very bad, vulgar, unnecessarily dirty’” (A. I. Kuprin, Sobranie sochinenii [Moscow: Pravda, 1964], 6: 456).
46.James Falen, Isaac Babel’.’ Russian Master of the Short Story (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), 171n.
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.N.A. Nilsson, “Isaac Babel”s Story ‘Guy de Maupassant,’” Studies in 20th Century Russian Prose, ed. N.A. Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wicksell International, 1982), 218.
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 [Tolstoy Centenary Edition, vol. 19]).
52.See Edward Wasiolek, Tolstoy’s Major Fiction (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1978), 191-92.
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 comme-il-faut conventionality, Dostoevsky targets bookishness and pride. On the interplay of “Fee”/”Memo” 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 of 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).