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

Babel in California

When the Russian Academy of Sciences puts together an author’s Collected Works, they aren’t aiming for something you can put in a suitcase and run away with. The “millennium” edition of Tolstoy fills a hundred volumes and weighs as much as a newborn beluga whale. (I brought my bathroom scale to the library and weighed it, ten volumes at a time.) Dostoevsky comes in thirty volumes, Turgenev in twenty-eight, Pushkin in seventeen. Even Lermontov, a lyric poet killed in a duel at age twenty-seven, has four volumes. It’s different in France, where definitive editions are printed on “Bible paper.” The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade manages to fit Balzac’s entire Human Comedy in twelve volumes, and his remaining writings in two volumes, for a combined total weight of eighteen pounds.

The Collected Works of Isaac Babel fills only two small volumes. Comparing Tolstoy’s Works to Babel’s is like comparing a long road to a pocket watch. Babel’s best-loved works all fit in the first volume: the Odessa, Childhood, and Petersburg cycles; Red Cavalry; and the 1920 diary, on which Red Cavalry is based. The compactness makes itself felt all the more acutely, since Babel’s oeuvre is known to be incomplete. When the NKVD came to his dacha in 1939, Babel’s first words were, “They didn’t let me finish.” The secret police seized and confiscated nine folders from the dacha, and fifteen from Babel’s Moscow apartment. They seized and confiscated Babel himself, on charges of spying for France and even Austria. Neither manuscripts nor writer were seen again.

In the next years, Babel’s published works were removed from circulation. His name was erased from encyclopedias and film credits. Rumors circulated—Babel was in a special camp for writers, he was writing for the camp newspaper—but nobody knew for sure if he was dead or alive. In 1954, the year after Stalin’s death, Babel was officially exonerated, and the dossier of his criminal case made public. Inside was just one page: a certificate attesting to his death, under unknown circumstances, on March 17, 1941. Like Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” Babel had vanished, leaving behind a single sheet of paper.

Nobody really knows why Babel was arrested when he was. He had made powerful enemies early in his career with the publication of the Red Cavalry stories, which immortalize the botched Russo-Polish military campaign of 1920. In 1924, Commander Semyon Budyonny of the First Cavalry publicly accused Babel of “counterrevolutionary lies” and character assassination. In later years, as Budyonny rose in the Party system, from marshal of the Soviet Union to first deputy commissar for defense and Hero of the Soviet Union, Babel found himself on increasingly thin ice—especially after the death of his protector, Maxim Gorky, in 1936. Nonetheless, he survived the height of the Great Purge in 1937–38, and was arrested only in 1939, when World War II was just around the corner and Stalin presumably had bigger fish to fry. What tipped the scale?

The Nazi-Soviet pact might have played a role: because of Babel’s close ties with the French Left, his continued existence was necessary to maintain Soviet-French diplomatic relations—which became a moot point once Stalin sided with Hitler. Some evidence suggests that Babel was arrested in preparation for one last show trial that was to accuse the entire intellectual elite, from the film legend Sergei Eisenstein to the polar explorer Otto Schmidt, but which was called off in September when Hitler invaded Poland.

Some scholars attribute Babel’s arrest to his bizarre relationship with the former people’s commissar Nikolai Yezhov: Babel had had an affair in the 1920s with Evgeniya Gladun-Khayutina, Yezhov’s future wife, and it was said that, even in the 1930s, Babel would visit the couple at home where they would all play ninepins and listen to Yezhov tell gruesome stories about the gulag. When Lavrenty (“Stalin’s Butcher”) Beria came to power in 1938, he made a point of exterminating anyone who had ever had anything to do with Yezhov.

Others insist that Babel was arrested “for no reason at all,” and that to say otherwise is to commit the sin of attributing logic to the totalitarian machine.

When Babel’s box in the KGB archives was declassified in the 1990s, it became known that the warrant for his arrest had been issued thirty-five days after the fact. Following seventy-two hours of continuous interrogation and probably torture, Babel had signed a confession testifying that he had been recruited into a spy network in 1927 by Ilya Ehrenburg and for years systematically supplied André Malraux with the secrets of Soviet aviation—the last detail apparently borrowed from Babel’s late screenplay, Number 4 Staraya Square (1939), which chronicles the byzantine intrigues among scientists in a plant devoted to the construction of Soviet dirigibles.

“I am innocent. I have never been a spy,” Babel says in the transcript of his twenty-minute “trial,” which took place in Beria’s chambers. “I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others . . . I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.” Babel was executed by firing squad in the basement of the Lubyanka on January 26, 1940, and his body was dumped in a communal grave. Nineteen forty, not 1941: even the death certificate had been a lie.

The first time I read Isaac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with a Jesus-like beard, an affinity for Russian literature, and a melancholy sense of humor, such that one afternoon he even “realized” the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: “You’re going to die. And you’re going to die. And you’re going to die.” I still remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused.

In this class we were assigned to read “My First Goose,” the story of a Jewish intellectual’s first night at a new Red Army billet during the 1920 campaign. Immediately upon his arrival, his new comrades, illiterate Cossacks, greet him by throwing his suitcase in the street. The intellectual, noticing a goose waddling around the billet, steps on its neck, impales it on a saber, and orders the landlady to cook it for his dinner. The Cossacks then accept him as one of their own and make room for him at the fireside, where he reads them one of Lenin’s speeches from a recent issue of Pravda.

When I first read this story in college, it made absolutely no sense to me. Why did he have to kill that goose? What was so great about sitting around a campfire, reading Lenin? Among the stories we read in that class, Chekhov’s “Lady with Lapdog” moved me much more deeply. I especially remember the passage about how everyone has two lives—one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other “running its course in secret”—and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything you hold most important, interesting, and meaningful is somehow in the second life, the secret one. In fact, this theme of a second, secret life is extremely important to Babel, but I didn’t figure that out until later.

The second time I read Babel was in graduate school, for a seminar on literary biography. I read the 1920 diary and the entire Red Cavalry cycle in one sitting, on a rainy Saturday in February, while baking a Black Forest cake. As Babel immortalized for posterity the military embarrassment of the botched 1920 Russo-Polish campaign, so he immortalized for me the culinary embarrassment of this cake, which came out of the oven looking like an old hat and which, after I had optimistically treated it with half a two-dollar bottle of Kirschwasser, produced the final pansensory impression of an old hat soaked in cough syrup.

There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover. Often, it’s the material circumstances themselves that make you remember a book that way—but sometimes it’s the other way around. I’m sure that my memory of that afternoon—the smell of rain and baking chocolate, the depressing apartment with its inflatable sofa, the sliding glass door that overlooked rainy palm trees and a Safeway parking lot—is due to the precious, almost-lost quality of Babel’s 1920 diary.

The diary starts on page fifty-five—Babel lost the first fifty-four pages. Three days later, another twenty-one pages go missing—a month’s worth of entries. “Slept badly, thinking of the manuscripts,” Babel writes. “Dejection, loss of energy, I know I will get over it, but when?” For the next couple of days, despite all his efforts, everything reminds him of the lost pages: “A peasant (Parfenty Melnik, the one who did his military service in Elisavetpol) complains that his horse is swollen with milk, they took away her foal, sadness, the manuscripts, the manuscripts . . .”

The diary isn’t about war, but about a writer during a war—about a writer voraciously experiencing war as a source of material. Viktor Shklovsky, who invented the theory that literary subject material is always secondary to literary form, was a great admirer of Babel. “He wasn’t alienated from life,” Shklovsky wrote. “But it always seemed to me that Babel, when he went to bed every night, appended his signature to the day he had just lived, as if it were a story.” Babel wasn’t alienated from life—to the contrary, he sought it out—but he was incapable of living it otherwise than as the material for 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, the Polish 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 have been 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 youth, with his soft voice, droopy soul, and sharp mind?”

“What is Grishchuk? Submissiveness, endless silence, boundless indolence. Fifty versts from home, hasn’t been home in six years, doesn’t run.”

“I go into the mill. What is a water mill? Describe.”

“Describe the forest.”

“Two emaciated horses, describe the horses.”

“Describe the air, the soldiers.”

“Describe the bazaar, baskets of cherries, the inside of the tavern.”

“Describe this unendurable rain.”

“Describe ‘rapid fire.’ ”

“Describe the wounded.”

“The intolerable desire to sleep—describe.”

“Absolutely must describe limping Gubanov, scourge of the regiment.”

“Describe Bakhturov, Ivan Ivanovich, and Petro.”

“The castle of Count Raciborski. A seventy-year-old man and his ninety-year-old mother. People say it was always just the two of them, that they’re crazy. Describe.”

Babel’s “describe” in his diaries shares a certain melancholy quality with Watson’s mention of those of Sherlock Holmes’s cases that do not appear in his annals: “the case of the Darlington substitution scandal,” the “singular affair of the aluminum crutch,” “the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra . . . for which the world is not yet prepared.” All the stories that will never be told—all the writers who were not allowed to finish! It’s much more comforting to think that, in their way, the promises have already been executed—that perhaps Babel has already sufficiently described limping Gubanov, scourge of the regiment, and that the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra is, after all, already the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Babel does return to the Raciborskis in Red Cavalry: “A ninety-year-old countess and her son had lived in the castle. She had tormented him for not having given the dying clan any heirs, and—the muzhiks told me this—she used to beat him with the coachman’s whip.” But even with the Zolaesque note of hereditary vitiation, the Turgenevian kinkiness of the coachman’s whip, and the hinted Soviet rhetoric of a knightly Poland “gone berserk” (a phrase from Babel’s own propaganda work), the “description” is still just two sentences.

