SOURCE: Ehre, Milton. “Red Cavalry.” In Isaac Babel, pp. 63-86. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

In the following essay, Ehre categorizes the major thematic concerns of Red Cavalry and views the collection as Babel's attempt “to create an epic of a decisive historical moment.”

For all their charm, Odessa Tales still smack of the provincialism of the genre sketch. Red Cavalry is a work of sophisticated maturity. The most important fiction to come out of the Russian Revolution—its only real competitor is a poem, Blok's The Twelve—it can advance a claim to stand as the national epic of that momentous event. Red Cavalry is to the Russian Revolution what Tolstoy's War and Peace is to the Napoleonic invasion, an attempt of the literary imagination to grasp a climactic historical experience in the life of a people. Of course Tolstoy's novel is broader in scope and deeper in its...