Read The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them for Free Online

literature.
    The epigraph to the 1920 diary could be the famous phrase from the beginning of
Don Quixote
: “since I’m always reading, even scraps of paper I find in the street . . .” In Brody, in the aftermath of a pogrom, while looking for oats to feed his horse, Babel stumbles upon a German bookstore: “marvelous uncut books, albums . . . a chrestomathy, the history of all the Boleslaws . . . Tetmajer, new translations, a pile of new Polish national literature, textbooks. I rummage like a madman, I run around.” In a looted Polish estate, in a drawing room where horses are standing on the carpet, he discovers a chest of “extremely precious books”: “the constitution approved by the Sejm at the beginning of the 18th century, old folios from the times of Nicholas I, thePolish code of laws, precious bindings, Polish manuscripts of the 16th century, writings of monks, old French novels . . . French novels on little tables, many French and Polish books about child care, smashed intimate feminine accessories, remnants of butter in a butter dish—newlyweds?” In an abandoned Polish castle, he finds “French letters dated 1820,
nôtre petit héros achève 7 semaines
. My God, who wrote it, when . . .”
    These materials are assimilated and expanded upon in the
Red Cavalry
stories, for example in “Berestechko,” whose narrator also finds a French letter in a Polish castle:
“Paul, mon bien aimé, on dit que l’empereur Napoléon est mort, estce vrai? Moi, je me sens bien, les couches ont été faciles . . .”
From the phrase “
nôtre petit héros achève 7 semaines
,” Babel conjures the full precariousness of time, a point as delicately positioned in human history as a seven-week-old child, or a false rumor of Napoleon’s death.
    Reading the whole
Red Cavalry
cycle after the diary, I understood “My First Goose.” I understood how important it was that the suitcase thrown in the street by the Cossacks was full of manuscripts and newspapers. I understood what it meant for Babel to read Lenin aloud to the Cossacks. It was the first hostile encounter of writing with life itself. “My First Goose,” like much of
Red Cavalry
, is about the price Babel paid for his literary material. Osip Mandelstam once asked Babel why he went out of his way to socialize with agents of the secret police, with people like Yezhov: “Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? ‘No,’ Babel replied, ‘I don’t want to touch it with my fingers—I just like to have a sniff and see what it smells like.’ ” But of course he had to touch it with his fingers. He had to shed blood with his own hands, if only that of a goose. Without that blood,
Red Cavalry
could never havebeen written. “It sometimes happens that I don’t spare myself and spend an hour kicking the enemy, or sometimes more than an hour,” observes one of Babel’s narrators, a Cossack swineherd turned Red Army general. “I want to understand life, to learn what it really is.”
    The imperative to understand life and describe it provides an urgent, moving refrain in the 1920 diary.
    “Describe the orderlies—the divisional chief of staff and the others—Cherkashin, Tarasov.”
    “Describe Matyazh, Misha.
Muzhiks
, I want to penetrate their souls.”
    Whenever Babel meets anyone, he has to fathom what he is. Always “what,” not “who.”
    “What is Mikhail Karlovich?” “What is Zholnarkevich? A Pole? His feelings?”
    “What are our soldiers?” “What are Cossacks?” “What is Bolshevism?”
    “What is Kiperman? Describe his trousers.”
    “Describe the work of a war correspondent, what is a war correspondent?” (At the time he wrote this sentence, Babel himself was technically a war correspondent.)
    Sometimes he seems to beg the question, asking, of somebody called Vinokurov: “What is this gluttonous, pitiful, tall