• • •

One of the most chilling relics to emerge from Babel’s KGB dossier was the pair of mug shots taken upon his arrest in 1939.

Photographed in profile, Babel gazes into the distance, chin raised, with an expression of pained resoluteness. Photographed face-on, however, he seems to be looking at something quite close to him. He seems to be looking at someone who he knows to be on the verge of committing a terrible action. Of these images, a German historian once observed: “Both show the writer without his glasses and with one black eye, medically speaking a monocle haematoma, evidence of the violence used against him.”

I felt sorry for the German historian. I understood that it was the inadequacy of “without his glasses and with one black eye” that drove him to use a phrase so absurd as “medically speaking a monocle haematoma.” The absence of glasses is unspeakably violent. You need long words, Latin words, to describe it. Babel was never photographed without his glasses. He never wrote without them, either. His narrator always has, to quote a popular line from the Odessa stories, “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” Another famous line, spoken by Babel’s narrator to a nearsighted comrade at a beautiful Finnish winter resort: “I beg you, Alexander Fyodorovich, buy a pair of glasses!”

In “My First Goose,” the Cossack divisional commander yells at the Jewish intellectual: “They send you over without asking—and here you’ll get killed just for wearing glasses! So, you think you can live with us?” The glasses represent precisely Babel’s determination to live with them, to watch their every move, with an attention bordering on love—to see everything and write it all down. “Everything about Babel gave an impression of all-consuming curiosity,” Nadezhda Mandelstam once wrote: “the way he held his head, his mouth and chin, and particularly his eyes. It is not often that one sees such undisguised curiosity in the eyes of a grownup. I had the feeling that Babel’s main driving force was the unbridled curiosity with which he scrutinized life and people.” That’s what they took away when they replaced his glasses with the monocle haematoma.

I had been persuaded to sign up for the biography seminar by one of my classmates, Matej, who knew the professor. “He’s a textbook Jewish intellectual from New York,” Matej said excitedly, as if describing some rare woodland creature. (Matej was a textbook Catholic intellectual from Zagreb.) “When he talks about Isaac Babel, he gets so excited that he starts to stutter. But it’s not the annoying kind of stutter that obstructs understanding. It’s an endearing stutter that makes you feel sympathy and affection.”

At the end of the term, Matej and I had agreed to collaborate on a presentation about Babel. We met one cold, gray afternoon at a dirty metal table outside the library, where we compared notes, drank coffee, and went through nearly an entire pack of Matej’s Winston Lights, which, I learned, he ordered in bulk from an Indian reservation. We settled on a general angle right away, but when it came to details, we didn’t see eye to eye on anything. For nearly an hour we argued about a single sentence in “The Tachanka Theory”: a story about the transformation of warfare by the tachanka, a wagon with a machine gun attached to the back. Once it is armed with tachanki, Babel writes, a Ukrainian village ceases to be a military target, because the guns can be buried under haystacks.

When it started to rain, Matej and I decided to go into the library to look up the Russian original of the sentence we disagreed about: “These hidden points—suggested, but not directly perceived—yield in their sum a construction of the new Ukrainian village: savage, rebellious, and self-seeking.” Even once we had the Russian text, though, we still disagreed about the meaning of “hidden points.” Rereading this story now, I can’t see what we could have been debating for so long, but I remember Matej saying irritably, “You’re making it sound as if he’s just adding things up, like he’s some kind of double-entry bookkeeper.”

“That’s exactly right,” I snapped. “He is a double-entry bookkeeper!”

We concluded that we would never agree on anything because I was a materialist, whereas he had a fundamentally religious view of history. Finally we parted ways, Matej to write about Babel’s replacement of old gods with a new mythology, and I to write about Babel as a bookkeeper.

“How good it is,” writes Mandelstam, “that I managed to love not the priestly flame of the icon lamp but the little red flame of literary spite!” I don’t know if Matej wrote his presentation in the priestly flame of the icon lamp, but I think it was literary spite that made me want to prove that Babel “was really” a bookkeeper. But, to my own surprise, it actually turned out to be true: not only did accountants and clerks keep turning up in Babel’s stories, but Babel himself had been educated at the Kiev Commercial Institute, where he received top marks in general accounting. I was particularly struck by the story “Pan Apolek,” in which the Polish protagonist calls the narrator “Mr. Clerk”—“pan pisar’ ” in the original. Pan is Polish for “sir” or “Mr.,” and pisar’ is a Russian word for “clerk.” In Polish, however, pisarz means not “clerk,” but “writer.” Pan Apolek was trying to call the narrator “Mr. Writer,” but the writer in the Red Cavalry turned into a clerk.

I ended up writing about the double-entry relationship in Babel’s work between literature and lived experience, centering on “Pan Apolek” (the story of a village church painter who endows biblical figures with the faces of his fellow villagers: a double-entry of preexisting artistic form with observations from life). The seminar presentation went well, and I expanded upon it a few months later at a Slavic colloquium, where it caught the interest of the department Babel expert, Grisha Freidin. Freidin said he would help me revise the paper for publication—“Why would you study the gospel with anyone but St. Peter?” he demanded—and offered me a job doing research for his new critical biography of Babel.

The title of the book was fluctuating at that time between A Jew on Horseback and The Other Babel. I was fascinated by the idea of The Other Babel, namely, that Babel wasn’t who we thought he was, or who said he was: he was some other person. His “Autobiography”—a document barely one and a half pages long—is full of untruths, such as his claim to have worked for the Cheka starting in October 1917, two months before the Cheka was founded, or to have fought on “the Romanian front.” “Now you might think ‘the Romanian front’ is a joke,” Freidin said. “Well, it’s not, it seems it really did exist. But Babel was never there.”

Babel’s undocumented life was likewise full of mysteries—chief among them, why he had returned to Moscow from Paris in 1933, after having spent nearly all of 1932 struggling to get permission to go abroad. Stranger still, why, in 1935, just when the purges were starting, did Babel begin making plans to bring his mother, sister, wife, and daughter from Brussels and Paris back to the Soviet Union?

As my first research assignment, I went to the Herbert Hoover archive to look up the Russian émigré newspapers in Paris from 1934 and 1935, starting with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, to see how much Babel’s family would have known about the purges. The newspapers hadn’t been transferred to microfilm, and the originals, which had been bound in enormous, tombstone-size books, couldn’t be photocopied because of the fragility of the paper. I sat in a corner with my laptop, typing out the lists of people who had been shot or sent to Siberia, typing the headlines about Kirov, and other headlines like “Who Burned the Reichstag?” and “Bonnie and Clyde Shot Dead.” Hours slipped by and the next thing I knew, all the lights went out. When I got up, I realized that the entire library was not only dark but also deserted and locked. I banged on the locked doors for a while with no result, then felt my way through the dark to a hallway with administrative offices, where I was happy to discover a tiny Russian woman reading a microfiche and eating lasagna from a tiny plastic box. She seemed surprised to see me, and even more surprised when I asked for directions on how to leave the building.

“ ‘Get out’?” she echoed, as if referring to the exotic custom of an unknown people. “Ah, I do not know.”

“Oh,” I said. “But how are you going to get out?”

“Me? Well, it is . . .” She glanced away, evasively. “But I show you something.” She got up from her desk, took a flashlight from a drawer, and went back into the hallway, motioning me to follow. We came to an emergency door with a big sign: ALARM WILL SOUND.

“It is not locked,” she said. “But behind you, it will lock.”

The alarm did not sound. I went down several flights of steps and out another fire door, and found myself in the yellow late-afternoon sunlight, standing in a concrete well below ground level. At the main entrance to Hoover Tower, just around the corner, two Chinese women wearing enormous straw hats were rapping on the door. I unlocked my bicycle and slowly rode home. I had no idea why Babel wanted his family to come back to the Soviet Union in 1935.

That month, Freidin began organizing an international Babel conference, to be held at Stanford, and I started working on an accompanying exhibit of literary materials from the Hoover archive.

The contents of the hundred-plus boxes on Babel turned out to be extremely diverse, a bit like one of those looted Polish manors: copies of Red Cavalry in Spanish and Hebrew; “original watercolors” of the Polish conflict, executed circa 1970; a Big Book of Jewish Humor, circa 1990; an issue of the avant-garde journal LEF, edited by Mayakovsky; The Way They Were, a book of childhood photographs of famous people, in alphabetical order, with a bookmark to the page where fourteen-year-old Babel in a sailor suit was facing a teenage Joan Baez. There was a book on the Cavalry Army designed by Alexander Rodchenko, with a photograph of Commander Budyonny’s mother, Melaniya Nikitichna, standing outside a hut, squinting at the camera, bearing in her arms a baby goose. (“Budyonny’s first goose,” observed Freidin, “and Budyonny’s trousers.” The trousers were hanging on a clothesline in the background.)

I had also been instructed to choose two propaganda posters from 1920, one Polish and one Soviet. The exhibit coordinator took me into a labyrinthine basement, where a new collection was being indexed. On top of a bank of filing cabinets lay various posters from 1920 representing Russia as the Whore of Babylon, or as the four horsemen of the apocalypse, on horses with Lenin and Trotsky heads; one showed Christ’s body lying in the postapocalyptic rubble—“This Is How All of Poland Will Look, Once Conquered by the Bolsheviks”—bringing to mind Babel’s diary entry about “the looting of an old church”: “how many counts and serfs, magnificent Italian art, rosy Paters rocking the infant Jesus, Rembrandt . . . It’s very clear, the old gods are being destroyed.”

“I’m sorry we don’t have any Russian propaganda posters,” the coordinator said. “I’m afraid it’s a bit one-sided.”

“But look,” I said, noticing some Cyrillic script in the stack. “Here is one in Russian.” I drew out an enormous poster showing a slavering bulldog wearing a king’s crown: “Majestic Poland: Last Dog of the Entente.”

