Reading Isaac Babel
Life and stories
ISAAC Babel, by Glòria Torner
Isaac Babel is the first major Russian Jewish writer
of the first part of 20th century. He was a master of the short
story, and also a playwright, a journalist and did reports and film scripts.
His fame is based on his stories about the Jews in Odessa.
The author has two leitmotivs in his life:
If the
world could write by itself, it would be like Tolstoy.”
“I felt
that it was pointless to write worse than Tolstoy.”
BIOGRAPHY
Isaac Babel was born in
the Jewish ghetto of Odessa, Ukraine, in 1894.
Babel’s childhood was
relatively comfortable, though he witnessed pogroms in Southern Russia in 1905.
However, his family was untouched. His father was a successful businessman who
installed his family in one of the best streets in Odessa.
In his teens, Babel wanted
to get into the preparatory class at the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School,
but he couldn’t. As a result, he was schooled at home by private tutors. Between
1905 and 1911, he studied the Talmud, violin, German, French, besides of Russian,
Ukrainian and Yiddish.
He began writing short
stories at the age of fifteen in imitation of Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert.
His first stories were written in French. He entered the Kyiv Institute of
Finances and Business Studies, and he graduated in 1915.
In 1916, he moved to St.
Petersburg where he met Maxim Gorky, his literary hero, who published some of
Babel’s stories in his literary magazine Letopis.
In 1917, he worked for a short time as a translator for the Cheka and as a
reporter for Gorky’s newspaper Novaya
Zhizin.
During the Russian Civil
War, he returned to Odessa where he was an editor for a small publishing house,
and, after the Civil War, he became a reporter for The Dawn of the Orient, a Russian newspaper published in Tbilisi.
He married Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein in 1919; their union produced a daughter,
but his marriage was broken by the husband’s infidelities.
In 1923, he published The Tales of Odessa, a collection
of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto. The stories describe the life of
Jewish gangsters before and after
the October Revolution. He moved to
Moscow and, in 1926, he published The
Red Cavalry, thirty-four short
stories about the brutal realities of war with horrific violence. During these
years, a number of Babel’s family emigrated to Paris, including his mother,
sister and, finally, his wife. In 1928, he wrote his first play, Sunset. His next play, Marya, described political corruption, prosecution of the innocent and
black market in the Soviet society. This play was intended to be performed in
1935, but was cancelled and was not performed in Russia until after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union.
All the short stories of
Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories, filled only two small volumes and were
published in 2002.
Babel was arrested by the
N.K.V.D., a precursor of the K.G.B. in May 1939 at his cottage in Peredelkino, a
writer’s colony. The secret police confiscated nine folders from the dacha and
fifteen from his Moscow’s apartment. Under interrogation and probable torture
at Lubyanka, Babel confessed a long association with Trotskyists and an engagement
in anti-Soviet activity, including being recruited into a spy network. He was
held in Buturka Prison, and, on January 27, 1940, he was shot on Stalin’s
orders for espionage. Babel’s last words were “I’m innocent, I have never been a spy... I’m asking only for one thing,
let me finish my work.”
MY
FIRST FEE
This story was written in
the 1920s, and it’s apparently an expansion of an earlier piece called Answer to an Inquiry. Both are variants
of the same story: an adolescent boy tells a forlorn, indecent and wholly
imaginary tale about himself to a tender-hearted prostitute. It went
unpublished during Babel’s lifetime for sexual prudery, not appearing in print until
the early 60s, when it was published in New York, first in Russian, then in an
English translation.
The story begins with a
long description in first person. The springtime has arrived in the town,
Tiflis (Tbilisi), where the narrator (perhaps an alter ego of the author), a twenty-years-old
young man, is living. He is working as a proof-reader for the printing press of
the Caucasus Military.
He describes the room that
he has rented from a Georgian couple and the sensual atmosphere of their
neighbours. But the most important is that the narrator, who feels lonely,
decides to look for love, runs out of the house and walks along the Kura River
at night. Tortured by lust, he decides to solicit a prostitute, called Vera, whom
he is infatuated with.
Now the story goes on,
sometimes in direct dialogue in third person between the writer and the
prostitute, and also with narrative and descriptive writing. Before Vera sleeps
with him, she asks him for the money he has, and the writer gives her ten rubbles.
They decide to go to Borzhom, and he has to accompany her as she makes her
rounds and spends his money. Later, they go up to Vera’s room. There, in the
prostitute’s bed, Vera prepares to get laid with the narrator, and he tells her
that he has never been with a woman. Then he invents a tale.
This second story is about
a boy living with an older Armenian man called Stepan
Ivanovich, in Baku for four years when he was fifteen years old. Stepan
Ivanovich’s friends ruined him because he gave them bronze promissory notes, and
their friends cashed them and left promissory notes unbacked. Then the writer
left him and decided to live with a rich church warden. He finishes the story
arriving at a convincing ending with the death of his old man and his own
arrival in Tbilisi now with twenty rubbles.
Returning to the first
story, he spends the rest of the night making love with the thirty years old
prostitute Vera, who tutors the young man in the erotic arts. Vera is moved by
the other story and come to consider the narrator as a “sister” prostitute
rather than a man. In the next morning, Vera insists on returning the narrator’s
money. From his perspective, this money is the first fee he has earned for writing a story. Vera is his “first reader.”
At the end of the story,
the author explains the relation and the meaning between the story and the
title.
Themes
There are two stories and two different themes
explained together in the story, one inside the other one, as the Russian doll
called matryoshka.
1. Babel
walks up through the steps of crafting a plot. The writer who wants to be known
telling a frankly sexual fiction for sex to a prostitute, perhaps a fictitious
tale about his life.
2. The loneliness
of a man looking for love and sex. He “experienced
a love you will never experience.” To be a writer, does one need to look for
love?
Conclusion
Sometimes difficult to
understand his prose, with long descriptions with sexual allusions just to
explain a strange, sharp and unrealistic story. My First Fee it’s a story about how to write a story.
QUESTIONS
Tell us about the characters
The narrator
Vera
Stepan Ivanovich
Fedosya Mavrikevna
Where is Tiflis? What do you know about its country (language,
religion, history…)
The narrator feels the spring in his skin. How do you
feel the spring? What qualities of spring affect you the most?
What do you know about Tolstoy?
“I was a dreamer and didn’t have the knack for the
thoughtless art of happiness”. That is, a dreamer cannot be happy: do you
agree? Why?
Why did the narrator ask Vera is she was going to Palestine?
What is Borzhom (Borjomi)?
What information do you have about Golovin and the boyars?
“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble
real life”. What is your opinion?
What do you think Vera’s preparations to get laid with
the narrator were for?
What does the image “like a toad on a stone” suggest?
Where is Kherson? And Baku?
Why does he say he’s a bitch, a whore?
What is the relation between the title and the story?
VOCABULARY
murky, part, whisking, shrews, babbling, hanks,
sapping, sultriness, burrowing, dauntless, gruelling, raiment, apish, tenner,
wilted, hightail, dough, banged, lackluster, potbellied, dogged, throes, drab,
took after, promissory note, auctioned, squeezed, taproom, quaked, cavorting,
braying
