SOURCE: Tucker, Janet. “Skaz and Oral Usage as Satirical Devices in Isaak Babel's Red Calvary.”¹ Canadian-American Slavic Studies 34, no. 2 (summer 2000): 201-10.

In the following essay, Tucker considers Babel's use of skaz and the oral tradition in Red Cavalry as parodic devices.

Given the density and intricacy of his short story collection Red Cavalry, justifiably regarded as one of the great prose works of twentieth-century Russian literature, Isaak Babel' is notoriously difficult to pin down. Even the briefest of his tales masterfully develops the subject central to all of them: the violence inherent in the October Revolution and the civil war that followed it. No writer explores this theme more cogently than Babel'. There is no single element in his stories that more strikingly underscores the horror of this violence than Babel's use of skaz and images from the folktale.

Babel's employment of skaz, coupled with his references to...