“Oh, sure,” said the coordinator, “there are posters in Russian, but they aren’t pro-Bolshevik. These are all Polish posters.”

I stared at the poster, wondering why Polish people had chosen that terrifying, wild-eyed dog as a representation of “Majestic Poland.” Then I spotted a second poster in Russian, with a picture of a round little capitalist with a mustache and a derby hat—like the Monopoly man, but holding a whip.

“ ‘The Polish masters want to turn the Russian peasants into slaves,’ ” I read aloud. I suggested it was difficult to interpret this as a pro-Polish poster.

The coordinator nodded enthusiastically: “Yes, these posters are full of ambiguous imagery.”

Back upstairs in the reading room, I put on my gloves—everyone in the archive had to wear white cotton gloves, like at Alice’s mad tea party—and turned to a box of 1920 Polish war memorabilia. My eye was caught by a single yellowed sheet of paper with a printed Polish text signed by Commander in Chief Józef Piłsudski, July 3, 1920, beginning with the phrase “Obywatele Rzeczpospolitej!” I recognized the phrase from Babel’s diary entry of July 15. He had found a copy of this very proclamation on the ground in Belyov: “ ‘We will remember you, everything will be for you, Soldiers of the Rzceczpospolita!’ Touching, sad, without the steel of Bolshevik slogans . . . no words like order, ideals, and living in freedom.”

In Red Cavalry, the narrator discovers this same proclamation while accidentally urinating on a corpse in the dark:

I switched on my flashlight . . . and saw lying on the ground the body of a Pole, drenched in my urine. A notebook and scraps of Piłsudski’s proclamation lay next to the corpse. In the . . . notebook, his expenses, a list of performances at the Krakow Dramatic Theater, and the birthday of a woman by the name of Maria-Louisa. I used the proclamation of Piłsudski, marshal and commander-in-chief, to wipe the stinking liquid from my unknown brother’s skull, and then I walked on, bent under the weight of my saddle.

To think this was the very document I was holding in my hands! I wondered whether it was really such an unlikely coincidence. Probably thousands of copies had been printed, so why shouldn’t one of them have ended up in the archive—it’s not as if the Hoover had received the exact copy with Babel’s urine on it, although Freidin did start making jokes to the effect that we should exhibit the proclamation “side by side with a bottle of urine.” The joke was directed at the Hoover staff, who kept hinting that the exhibit would be more accessible to the general community if all those books and papers were offset by “more three-dimensional objects.” Somebody suggested we construct a diorama based on the ending of “The Rabbi’s Son,” with pictures of Maimonides and Lenin, and a phylactery. Freidin maintained that if we included the phylactery, we would have to have “the withered genitalia of an aging Semite,” which also appear at the end of the story. The diorama idea was abandoned.

Finding the Piłsudski proclamation made me realize that, even if the withered genitalia were lost to posterity, textual objects related to Babel’s writings might still be uncovered. I decided to look for materials related to my favorite character in the 1920 diary, Frank Mosher, the captured American pilot whom Babel interrogates on July 14:

A shot-down American pilot, barefoot but elegant, neck like a column, dazzlingly white teeth, his uniform covered with oil and dirt. He asks me worriedly: Did I maybe commit a crime by fighting against Soviet Russia? Our position is strong. O the scent of Europe, coffee, civilization, strength, ancient culture, many thoughts. I watch him, can’t let him go. A letter from Major Fauntleroy: things in Poland are bad, there’s no constitution, the Bolsheviks are strong . . . An endless conversation with Mosher, I sink into the past, they’ll shake you up, Mosher, ekh, Conan Doyle, letters to New York. Is Mosher fooling—he keeps asking frantically what Bolshevism is. A sad, heartwarming impression.

I loved this passage because of the mention of Conan Doyle, coffee, someone called Major Fauntleroy, and the “sad, heartwarming impression.” Furthermore, “Frank Mosher” was the alias of Captain Merian Caldwell Cooper, future creator and producer of the motion picture King Kong. This really happened: in Galicia in July 1920, the future creator of King Kong was interrogated by the future creator of Red Cavalry. And when I looked up Merian Cooper in the library catalogue, it was like magic: Hoover turned out to hold the bulk of his papers.

Merian Cooper, I learned, was born in 1894, the same year as Babel. He served as a pilot in the First World War, commanded a squadron in the battle of St.-Mihiel, was shot down in flames in the Argonne, and spent the last months of the war in a German prison, where he “was thrown with Russians a good deal” and developed a lifelong aversion to Bolshevism. In 1918 he was awarded a Purple Heart. In 1919 he joined nine other American pilots in the Kosciuszko Air Squadron, an official unit of the Polish Air Force, to combat the Red menace under the command of Major Cedric Fauntleroy. Cooper took his pseudonym, Corporal Frank R. Mosher, from the waistband of the secondhand underwear he had received from the Red Cross.

On July 13, 1920, the Associated Press reported that Cooper had been “brought down by Cossacks” behind enemy lines in Galicia. According to local peasants, Cooper had been “rushed by horsemen of Budyonny’s cavalry,” and would have been killed on the spot, had not an unnamed English-speaking Bolshevik interfered on his behalf. The next day, July 14, the Frank Mosher entry appears in Babel’s diary.

Although Cooper left a “sad, heartwarming impression” on Babel, Babel seems to have left no particular impression on Cooper, who recorded nothing of their “endless conversation.” Of his time in the Red Cavalry, he has written only of his interrogation by Budyonny, who invited him “to join the Bolshevist army as an aviation instructor.” (Babel was right, by the way; Mosher was fooling when he pretended to wonder whether he had committed “a crime by fighting against Soviet Russia.”) Refusing to become a flight instructor, Cooper found himself “the ‘guest’ of a Bolshevist flying squadron for five days. I escaped, but was recaptured after two days, and taken under heavy guard to Moscow.” He spent the winter shoveling snow from the Moscow railway line. In the spring, he escaped Vladykino Prison in the company of two Polish lieutenants, and hopped freight trains up to the Latvian frontier (“We adapted the American hobo methods to our circumstances”). At the border, they were obliged to bribe the guards. Cooper handed over his boots, and made another barefoot entrance in Riga.

One of Cooper’s fellow pilots, Kenneth Shrewsbury, had kept a scrapbook—and, by a marvelous stroke of luck, it had also ended up at Stanford. Using a dry-plate camera, Shrewsbury had documented the entire Polish campaign, as well as an initial stopover in Paris. (There was a group portrait of the entire Kosciuszko squadron standing outside the Ritz; a long shot of the Champs-Élysées, eerily deserted except for a single horse-drawn carriage and two automobiles; and a close-up of a swan in what looked like the Tuileries.) For weeks I had been looking at 1920s photographs of Galicia and Volhynia, but these were the first that looked like the same place Babel was describing. Everything was there: a village clumped at the foot of a medieval castle, a church “destroyed by the Bolsheviks,” airplanes, the handsome Major Fauntleroy, “Jews leveling a field,” “Polish mechanics,” mounted troops riding past a pharmacy in Podolia—and Cooper himself, looking just like Babel described him, big, American, with a neck like a column. In one photograph he was smiling slightly and holding a pipe, like Arthur Conan Doyle.

Cooper turned to filmmaking in 1923, in collaboration with fellow Russo-Polish veteran Captain Ernest B. Schoedsack. Looking for “danger, adventure, and natural beauty,” they went to Turkey and filmed the annual migration of the Bakhtiari tribe to Persia (Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life); next, in Thailand, they filmed Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), about a resourceful Lao family who dig a pit outside their house to catch wild animals. All kinds of animals turn up in the pit: leopards, tigers, a white gibbon, and finally a mysterious creature called a chang, eventually revealed to be a baby elephant. Cooper claimed that, while filming Chang, he was able to predict the cast’s behavior based on phases of the moon. A passionate aeronaut, Cooper often looked to the sky for answers: among his papers I found a letter from the 1950s outlining his plan to colonize the solar system, in order to both stymie the Soviets and solve California’s impending crises of human and automobile overpopulation.

In 1931, the year Babel published “The Awakening,” Cooper devised the premise for King Kong: on a remote island, a documentary filmmaker and his team discover the “highest representative of prehistoric animal life.” The documentary filmmaker would be a composite of Cooper and Schoedsack: “Put us in it,” Cooper instructed the scriptwriters. “Give it the spirit of a real Cooper-Schoedsack expedition.” The team would bring the prehistoric monster to New York City to “confront our materialistic, mechanistic civilization.”

I borrowed King Kong from the library that week. Watching the gigantic ape hanging off the Empire State Building, swiping at the biplanes, I realized that Babel had painted an analogous scene in “Squadron Commander Trunov.” At the end of the story, Trunov stands on a hill with a machine gun to take on four bombers from the Kosciuszko Squadron—“machines from the air squadron of Major Fauntleroy, large, armored machines . . . The airplanes came flying over the station in tighter circles, rattled fussily high in the air, plunged, drew arcs . . .” Like King Kong, Trunov has no plane. Like King Kong, he goes down. From the DVD notes, I learned that the pilots in the close-up shots of the Empire State Building scene were none other than Schoedsack and Cooper themselves, acting on Cooper’s suggestion that “We should kill the sonofabitch ourselves.” In other words, King Kong and Commander Trunov were both shot down by members of the Kosciuszko Squadron.

The other fascinating detail of King Kong’s production is that the set for Skull Island was used at night to represent Ship-Trap Island in Cooper and Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game, an adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story. The Most Dangerous Game finds the two stars of King Kong, Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray, again marooned on a tropical island, where they must again contend with a primitive monster: a mad Cossack cavalry general who hunts shipwrecked sailors for sport, attended by his mute sidekick, Ivan. (“A gigantic creature, solidly made and black bearded to the waist,” Ivan “once had the honor of serving as official knouter to the Great White Tsar.”)

