Red Cavalry

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Red Cavalry (Russian: Конармия) is a collection of short stories by Russian author Isaac Babel. It was first published in the 1920s, but many of the stories were later banned in the USSR until the 1980s.

On the advice of Maxim Gorky, the young Babel, his literary career only beginning, set off to join the Soviet Red Cavalry as a war correspondent and propagandist. The legendary violence of the Red Cavalry, present in Babel's writings, seemed to harshly contrast the gentle nature of the young writer from Odessa. This contrast is also apparent in stories like "My First Goose," where the narrator, on account of his glasses, must prove himself worthy of his fellow soldier's camaraderie (and deny his 'intellectuality') by brutally killing a goose and ordering a woman to cook it.

The stories take place during the Polish-Soviet war and are based on Babel's own diary, which he maintained when he was a journalist assigned to the Semyon Budyonny's First Cavalry Army.

[edit] Bibliographic information

• Конармия
• Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry , W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, ISBN 0-393-32423-0. (Google Books link)