Beyond Me: Isaac Babel’s Red Calvary

From “Home Life of a Prophetess,” The New Yorker, September 7, 1929, p. 87.


I am sorry, but “Red Cavalry” is entirely beyond me. For all I care Mr. I. Babel’s book might have been left in the original Russian. It is a series of sketches of the Soviet invasion of Poland, but I didn’t stay to see who won. This isn’t the sort of war I have been brought up on and I am too old to learn. Soviet slang leaves me saddened and hurt; it is too much like a lot of cable addresses. For instance, “Presrevcom” is the pet name for the President of the Revolution Committee and it doesn’t seem much of an improvement. Mr. Babel has been hailed by more patient critics as the Soviet’s gift to literature, a judgment that leaves me absolutely baffled.

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Red Cavalry first appeared in English in the UK in May 1929, published in London by Alfred A. Knopf in a translation by John Harland. The American edition came later that summer, published in New York in August 1929 by Alfred A. Knopf, in a Yankee translation by Nadia Helstein.