I reported these findings to Grisha Freidin. “Well look, there he is! Squadron Commander Trunov!” he exclaimed, peering at the film still I had brought, showing King Kong and the navy planes. “The image must have been in the collective unconscious,” he mused. “You know what we should do? We should go back to Hoover and look at all the anti-Bolshevik posters. I am certain that we will find one representing Bolshevism as a giant ape.”

He telephoned the archive directly and asked them to run a search for ape and propaganda in the poster database. The eighteen-page printout was waiting for me when I got there. Unfortunately, it included not just the keyword ape but any word beginning with ape- in any language.

The actual apes, once isolated from items such as “Apertura a sinistra” and “25 lat Apelu Sztokholmskiego,” proved to be few in number. First was a German poster of an ape in a Prussian hat, grabbing a woman in one paw, and holding in the other a club labeled “Kultur.” I had no idea how to interpret this image, but decided it wasn’t related to Bolshevism. Next was a Hungarian poster whose central figure, described in the catalogue as an “ape man,” looked more like an extremely ugly human, covered in blood, which he was attempting to wash off in the Danube at the foot of the Parliament.

Just as I was starting to wonder how I would break the news to Freidin, I happened upon an Italian World War II poster: “La mostruosa minaccia torna a pesare sull’Europa.” The monstrous menace of Bolshevism was represented as a bright red, embarrassed-looking ape, standing on a map of Europe and brandishing a sickle and hammer. The artist, possibly concerned that the ape hadn’t come out menacing enough, had taken the precaution of representing a masked figure of Death standing behind its shoulder.

One ape on a map of Europe, the other on the Empire State Building. I took off the white gloves; my work here was done.

Or so I thought. First, my copy was sent back to me with a note: “Please call ASAP regarding portrayal of Cossacks as primitive monsters.” I tried to explain that I myself wasn’t calling the Cossacks primitive monsters—I was only suggesting that others had felt that way. The exhibit coordinator disagreed. Others, she said, didn’t consider Cossacks to be primitive monsters: “In fact, Cossacks have a rather romantic image.”

I debated citing the entry for Cossack in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas—“Eats tallow candles”—but instead I simply observed the likelihood of any Cossacks actually attending the exhibit was very slim.

“Well, that’s really not the point. Anyway, you never know in California.”

A few days later, I began to receive phone calls about the “three-dimensional objects.” “Elif, glad I caught you! How would you feel if we put a fur hat in your Red Cavalry display case?”

I considered this. “What kind of fur hat?”

“Well, that’s the thing, I’m afraid it’s not quite authentic. Someone picked it up at a flea market in Moscow. But it looks, you know, like a Russian fur hat.”

“Thanks so much for asking me,” I said, “but I really think it should be up to Professor Freidin.”

“Oh,” she said. “Professor Freidin is not going to want that hat in the display case.”

“No,” I acknowledged.

The next day, the telephone rang again. “OK, Elif, tell me what you think: we’ll put, sort of lying along the bottom of your display case—a Cossack national costume.”

“A Cossack national costume?” I repeated.

“Well—well—OK, the problem is that it’s child’s size. It’s sort of a children’s Cossack costume. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. I mean, because it’s in a child’s size, it will definitely fit in the case, which might not happen with an adult-size costume.”

Nearly every day they thought of something new: a samovar, a Talmud, a three-foot rubber King Kong. Finally they settled on a giant Cossack saber, also, I suspect, acquired at the Moscow flea market. They put the saber in a case that had no semantic link to sabers, so people at the exhibit kept asking me what it meant. “Why didn’t it go in the display about ‘My First Goose’?” one visitor asked. “At least that story has a saber in it.”

By that time, the conference had begun. Scholars arrived from around the world: Russia, Hungary, Uzbekistan. One professor came from Ben Gurion with a bibliography called “Babelobibliografiya” and a talk titled “Babel, Bialik, and Bereavement.” But the star guests were Babel’s children: Nathalie, the daughter from his wife Evgeniya; and Lidiya, the daughter from Antonina Pirozhkova, with whom Babel lived his last years.

When it turned out that Antonina Pirozhkova would be in attendance, my classmate Josh was ecstatic. Josh’s parents were Star Wars fans and his full name is Joshua Sky Walker; to differentiate him from other Joshes, he was often called Skywalker. Skywalker was also working on the exhibit and, based on photographs from the 1930s, had developed a crush on Pirozhkova.

“Man, do I hope I get to pick her up from the airport,” he said.

“You do realize she must be more than ninety years old?”

“I don’t care—she is so hot. You don’t understand.”

I did understand, actually. I had noticed some Cossacks in the Rodchenko book whom I would gladly have picked up from the airport, were it not that, in accordance with my prediction, none of them came to the conference.

Skywalker, however, got his wish: he and his friend Fishkin, a native Russian speaker, were appointed to pick up Pirozhkova and Lidiya, the Sunday before the conference. I was initially supposed to pick up Nathalie Babel, but Nathalie Babel had called the department to warn that she had a very heavy trunk: “You must send me a strong male graduate student. Otherwise, do not bother. I will take a bus.” So a male graduate student had been sent, and I had the afternoon free. I was cramming for my university orals, trying to read all eighteen pounds of the Human Comedy in one month, and was desperately speed-reading Louis Lambert when the telephone rang. It was Skywalker, who had apparently broken his foot the previous night at the Euromed 13 dance party, and wanted me to go pick up Pirozhkova and Lidiya. “You can’t miss them,” he said. “It’ll be, like, a ninety-year-old woman who is gorgeous and a fifty-year-old woman who looks exactly like Isaac Babel.”

“But—but what happened to Fishkin?”

“Fishkin went to Tahoe.”

“How do you mean, he went to Tahoe?”

“Well, it’s kind of a funny story, but the thing is that their plane lands in half an hour . . .”

I hung up the phone and rushed outside to dump all the garbage that had accumulated in my car. Realizing that I didn’t remember Antonina Pirozhkova’s patronymic, I ran back inside and Googled her. I was halfway out the door again when I also realized I had forgotten how to say “He broke his foot” in Russian. I looked that up, too. I wrote BABEL in big letters on a sheet of paper, stuffed it in my bag, and ran out the door, repeating “Antonina Nikolayevna, slomal nogu.”

I got to SFO ten minutes after their plane had landed. For half an hour I wandered around the terminal holding my BABEL sign, looking for a gorgeous ninety-year-old woman and a fifty-year-old woman who looked like Isaac Babel. Of the many people at the airport that day, none came close to matching this description.

In despair, I called Freidin and explained the situation. There was a long silence. “They won’t be looking for you,” he said finally. “They’re expecting a boy.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “What if they didn’t see a boy and, you know, they took a bus.”

“Well, my gut feeling is that they’re still there, in the airport.” He had been right about the Bolshevik ape, so I decided to keep looking. Sure enough, ten minutes later I spotted her sitting in a corner, wearing a white headband and surrounded by suitcases: a tiny elderly woman, nonetheless recognizable as the beauty from the archive photographs.

“Antonina Nikolayevna!” I exclaimed, beaming.

She glanced at me and turned slightly away, as if hoping I would disappear.

I tried again. “Excuse me, hello, are you here for the Babel conference?” She quickly turned toward me. “Babel,” she said, sitting up. “Babel, yes.”

“I’m so glad—I’m sorry you were waiting. A boy was going to get you, but he broke his foot.”

She gave me a look. “You are glad,” she observed, “you are smiling, but Lidiya is suffering and nervous. She went to look for a telephone.”

“Oh no!” I said, looking around. There were no telephones in sight. “I’ll go, I’ll look for her.”

“Why should you go, too? Then you’ll both be lost. Better you should sit here and wait.”

I sat, trying to look appropriately somber, and dialed Freidin again.

“Thank goodness,” he said. “I knew they would still be there. How is Pirozhkova? Is she very angry?”

I looked at Pirozhkova. She did look a bit angry. “I don’t know,” I said.

“They told me they would send a Russian boy,” she said loudly. “A boy who knows Russian.”

• • •

The atmosphere in the car was somehow tense. Lidiya, who did indeed look very much like her father, sat in the front seat, reading aloud from every billboard. “ ‘Nokia Wireless,’ ” she said. “ ‘Johnnie Walker.’ ”

Pirozhkova sat in the back and spoke only once the whole trip: “Ask her,” she told Lidiya, “what is that thing on her mirror.”

The thing on my mirror was a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy, a tiny stuffed Eeyore wearing a tiger suit. “It’s a toy,” I said.

“A toy,” Lidiya said loudly, half turning. “It’s an animal.”

“Yes, but what kind of animal?”

“It’s a donkey,” I said. “A donkey in a tiger suit.”

“You see, Mama?” said Lidiya loudly. “It’s a donkey in a tiger suit.”

“I don’t understand. Is there a story behind this?”

The story, to my knowledge, was that Tigger had developed a neurosis about being adopted and having no heritage, so Eeyore put on a tiger suit and pretended to be his relative. As I was thinking of how to explain this, another patch of orange caught my eye. I glanced at the dashboard: it was the low fuel warning light.

“It’s not my donkey,” I said, switching off the fan. “It’s my friend’s donkey.”

“What did she say?” Pirozhkova asked Lidiya.

“She said that it’s her friend’s donkey. So she doesn’t know why he’s wearing a tiger suit.”

“What?” said Pirozhkova.

Lidiya rolled her eyes. “She said that the donkey put on the tiger suit in order to look stronger in front of the other donkeys.”

