SOURCE: Hetenyi, Zsuzsa. “‘Up’ and ‘Down’, Madonna and Prostitute: The Role of Ambivalence in Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel.” Acta Litteraria Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 32, nos. 3-4 (1990): 309-26.

In the following essay, Hetenyi investigates the role of ambivalence as well as the significance of Christian mythology and biblical allusions in the stories of Red Cavalry.

The stories of Isaac Babel, which he combined into a whole in Red Cavalry, are united by the author's outlook, a coherent world view. The heroes, objects, landscapes and events become constituents of a system in the artistic method that I have called “the creation of a new myth”¹. The chief ingredient of this method is its constant allusions to the Christian myth, a parallelism reinforced at a variety of levels within the work. It is a less conspicuous but equally convincing fact that, in precisely twelve of his heroes, Babel, in creating them...