SOURCE: Brown, Stephen. “The Jew among the Cossacks: Isaac Babel and the Red Cavalry in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920.” Slavonica 3, no. 1 (1996-1997): 29-43.

In the following essay, Brown discusses the autobiographical nature of the stories of Red Cavalry, asserting that “Babel's depiction of a Cossack Red Cavalry should be viewed not as a mere recounting of the facts of the writer's wartime experience but as an integral part of his pessimistic account of war and revolution.”

For the historian, Isaac Babel's literary masterpiece, Konarmiia, represents an intriguing blend of historical fact, autobiography and literary fantasy. Konarmiia is set amid a strange and nightmarish world of brutal Cossack cavalrymen, plundered Jewish settlements and the failure of the Soviet government's first attempt to bring about the export of communism during the Soviet-Polish War of 1920. The Konarmiia of the title refers to Semen Budennyi's First Cavalry Army, the Red Army's elite...