There was a silence.

“I don’t think she said that,” said Pirozhkova.

We drove by another billboard: “ ‘Ted Lempert for State Senate.’ ”

“Ted Lempert,” Lidiya mused, then turned to me. “Who is this Ted Lempert?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he wants to be senator.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Lempert. I knew a Lempert once—an artist. His name was Vladimir. Vladimir Lempert.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to think of something to say. “I’m reading a novel by Balzac now about somebody called Louis Lambert.” I tried to pronounce “Lambert” to sound like “Lempert.”

We drove the rest of the way to the hotel in silence.

Babel’s first daughter, Nathalie, looked younger than her age (seventy-four), but her voice was fathomless, sepulchral, with heavy French r’s.

“YOUR HAND IS VERY COLD,” she told me when we were introduced. It was later that same evening, and all the conference participants were heading to the Hoover Pavilion for an opening reception.

“We have black squirrels here at Stanford,” another graduate student told Nathalie Babel, pointing at a squirrel. “Have you ever seen a black squirrel?”

Nathalie glanced vaguely in the direction of the squirrel. “I CANNOT SEE ANYTHING ANYMORE,” she said. “I cannot hear, I cannot see, I cannot walk. For this reason,” she continued, eyeing the steep cement stairway to the pavilion, “everyone thinks I am always drunk.”

At the top of the stairs, two Chinese men were taking turns photographing each other with Viktor Zhivov, a Berkeley professor with a kind expression and a tobacco-stained Old Believer beard.

“Lots of Chinese,” I overheard someone say in Russian.

“True. It’s not clear why.”

“They’re taking pictures with Zhivov.”

“They want to prove that they’ve been to California. Ha! Ha!”

The two Chinese were in fact filmmakers, whose adaptation of the Red Cavalry cycle, Qi Bing Jun, was supposed to premiere in Shanghai the following year. (I believe the project was eventually canceled.) The screenwriter was tall, round-faced, smiled a lot, and spoke very good English; the director was short, slight, serious, and didn’t seem to speak at all. Both wore large cameras around their necks.

In the Chinese Red Cavalry, the screenwriter told us, Cossacks would be transformed into “barbarians from the north of China”; the Jewish narrator would be represented by a Chinese intellectual. “There are not so many differences between Jews and Chinese,” he explained. “They give their children violin lessons, and they worry about money. Lyutov will be a Chinese, but he will still have ‘spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.’ ” At nose, he touched his nose, and at heart, he struck his chest. The director nodded.

Looking at the Chinese filmmakers, I remembered Viktor Shklovsky’s account of how Babel spent the whole year 1919 writing and rewriting “a story about two Chinese.” “They grew young, they aged, broke windows, beat up a woman, organized this or that”; Babel hadn’t finished with them when he joined the Red Cavalry. In the 1920 diary, “the story about the Chinese” becomes part of the propaganda that Babel relays in the pillaged shtetls: “I tell fairy tales about Bolshevism, its blossoming, the express trains, the Moscow textile mills, the universities, the free food, the Revel Delegation, and, to crown it off, my tale about the Chinese, and I enthrall all these poor tortured people.” At Stanford, we had it all: a university, free food, and, to crown it off, the Chinese.

Not all of the Russians were as delighted by the Chinese as I was. “We don’t mess with your I Ching . . . ,” I overheard one audience member saying.

Some Russian people are skeptical or even offended when foreigners claim an interest in Russian literature. I still remember the passport control officer who stamped my first student visa. He suggested to me that there might be some American writers, “Jack London for example,” whom I could study in America: “the language would be easier and you wouldn’t need a visa.” The resistance can be especially high when it comes to Babel, who wrote in an idiosyncratic Russian-Jewish Odessa vernacular—a language and humor that Russian-Jewish Odessans earned the hard way. While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can’t do that, what’s it good for? On these grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov’s “specifically Jewish alienation.”

“Right,” I finally said. “As a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.”

He nodded: “So you see the problem.”

• • •

The reception was followed by a dinner, which began with toasts. A professor from Moscow was proposing a toast to Pirozhkova. “In Russian we have an expression, a little-known but good expression, that we say when someone dies: ‘He ordered us to live a long time.’ Now I look at Antonina Nikolayevna and I think of Babel who died before his time, and I think, ‘Babel ordered her to live a long time.’ We are so lucky for this, because she can tell us all the things that only she knows. A long life to Antonina Nikolayevna!”

This toast struck me as both bizarre and depressing. I downed nearly a whole glass of wine and became light-headed to the extent that I almost told a dirty joke to Freidin’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Anna. Anna, who was applying to colleges, had asked about undergraduate advising at Harvard. I told her about my freshman adviser, a middle-aged British woman who held advisee meetings in a pub—once I missed our meeting because they were checking IDs at the door—and who worked in the telecommunications office.

“The telecommunications office?”

“Uh-huh. I would see her there when I went to pay my phone bill.”

“Did she have any other connection to Harvard, other than working in the telecommunications office? Was she an alumna?”

“Yeah, she got an MA in the seventies, in Old Norse literature.”

Anna stared at me. “Old Norse literature? What good is an MA in Old Norse literature?”

“I think it’s useful in telecommunications work,” I said.

“Old Norse literature,” Anna repeated. “Hmm. Well, it must be a fecund area of study. Aren’t the Norse the ones who invented Thor, god of thunder?”

“Oh—I know a joke about Thor!” The joke involves the comic exchange between Thor and a farmer’s daughter: “I AM THOR!” says Thor, to which the farmer’s daughter replies: “I’m thor, too, but I had tho much fun!”

“So Thor comes down to earth for a day,” I began, when I suddenly became conscious that Joseph Frank—the Stanford emeritus famous for his magisterial five-volume biography of Dostoevsky—had abandoned the lively discussion he had been having with a Berkeley professor about Louis XIII. Both were regarding me from across the table with unblinking interest.

“You know,” I said to Anna, “I just remembered it’s kind of an inappropriate joke. Maybe I’ll tell you another time.”

By now, every single person at the table was staring at me. Frank leaned over the arm of his wheelchair toward Freidin’s wife, a professor at Berkeley who was also in a wheelchair. “Who is that?” he asked loudly.

“That is Elif, a graduate student who has been very helpful to Grisha,” she replied.

“Ah.” Joseph Frank nodded and turned his attention to his pasta.

These events took a toll on me, and I overslept the next morning, missing the nine a.m. panel on biography. I got to the conference center as everyone was leaving for lunch, and immediately spotted Luba, who is my height, with huge, sad, gray eyes, and an enormous quantity of extremely curly hair.

“Elishka!” she exclaimed. “Did you just wake up? Don’t worry, I wrote everything down for you, in case you want to use it in a novel.” We went to the student union for lunch, and Luba told me about the panel.

Three different people were writing biographies about Babel. The first, Freidin, presented on the Other Babel. The second, an American journalist, talked about her experiences researching Babel’s life in 1962 Moscow. She had interviewed Babel’s old acquaintance, the French chargé d’affaires, Jacques de Beaumarchais (descendant of the author of Figaro), and was followed by the KGB, whom Beaumarchais gallantly instructed “Fichez le camp!” but the KGB took her in for questioning anyway. The third, Werner Platt, a German who taught Russian history in Tashkent, read a paper called “Writing a Biography of Isaac Babel: A Detective’s Task,” largely about getting kicked out of various Russian archives and not managing to find out anything about Babel. On the premise that “good detective work means returning to the scene of the crime,” the historian had made pilgrimages to Babel’s old house in Odessa, the Moscow apartment, the dacha in Peredelkino—only to find that all had been torn down. Undiscouraged, Platt got on a bus to Lemberg. In his diary Babel had mentioned Budyonny’s decision not to attack Lemberg in 1920: “Why not? Craziness, or the impossibility of taking a city by cavalry?” Looking around Lemberg, Platt concluded that, as Babel had implied by calling Budyonny’s withdrawal “crazy,” Lemberg was indeed a beautiful city.

His talk was poorly received. Someone had muttered: “For an incompetent scholar, everything is ‘a detective’s task.’ ” It seemed that some of the documents that Platt had been unable to access in the archives had been published years ago. “You can buy this in the Barnes & Noble,” someone said.

Platt had also made some provocative claims about the lost manuscripts, which led to a free-for-all about the location and contents of the missing folders.

“Empty!” an unknown Russian had shouted. “The folders were empty!”

Nathalie Babel had stood up and taken the microphone—“The best part,” Luba said, sitting up straighter and reading from her notebook in a deep, sepulchral voice.

“WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, I WAS TOLD THAT MY PUPPY WAS A WRITER.” Pause. “LATER I HEARD PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT ISAAC BABEL, SAYING THAT HE WAS A GREAT WRITER.” Pause. “TO ME, HE WAS MY PUPPY.”

Long pause.

“I AM CONFUSED.”

Another pause.

“I AM CONFUSED.”

One minute, two minutes passed, in total silence. Finally, somebody asked Nathalie whether it was true that she was “still sitting on some unpublished letters.”

Nathalie Babel sighed. “LET ME TELL YOU A STORY ABOUT LETTERS.” The story was that Nathalie Babel had come into possession of a trunk of her father’s letters. (“Her puppy’s letters,” Luba explained.) “I KNEW THE BIOGRAPHER WOULD COME,” she said, “BUT HE ANNOYED ME. SO I GAVE THE LETTERS TO MY AUNT. WHEN THE BIOGRAPHER CAME, I SAID, ‘I HAVE NOTHING.’ ” And where were the letters now? Nathalie Babel didn’t know. “MAYBE THEY ARE UNDER MY BED, I DON’T REMEMBER.” The panel ended in pandemonium.

