Red Cavalry
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Based on Babel's own diaries that he wrote during the Russo-Polish war of 1920, Red Cavalry is a lyrical, unflinching and often startlingly ironic depiction of the violence and horrors of war. A classic of modern fiction, the short stories are as powerful today as they were when they burst onto the Russian literary landscape nearly a century ago. The narrator, a Russian-Jewish intellectual, struggles with the tensions of his dual identity: fact blends with fiction; the coarse language of soldiers combines with an elevated literary style; cultures, religions and different social classes collide. Shocking, moving and innovative, Red Cavalry is one of the masterpieces of Russian literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stories in this classic collection are set in the summer of 1920, when Babel was 25 and sent to cover the Polish-Soviet War for the Red Cavalryman newspaper. Sympathetic to the revolution yet having a satiric eye, he describes the newspaper s writers who roam about in the barren dust of the rear and spread the riot and fire of their leaflets. Babel was a Jew assigned to a Cossack regiment; his stand-in first-person narrator overcomes the soldiers animosity when, in the story My First Goose, he breaks a fowl s neck and orders it to be roasted up. In The Story of a Horse and The Story of a Horse, Continued, a dispute between a squadron commander and a division commander over a horse produces an exchange of letters full of heartfelt (though jargony) prose and brutal honesty the commanders have more of an emotional connection to the horses than to other people. Casual violence ( grabbed her hair, bent back her head and smashed her face with his fist ) alternates with beauty, sometimes in the same sentence ( We fled without staining our swords crimson with the wretched blood of traitors ). The stories, which are often not much more than anecdotes, mostly focus on characters like Apolek, an itinerant painter; squadron commander Trunov; and a rabbi in Zhitomir, as well as the occasional flashes of battle. This translation is of the first 1926 edition, before censorship and the author s own revisions altered the text.
