SOURCE: Danow, David K. “The Paradox of Red Cavalry.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 36, nos. 1-2 (March-June 1994): 43-54.

In the following essay, Danow considers the stories of Red Cavalry to be full of depictions of mindless violence coupled with futile attempts to understand such behavior.

In Red Cavalry the first story sets the tone: horrific violence thrust upon the unsuspecting narrator and reader, accompanied by a question at the end for which there is, and can be, no response. “And now I should wish to know … I should wish to know where in the whole world you could find another father like my father?” asks the daughter whose father has been butchered before her eyes.¹ The question itself, we are told, is delivered “with sudden and terrible violence.” In Babel's cycle of stories, violence that is sudden and terrible appears generic to the world he describes. That disturbing feature generates...