Later that afternoon, after the panel on Babel and World Literature, I rode my bike back to the graduate-student housing complex and nearly ran over Fishkin, who was standing outside wearing pajamas and smoking a cigarette. I welcomed him back from Tahoe, and asked how he was enjoying the conference. Fishkin, I learned, was not enjoying the conference. Not only was he in trouble about Tahoe, but Boris Zalevsky, a well-known twentieth-centuryist, had given him the finger in the parking lot.

“Is that a joke?” I asked.

“N-n-no!” said Fishkin, who stuttered at emotional moments. “He really did it, I swear!”

I had been baffled by Zalevsky’s character ever since the question-answer session after that afternoon’s panel. A famous professor of comparative literature had just read what struck me as an incredibly lame paper comparing a passage in Madame Bovary, in which flies are dying in the bottom of a glass of cider, to Babel’s description of the death of Squadron Commander Trunov. (The similarity was supposedly that both Babel and Flaubert were aestheticizing the banal.) The moderator—my adviser, Monika Greenleaf—returning to the subject of those flies in the cider, had compared them to the inkwell full of dead flies at the miser’s estate in Dead Souls, and also to Captain Lebyadkin’s lyric about cannibalistic flies in a jar in Dostoevsky’s Demons. I thought this was a much more promising line of comparison—in fact, Babel, too, had a passage about “flies dying in a jar filled with milky liquid” in a Tiflis hotel. A beautiful passage: “Each fly was dying in its own way.” But before my adviser could get to her point about dead flies, Zalevsky had interrupted: “The Flaubert example was pertinent, but your example is not pertinent.”

This had confused me, because I had actually liked Zalevsky’s paper. It had been far more interesting than the one about “aestheticizing the banal” and the “rapture of perception.” But if he was such a smart guy, why was he (a) praising a mediocre paper and (b) being rude to Monika, who had at her fingertips every fly that had ever drowned in the whole Russian canon?

“He must be bipolar,” I told Fishkin. “So how did it happen?”

Fishkin had had his turn signal on and was about to pull into a parking spot when suddenly a car came around the corner from the opposite direction and slipped in before him. The driver of this car proceeded to give Fishkin the finger—and, as if that weren’t enough, he had gone and turned out to be Zalevsky!

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I-I-I turned my head, like this”—Fishkin turned his head to the left—“so that he wouldn’t see my face. Then I drove away.”

Back in my apartment, I made some tea and settled down to get through some more Balzac. But there was no escaping from Babel. In one of the critical forewords I found the following anecdote, which Balzac used to tell about his father’s early career as a clerk to the public prosecutor in Paris, and which might justly be titled “My First Partridge”:

According to the custom of the time [Balzac’s father] took his meals with the other clerks at his employer’s table . . . The Prosecutor’s wife, who was eyeing up the new clerk, asked him, “Monsieur Balzac, do you know how to carve?” “Yes, Madame,” the young man replied, blushing to the roots of his hair. He plucked up his courage and grabbed the knife and fork. Being entirely ignorant of culinary anatomy, he divided the partridge into four, but with such vigor that he smashed the plate, ripped the tablecloth and carved right through to the wood of the table. The Prosecutor’s wife smiled, and from that day on the young clerk was treated with great respect in the house.

As in “My First Goose,” a young man starts a new job, goes to live among people from a potentially unwelcoming culture, and attains respect and acceptance through the mutilation of poultry.

The anecdote appears in Théophile Gautier’s 1859 biography of Balzac. I wondered if it could be shown that Babel had read Gautier. Then I wondered whether there was anything to eat at home. There wasn’t. I got in my car and was driving down El Camino Real when my cell phone started ringing. The phone played a cheerful melody, but the letters on the screen spelled “FREIDIN.”

“Professor Freidin! What a pleasant surprise!”

“Elif, hello. I don’t know if it is pleasant or a surprise, but, yes, this is Grisha.”

Freidin was at a dinner for the conference participants. He was experiencing confusion due to the lack at this dinner of any graduate-student presence. “You are not here. Fishkin isn’t here. Josh isn’t here. Nobody is here. It looks—well, it looks strange. It’s a bit embarrassing.”

“But we weren’t invited to the dinner,” I pointed out.

Silence.

“I see. You were waiting to be invited.”

I made the next U-turn and headed to the faculty club.

Of the four tables in the private room, three were completely full, and one completely empty. As I was considering whether to sit at the empty table by myself, Freidin noticed me and made a space between him and Janet Lind, a professor who had edited the first English translation of the 1920 diary. The others at the table were Nathalie Babel; the American journalist; Werner Platt; a literature professor from Budapest; and a translator who had recently published the first English edition of Babel’s collected works.

Freidin introduced me to Janet Lind, and suggested that we might like to talk about King Kong. It rapidly emerged that she and I had very little to say to one another about King Kong. What little spark there had been in this conversation was soon extinguished by Nathalie Babel, who was staring at Lind with a fixed, unbenevolent expression. A chilly silence descended upon the table.

“JANET,” Nathalie said finally, in her fathomless voice. “IS IT TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME?”

Janet Lind turned to her calmly. “I beg your pardon?”

“IS IT TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME?”

“I can’t imagine what makes you say that.”

“I say it because I would like to know if it is TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME.”

“That is an extremely odd question. What gives you an idea like that?”

“I just think you were told that I’m a NASTY OLD WITCH.”

“This is really extremely odd. Did someone say something to you?” Lind frowned slightly. “You and I have barely had any interactions.”

“Even so, I had the impression—that you DESPISE ME.”

This conversation continued for longer than one would have thought possible, given how clear it was that Janet Lind, for whatever reason, was just not going to tell Nathalie Babel that she did not despise her. Looking from Lind to Babel, I was struck by the nontrivial truth behind the Smiths song: “Some girls are bigger than others.” It wasn’t just that Nathalie Babel’s face was physically larger—it was somehow visibly clear that she came from a different place and time, where the human scale was different, and bigger.

“Come, Nathalie,” Freidin interceded.

She fixed him with her deep, watery eyes. “SOME PEOPLE DO DESPISE ME, YOU KNOW . . .” She sighed, and pointed at two wineglasses: “Which of these is my glass?”

“They’re both yours.”

“Oh? I can’t see anything. Which is water?”

“It looks to me like they’re both white wine.”

Nathalie stared at him. “AND WHY DO I HAVE TWO GLASSES OF WINE?”

“Why do you say it like it’s a bad thing? If it were me, I would think, ‘This must mean that I’ve done something very good.’ Here, however, is your water glass.”

“Ah.” Nathalie Babel took a drink of water.

There was a long silence.

“So,” Platt said to Freidin, as the waiters were bringing out the entrées. “I hear that Slavic department enrollments are declining in the United States.”

“Oh, do you? Well, you’re probably right.”

“Do you notice a decline here at Stanford?”

“I’d say we’ve had a pretty fair enrollment the past few years.”

“What about graduate students—do you have many graduate students? I have somehow not seen your students.”

“Here is Elif,” said Freidin. “She is one of our graduate students.”

Platt peered at me over the rims of his glasses for several seconds, then turned back to Freidin. “Yes—so. I see you have one specimen. Are there many others?”

By this point we had all been served some cutlets swimming in a sea of butter. These cutlets appeared to depress everyone. The Hungarian scholar even sent hers back, with detailed instructions. It reappeared a few minutes later, with no modification visible to the naked eye.

Toward the end of the meal, Lidiya Babel came over from her table, stood behind Nathalie’s chair, put her arms around her shoulders, and patted her head. “My darling,” she said, “how I love you! How good it is that we are all together!”

Nathalie glanced over her shoulder, with the expression of a cat who does not want to be picked up.

Freidin looked from Nathalie to Lidiya. “Thank you!” he exclaimed. “Thank you, Lidiya!”

Lidiya stared at him. “What for?”

“For coming! In your place maybe I would have hesitated.”

“What do you mean to say—that you would find it difficult to travel with my mother?”

“No, of course not—but it’s a long distance, an unknown place . . .”

“Speaking of your mother,” Nathalie told Lidiya, “how old is she anyway? Some people say ninety-two, some people say ninety-six. Or is it a secret?”

“My mother is ninety-five.”

“She doesn’t look a day over ninety-three,” said Freidin gallantly.

“It’s true, she’s in good health and looks well,” Lidiya said. “However, not as well as she looked two years ago. But that isn’t the main thing. The main thing is that everything is still all right here.” She tapped her temple. “Her memory and her understanding.”

When Lidiya went back to her table, Nathalie followed her with her eyes.

“THAT OLD WITCH WILL BURY US ALL,” she remarked.

“Nathalie!” said Freidin.

She turned to stare at him. “YOU THINK I SHOULD KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT,” she observed. “But—WHY? WHAT DO I HAVE TO LOSE? I HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE.”

Freidin looked nonplussed. “Well, then, I guess you should risk everything,” he said. And, making a visible effort to change the subject: “Nathalie, now that you’re here, there is something I’ve been dying to ask you. What was your aunt’s name? One sees it written so many ways. Meriam, Miriam, Mary, Maria—which was it?”

“Oh! Do tell us the correct spelling!” exclaimed Platt, his eyes lighting up.

Nathalie looked at him. “I don’t understand what you mean by the correct spelling. Some called her Meriam, others Mary, others Maria. All three were used.”

“How interesting,” said Janet Lind, turning to Freidin. “I’m surprised you haven’t already gone to Odessa and looked it up in the municipal register.”

“I’m afraid there are many other surprises where that came from. I’ve always wanted to go to Odessa and look all these things up, but it somehow never happened.”

“Why don’t you go now?”

