SOURCE: Avins, Carol J. “Kinship and Concealment in Red Cavalry and Babel's 1920 Diary.” Slavic Review 53, no. 3 (fall 1994): 694-710.

In the following essay, Avins elucidates the relationship between Babel's diary and the stories of Red Cavalry, and she investigates identity and the expression of kinship as key thematic concerns in the book.

To begin, three encounters, and then some ruminations about two deaths, the veiling of identity and the expression of kinship. The encounters are from the diary Isaac Babel' kept during his service with Budenny's First Cavalry Army in the Polish campaign of 1920; the deaths are those that frame the work of fiction he drew from this experience, Red Cavalry.¹ That book begins and ends with the narrator contemplating a corpse—in each instance, the body of a Jewish man whose passing leads the narrator to confront the meanings of kinship and loss. In the first case, he...