SOURCE: Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. “Isaak Babel and His Red Cavalry Cossacks.” In The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology, pp. 107-25. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Kornblatt finds a number of connections between Babel and Nikolai Gogol and analyzes Red Cavalry in light of the Cossack myth.

In his A History of Russian Literature, D. S. Mirsky praises Taras Bul'ba with an enthusiasm rare among students of Gogol. The novel is “heroic, frankly and openly heroic,” he writes, and “its place in Russian literature is unique—it has had no imitators or followers (except, perhaps, Babel in his stories of the Red Army).”¹ Maksim Gor'kii also suggested the comparison of Gogol and Isaak Babel (1894-41), but with little elaboration. He defended Babel, who had recently been attacked in the press, by claiming that Babel's Cossacks were bolder even than Gogol's...