“For the same reason that the Babel conference is here, at Stanford: I don’t really travel.”

“Why not?” asked the American journalist.

Freidin explained that his wife’s health kept him in the area, which I thought would end the discussion, but it didn’t.

“Well, your daughter still lives with you, doesn’t she?” someone asked. “Can’t your daughter stay with her?”

“Anna is an enormous source of support and happiness, but she is eighteen years old, and she has a busy life of her own.”

The journalist looked thoughtful. “You know what I think?” she said. “I think you should get her a dog.”

Freidin stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“You should get your wife a dog,” the journalist explained. “It will change her life.”

“I really don’t see what a dog has to do with any of this.”

“The dog will change her life!”

“What makes you think that her life needs to be changed?” There was another silence. “There are various things that cannot be accomplished by a dog.”

The journalist looked downcast. “I just thought that if she’s sick, the dog can cuddle with her.”

“Cuddling is not the problem,” said Freidin firmly.

The journalist nodded. “I can see I’ve said something wrong,” she said. “But I’m just crazy about dogs.” She looked truly sorry.

“We did have a dog once, years ago,” Freidin said, in a conciliatory tone, “called Kutya.”

The Hungarian professor, a mournful-looking woman in gray, looked up with interest. “Kutya means ‘dog’ in Hungarian!” she said. She spoke in a head voice, a bit like a puppet.

“We think Kutya might have had some Hungarian blood. He had a complicated heritage—part German shepherd, part Labrador retriever, and part bass baritone.”

“Your dog could sing? Did he also speak? We had a cat once who could speak.”

Silence.

“What—,” I ventured, and cleared my throat. “What did your cat say?”

The Hungarian professor stared at me. “ ‘I’m hungry,’ ” she sang out.

The one person at the table who had remained completely silent during these exchanges was the English translator: a lithe, handsome man—a former dancer, I later learned—with high cheekbones, narrow eyes, and a faintly contemptuous expression. He spoke British English, with a hint of a foreign accent.

His translation was itself an enigma: there were passages of such brilliance that you would stare from the original to the English and wonder how anyone had arrived at anything so unlikely and yet dead-on, but there were also strange discrepancies. For example, at the end of “My First Fee,” Babel writes, “I will not die before I wrest from the hands of love one more—and this will be the last—gold coin”; the translation reads: “I will not die until I snatch one more gold ruble (and definitely not the last one!) from love’s hands.” In “Guy de Maupassant,” Babel writes: “Night bolstered my hungry youth with a bottle of ’83 Muscatel.” The translation says, “Night obstructed my youth with a bottle of Muscatel ’83.” The book was full of such odd changes. Babel says “at nine o’clock”; the translation says “shortly after eight.” Babel says “at midnight”; the translation says “after eleven.” Freidin didn’t like the way “giving the fig” was rendered as “thumbing one’s nose,” or the passage in which the homeless poet during the Petrograd famine has “Siberian salmon caviar and a pound of bread in [his] pocket”: on the grounds that “homeless people do not carry caviar in their pockets,” Freidin considered the correct translation to be “salmon roe.”

Because of these and other disagreements, we all ended up writing our own translations, with a note that “many translations were used in the preparation of this exhibit, including . . .”

Everything had seemed fine until the end of the dinner, when the handsome translator suddenly turned to Freidin.

“You know,” he said, “I went to your exhibit yesterday, and I noticed something strange. Perhaps you can explain it to me.” He had noticed his own book in a glass case, open to Babel’s story “Odessa”—next to a caption quoting “Odessa,” in a different translation.

“Copyediting,” Freidin said promptly. “Hoover ran all our text through copyediting. You would not believe the changes they made.” He told the story of the copy editor who had translated all the italicized Yiddish in such a way that Luftmensch (an impractical visionary) came out as “pilot”; shamas (the beadle of a synagogue) turned, via “shamus,” into “private detective.”

The translator looked completely unamused. “So you’re saying that the Hoover copy editors changed my translation?”

“Well, I’m saying that these texts went through many different hands.”

“But what am I supposed to think, as a translator? My book is put on display next to something I didn’t write. Is it possible to take some sort of legal action?”

Freidin paused. “Michael,” he said, “we all like your translation, and we are grateful to you. I want us to be friends. Let’s not talk about legal action. It doesn’t even make sense. We didn’t charge admission for the exhibit.”

“That isn’t the point. The point is that there in the display case I see my book, and next to it I see a typed quotation with mistakes. And you’re telling me nobody can be held accountable because you didn’t charge admission?”

“Michael. I want us to be friends. Now let’s be honest. Were there mistakes in the exhibit? Yes! There are mistakes everywhere. There are mistakes in the Complete Works, if it comes to that.”

The translator, who had excellent posture, sat up even straighter. “What mistake? Do you mean in the notes? That was corrected in the paperback.”

“No, I’m not talking about the notes.”

“Well, frankly, I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Michael, I want us to be friends. The Complete Works is very, very good. We all like it very much. But in translating Babel—in translating anyone—mistakes are unavoidable. I have found mistakes. Elif has found mistakes.” The translator briefly turned his hooded eyes in my direction. “But I want us to be friends.”

“Do you see what I’m up against?” Freidin demanded. We were standing outside the conference hall after dinner. The Chinese were about to give their presentation. A junior professor of symbolism was standing nearby, smoking.

“What happened?” the symbolist asked.

“What didn’t happen? It was a dinner from Dostoevsky, that’s all.”

“In what sense? ‘The Two Families’?”

“Well, there was that.”

“And what else?”

“Well—” Freidin broke off, glancing into the hall, where two professors and one Chinese filmmaker were crawling under a table, doing something with extension cords. “Excuse me.” As Freidin hurried into the conference room, Lidiya Babel came up the stairs trailed by several International Babel Scholars, who were perhaps hoping to learn the things that only she could tell us. “Do you know,” one of them said, “of those two Chinese, one is a Muslim?”

“Which one?”

“The short one.”

“Are there many Chinese Muslims?” Lidiya asked.

“He is not Chinese!” shouted a depressed-looking historian.

Everyone turned and looked at him.

“I don’t think he’s really Chinese,” the historian repeated.

“He does look—different,” said Lidiya.

“Maybe he is a Uighur,” Zalevsky suggested.

“Wha-a-at?”

“A Uighur, a Uighur, a Uighur.”

“When I asked the other Chinese what his religion was,” continued the first scholar, “he said to me, ‘My religion is Isaac Babel.’ ”

“Very strange,” said the historian.

Everyone turned to Lidiya Babel, as if awaiting some response. “It’s an interesting thing,” she said slowly. “I once knew a man who married a German woman, and they went to China and photographed Chinese children. Their pictures were put in a book, and published: a book of photographs of Chinese children. But the really interesting thing is that when they asked the man what kind of women he preferred, he would always say: ‘Oh, ethereal—like a butterfly.’ But when you saw the German woman—she was completely round.”

There was a long pause.

“Ah, yes,” said the symbolist finally. “ ‘The eternal disjuncture between reality and the dream.’ ”

“Completely round,” repeated Lidiya Babel. “Whereas later, she ate nothing but cucumbers and black caviar, and now she’s altogether thin. Of course, this was when black caviar in Russia sold for next to nothing.”

I felt a strange feeling, close to panic. What if that was it, the thing that only she could tell us?

Inside the conference hall, the Chinese filmmakers sat at a long table in front of a flickering screen. The screenwriter smiled and made eye contact with everyone who came in. The director stared impassively into the back corner of the room. I wondered what he was thinking about, and whether he was really a Uighur.

“I used to be a student here at Stanford,” the screenwriter began. “Right here. I used to study computer programming. I used to work all night in the computer cluster next door. Then I took a creative writing class to learn how to write stories. There, my teacher assigned Isaac Babel’s story ‘My First Goose.’ This story changed my life.”

I was amazed anew at the varieties of human experience: to think we had both read the same story under such similar circumstances, and it had had such different effects on us.

“Babel was like the father to me,” continued the screenwriter. “I consider myself Babel’s son. Therefore, Nathalie and Lidiya are my sisters.” Something in the air suggested that not everyone in the audience had followed him in these logical steps. “Today I was able to shake hands with Nathalie, Lidiya, and Pirozhkova. I feel that I touched Babel’s hand. I hope Babel is up there watching us right now!”

Next, the director gave a short address in Chinese, and the screenwriter translated. “I had the foundations of my existence rocked by Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. His prose is so concise.” The director gave a little nod when he heard the English word “concise.” He went on to express his admiration of Babel’s deep understanding of the relationship between men and horses. He himself was a horseman, and had filmed the movie known as the first Chinese Western. He had made films in all genres, including action, war, and family.

“I am so grateful because here I met Babel scholars from all over the world and the universe,” the address concluded. “I saw so much passion! I can’t show you my film of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, because I haven’t made it yet. Instead I will show you some of my film, the first Chinese Western, Swordsmen in Double Flag Town. Then you will see how I feel about horses, and maybe you will understand how I feel about Isaac Babel.”

The DVD was inserted into somebody’s laptop and projected onto a big screen. The sound didn’t work. Yellow dunes flashed silently by, a desert, the galloping legs of a horse, a row of Chinese characters. “Swordsmen in Double Flag Town!” cried the director, flinging out one arm. These were the first words he had spoken in English.

Later that night, Matej and I met at the picnic tables outside the housing complex. The world had changed two years’ worth since the biography class. I had moved from the apartment across from the Safeway to a studio on campus. Matej now bought his Winston Lights from Australia, instead of from the American Indians. Matej had brought four bottles of beer—three for him and one for me—and I told him my story about the two Chinese, about their gratitude for having met scholars from all over the world, and the universe. “I think I saw one of them this afternoon,” Matej said. “I saw one scholar, who was from the world, talking to another scholar, who was from elsewhere in the universe.”

