"Funny images" in I. Babel's short stories ("Odessa stories")

I. E. Babel talentedly described the life of the Odessa inhabitants of the early 20th century. The heroes of his story are mainly ordinary Jews from the lower strata of society. Many of them are forced by necessity to engage in unseemly acts from the point of view of the law. That is why the author has so many raiders, bandits, and scammers. Everyone lives their own life. Only grief can bring everyone together. Then we see that in addition to the bandits, there are also elders, and members of the society of Jewish clerks, and doctors of medicine, and chicken traders, and honorary milkmaids living on the street. The society is quite diverse and colorful. Despite the different occupations, all the inhabitants of the street are connected with each other by an imperceptible thread. That is why instant and amazing transformations are possible from an unlucky broker to an excellent manager, from a dissolute young man to a criminal gang, from an ordinary clerk during his lifetime to a symbol of the entire working people after his death. Even Jewish beggars at Jewish weddings are transformed and can claim a sip of Jamaican rum or “buttery Madeira,” as well as cigars from the Pierpont Morgan plantation and oranges from the outskirts of Jerusalem.
Thus, in his “Odessa Stories” the author talks about the life of the kings of the underworld, the raiders. It’s not easy for the main character Ben the King. On the one hand, he must withstand the onslaught of law enforcement agencies, the police, on the other hand, he must constantly prove his competence in terms of the leader, and his own. Babel talks about Benny Krik’s lightning-fast rise to the pinnacle of power: “Here is From Rook. The steel of his actions - will it not stand in comparison with the strength of the King? Here is Kolka Pakovsky. The madness of this contained everything that was needed in order to dominate... But why did only Benya Krik climb to the top of the rope ladder, while everyone else hung below, on the shaky steps? Probably, the whole point here is in reckless courage, an onslaught that knows no barriers and even mischief, characteristic of the King. People live in a certain atmosphere of daring. It is not customary to shed tears here. If you need something, reach out and take it. The main characters are shameless and freedom-loving. They are not afraid to attract the attention of others. The appearance of the characters speaks for itself: orange suits, crimson vests, red jackets, cream pants, crimson boots or sky blue shoes are in fashion. Despite the quite adult games, the heroes of Babel's stories to some extent remain children. Perhaps this is where the love for bright clothes and all kinds of trinkets, and childish spontaneity, and even cruel jokes come from. So, for example, when the famous rich man, the owner of numerous shops, Tartakovsky, not wanting to pay, runs away from the raiders who are making an attempt on his life and property for the ninth time, he encounters a funeral procession. She and the singers are moving along Sofiyskaya. The rich man's horror knew no bounds when he learned that it was him, Tartakovsky, who was being buried. The nicknames given by the raiders to each other are also childishly perspicacious and meaningful: Benya - King, Tartakovsky - One and a half Jews, Lyubka - Cossack, Ivan - Pyatirubel. Residents of Odessa neighborhoods are as generous as they are enterprising. Eg. At the wedding of Benny the King’s sister, the guests “showed what blue blood and undying Moldavian knighthood are worth..., with a careless movement of their hands they threw gold coins, rings, and coral threads onto silver trays.” Babel perfectly conveys the peculiarities of the conversation of Odessa residents, Jewish folk wisdom, which is formed through long observations of the surrounding reality, the activities of the common people, their sorrows and joys. Among the raiders, it is not customary to distribute honors according to seniority, since “stupid old age is no less pitiful than cowardly youth.” There is a kind of unwritten law at work here, according to which a person is assessed by his merits, by his ability to successfully survive in this world. Wealth does not play a decisive role, since everyone knows that “the lining of a heavy purse is made of tears.” The author conveys the unique Odessa flavor, humor, and through the conversation of his characters. So, for example, a messenger cannot simply convey a message, he “has to say a few words.” Any information is accompanied by a saying, an interesting colloquial expression: “every girl has her own interest in life, and only I live as a night watchman at someone else’s warehouse.” Many phrases from Babel’s stories become “volatile”: “let’s stop spreading porridge on the clean table”; “the shore to which I will wash will be a winner”, “Manya, you are not at work, calm down, Manya”, etc.
In his stories, Babel not only historically truthfully shows the life of the Odessa raiders, but also proves the doom of the people of the underworld. Death constantly accompanies the main characters. Despite their outward bragging and fearlessness, the Odessa raiders understand that their lives are in serious danger every day. Even Benya the King is not immune from trouble.

“The funny word” as the most pressing problem in the study of I. Babel’s short prose. Characteristics of the short story "The King". Death in the artistic world of I. Babel as the starting point of a farcical scene. Analysis of the main characters of the novel "How it was done in Odessa."