The subject of interplanetary visitors reminded me to tell Matej about Cooper’s plan to simultaneously resolve the West Coast population boom and the Sputnik crisis by exporting Californians to the moon.

“What—like Nikolai Fyodorov?” Matej riposted.

I had forgotten all about Nikolai Fyodorov, the influential Russian philosopher who declared the future tasks of mankind to be the abolishment of death, the universal resurrection of all dead people, and the colonization of outer space (so the resurrected people would have somewhere to live).

Fyodorov published almost nothing in his lifetime. He worked as a librarian in Moscow, where his visitors included both the aging Lev Tolstoy and the teenage Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who, in 1903—the year of Fyodorov’s death—mathematically proved the possibility of spaceflight. Tsiolkovsky went on to become the “grandfather of Soviet cosmonautics,” and Soviet cosmonautics was Cooper’s bête noire: “So there really is a path from Fyodorov to Cooper!” I concluded.

“If there wasn’t, you would find one anyway,” Matej replied. “You remind me of a Croatian proverb: the snow falls, not in order to cover the hill, but in order that the beast can leave its tracks.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, it’s kind of an enigmatic proverb.”

We talked then about Matej’s current object of study: something called “the problem of the person.” The problem, Matej explained, was that personhood is revealed and constituted by action, such that the whole person is always present in every action—and yet the person isn’t “exhausted” by any single action, or even by the sum of all her actions. The action of writing “My First Goose,” for example, expresses Babel’s whole person (it isn’t the case that only part of Babel wrote “My First Goose,” while part of him remained uninvolved); nonetheless, neither “My First Goose,” nor even the sum total of Babel’s writings, express everything about him as a person.

“One way of putting it is like this,” Matej said. “When you’re in love with someone, what exactly is it you love?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s just it, you see—you love . . . the person.”

The person is never exhausted by his actions: there is always something left over. But what is that precious remainder—where do you find it?

Reflecting upon the problem of the person, I was brought to mind of a novel I had always liked, but never quite understood: Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859), the story of a man so incapable of action or decision-making that he doesn’t get off his sofa for the whole of part 1. In the first chapter, Oblomov receives various visitors who are active in different spheres of human activity. In all these forms of activity, Oblomov deplores the absence of “the person.” A socialite rushes in, talks of balls, dinner parties, and tableaux vivants, and then rushes away, exclaiming that he has ten calls to make. “Ten visits in one day,” Oblomov marvels. “Is this a life? Where is the person in all this?” And he rolls over, glad that he can stay put on his sofa, “safeguarding his peace and his human dignity.”

The second visitor, a former colleague from the civil service, tells Oblomov about his recent promotion to department head, his new privileges and responsibilities. “In time he’ll be a big shot and reach a high rank,” Oblomov muses. “That’s what we call a career! But how little of the person it requires: his mind, his will, his feelings aren’t needed.” Stretching out his limbs, Oblomov feels proud that he doesn’t have any reports to write, and that here on the sofa there is “ample scope both for his feelings and his imagination.”

I saw now that the problem of the person was the key to Oblomov’s laziness. So loath is Oblomov to be reduced to the mere sum of his actions that he decides to systematically not act—thereby to reveal more fully his true person, and bask in it unadulterated.

Oblomov’s third visitor, a critic, arrives in rapture over the invention of literary realism. “All the hidden wires are exposed, all the rungs of the social ladder are carefully examined,” he gushes. “Every category of fallen woman is analyzed—French, German, Finnish, and all the others . . . it’s all so true to life!” Oblomov not only refuses to read any realist works, but becomes almost impassioned. “Where is the person in all this? . . . They describe a thief or a prostitute, but forget the person, or are incapable of depicting him . . . The person, I demand the person!” he shouts.

Thinking over the problem of the person in the context of literary realism, I remembered a sentence from Babel’s diary that I had initially taken as a joke: “What is this gluttonous, pitiful, tall youth, with his soft voice, droopy soul, and sharp mind?” It wasn’t a joke—the question was where, in these characteristics, was the person? What was the person? In a speech in 1936, Babel described a change in his view of literary production: formerly, he had believed that the events of their time were so unusual and so surprising that all he had to do was write them down and “they would speak for themselves,” but this literature of “objectivism” had turned out “uninteresting.” “In my work there had been no person,” Babel concluded. “The person had escaped himself.” Three years later, the NKVD took him in, and didn’t let him finish. The person had escaped for good.

The conversation with Matej turned to the way people are formed by their influences, by the fatal roles of others in their lives. I remember saying that I didn’t believe Babel when he described Maupassant as the most significant of his literary influences.

“I suppose you have some other influence in mind?”

“Well . . . Cervantes.” My latest theory was based on Babel’s incorporation into one of his stories of various elements from the biography of Cervantes, who had worked for seven years as a bookkeeper for the Spanish Armada.

“My fear when I listen to you,” Matej said finally, “is you remind me of this German philosopher.” This German, Leo Strauss, had written a commentary to Western philosophy, arguing that all the greatest philosophers had felt it necessary to encrypt their real ideas. In the commentary, Strauss took it as his mission to reveal the Other Plato, the Other Hobbes, the Other Spinoza, all saying things that Plato and Hobbes and Spinoza had left unspoken.

“A lot of the ideas he attributes to Spinoza are interesting,” Matej said, “but if Spinoza really thought those things, why didn’t he say so?”

As he spoke these words, two figures approached through the darkness: Fishkin and Skywalker.

“Elif!” said Skywalker. “Just the person we wanted to see. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” said Fishkin unhappily.

“Fishkin has something to tell you. Doesn’t he?”

“Yes.” Fishkin took a deep breath. “Remember how I said yesterday that Zalevsky gave me the finger? Well, actually it happened d-differently . . .” He trailed off.

“Ye-e-s?” Skywalker prompted.

“Actually,” Fishkin said, “I gave him the finger. I had finally found a parking spot and was about to pull in—when all of a sudden this car came speeding from the opposite direction and stole my spot. Naturally, I gave the guy the finger. Then he gave me the finger, and I saw it was Zalevsky. Then I drove away. I meant to tell you the truth yesterday. But when I said Zalevsky gave me the finger, you were like, ‘Oh my God, what a monster!’—I just couldn’t tell you I did it first.”

A straightforward relationship to factual truth never was one of Babel’s top priorities. “I was a boy who told lies,” begins one of the Childhood stories: “This came from reading.” A later story about reading, “Guy de Maupassant,” ends with a largely incorrect retelling of Édouard de Maynial’s biography of Maupassant: “Having achieved fame, he cut his throat at the age of forty, bled profusely, but lived. They locked him in a madhouse. He crawled about on all fours and ate his own excrement . . .” Contemporary Babel scholarship has shown that “neither Maynial nor any other biographer has Maupassant walking on all fours or eating his excrement”; the image appears to be borrowed from either Nana (Count Muffat crawls at Nana’s feet, thinking of saints who “eat their own excrement”) or Madame Bovary (a reference to Voltaire on his deathbed, “devouring his own excrement”). In “Guy de Maupassant,” Babel mentions neither Voltaire nor Zola nor Flaubert—except to claim that Maupassant’s mother is Flaubert’s cousin: a false rumor explicitly controverted by Maynial.

Was Babel trying to establish the independence of the person from his deeds—the independence of Maupassant, the person, from his factually accurate biography? Was it about the “premonition of truth” being more true than historical fact?

Walking back to my apartment, I passed the laundry room. Warm, detergent-scented air gusted from vents near the floor and a stereo in the open window was playing Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”: I love your body and your spirit and your clothes.

What is it you love, when you’re in love? His clothes, his books, his toothbrush. All of the manufactured, formerly alienated commodities are magically rehabilitated as aspects of the person—as organic expressions of actions, of choice and use. After Eugene Onegin disappears in book 7, Tatyana starts visiting his abandoned estate. She looks at his pool cues, his library, his riding crop, “And everything seems priceless to her.” “What is he?” she asks, poring over his books, examining the marks left by his thumbnail in the margins.

So, too, do scholars now pore over the articles that once belonged to Babel. One historian has annotated the inventory of belongings confiscated from Babel’s Moscow apartment, his apartment in the Great Nikolo-Vorobinsky Lane. (In her memoirs, Pirozhkova writes about how impressed she was to learn about the existence of the Great Nikolo-Vorobinsky Lane, whose name literally means “Great Lane of Nikolai and the Sparrows”; Babel told her the street was named after the nearby Church of St. Nikolai-on-the-Sparrows, which had been built “with the help of sparrows, that is to say, in order to raise money for its construction, sparrows were caught, cooked and sold.” This was totally untrue, as Vorobinsky actually came from an archaic word for “spindle,” only coincidentally sharing the same adjectival form as “sparrow,” but Babel could spin a story out of anything.) Can one glimpse the person, in the list of objects?

Binoculars—2 pr.

Manuscripts—15 folders

Drafts—43 it.

Schematic map of the motor transport network—1 it.

Foreign newspapers—4

Foreign magazines—9

Notebooks with notes—7 it.

Various letters—400 it.

Foreign letters and postcards—87 it.

Various telegrams—35 it.

Toothpaste—1 it.

Shaving cream

Suspenders—1 pr.

Old sandals

Duck for the bath

Soapdish—1

The fifteen folders of manuscripts vanished, along with the nine others seized from Babel’s dacha. As for the personal items, they were held for three months before being surrendered to the state as “revenue.” According to receipts, the binoculars eventually brought in 153 rubles and 39 kopeks, but there is no record of what happened to Babel’s rubber duck.