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One of the most pressing problems in the study of short prose by I.E. Babel can be called the writer’s use of the “laughing word.” Understanding the “funny word” as a category of poetics by M.M. Bakhtin, which “is realized in “ritual and entertainment forms”, “verbal and humorous works”, in “forms and genres of familiar common speech”, it can be noted that “Odessa Stories” is a more than productive narrative field where the “laughing word” is manifested through carnival “funny images”, which form an essential part of the general poetics of the novelistic cycle.

The title image of the first short story in the “King” series is quite traditional for humorous folk culture. The king and the jester, dressed as a king, are indispensable participants in any carnival, in the finale of which the impostor is dethroned. At the beginning of the story, the fake king is a new bailiff who represents state power. He is convinced that “where there is a sovereign emperor, there is no king,” so he decides to raid Benya Krik (King of Thieves) during his sister’s wedding. At the end of the story, according to the law of the carnival, Benya Krik, the real King of Moldavanka, debunks his opponent: “The policemen, shaking their butts, ran along the smoke-filled stairs. The firefighters were full of zeal, but there was no water in the nearest tap. The bailiff, the same broom that sweeps cleanly, stood on the opposite sidewalk and bit the mustache that was growing into his mouth.” The cleansing fire of the burning area serves as a talisman for the wedding event, which the bailiff wanted to destroy, for which he was punished.

Carnival time is wedding time. In “Odessa Stories,” a wedding is one of the main events in the life of a Moldavian woman. Two weddings are described by Babel in the short story “The King”: the marriage of Benya with Tsilya and Benya’s sister Dvoira Krik “with a puny boy bought with Eichbaum’s money.”

The marriage to Zila, Eichbaum’s daughter, is accompanied by motifs of abundance and fertility: “The newlyweds lived for three months in lush Bessarabia, among grapes, abundant food and the sweat of love.” One can agree with the opinion of M.B. Yampolsky, for whom the love that struck the King’s heart was a new victory for Crick, and not a “defeat,” as Babel wrote with irony, “his initiation into manhood.”

The second wedding organized by the King is a buffoonery. Krik uses Eichbaum’s money to buy a groom for his sister Dvoira: “forty-year-old Dvoira, disfigured by illness, with an enlarged goiter and eyes bulging out of her sockets, sat on a mountain of pillows next to the puny boy bought with Eichbaum’s money.”

If the regenerating power of Benny Krik’s wedding on Tsilya is conveyed through the obesity of Bessarabia, then in the second we observe the “protrusion” of the carnival world through the overgrown goiter and Dvoira’s eyes popping out of their sockets. If the first wedding is a triumph of love, then the second is its travesty, and the “newlyweds” Krik’s forty-year-old sister and the “skinny boy” are a clown couple who will perform their circus reprise at the end of the story: “Only Dvoira was not going to sleep. With both hands she pushed her timid husband to the door of their marriage room and looked at him carnivorously, like a cat that, holding a mouse in its mouth, lightly tastes it with its teeth.”

Researcher M. B. Yampolsky draws a parallel between “The King” and the short story from Babel’s “Cavalry” “Pan Apolek”. According to him, Crick’s matchmaking is a parody of the gospel story: Benya’s orange suit and Christ’s orange kuntush, Eichbaum’s instantly healed blow, which immediately “rose up” and the second miracle of Christ in Galilee. The literary critic compares Deborah from Apolek's parable with her carnival image of Dwoira. The correspondence is established on the basis of “symmetrical inversion: “the elephantine quality of Deborah’s husband corresponds to Dvoira’s “mouse”, Deborah’s vomit is Dwoira’s savoring of the unfortunate mouse clamped in her mouth.

Referring to the famous statement of V.N. Turbina: “And the Gospel is a carnival”, one cannot deny the presence in Babel’s cycle of funny allusions to the “gospel text”. Despite this, one must be careful when comparing the images of Beni and Christ, Dvoira and Deborah, since M.B. Yampolsky draws a parallel between stories published two years apart (“The King,” 1921; “Pan Apolek,” 1923).

Babel refers to the image of a wedding in the story “Father” when he describes the raiders going to the brothel of Ioska Samuelson: “Their eyes were bulging, one leg was out in each carriage, there was one person with a bouquet, and the coachmen, sticking out on high seats, were decorated bows, like best men at weddings.” The episode parodies and exaggerates the “wedding train” motif, with the help of which a grotesque image of the triumphant, protruding world of Moldavanka is created and compensates for the lack of description of another wedding of Baska Hrach and Benny Krik.

The marriage of the daughter of Froim Rook and the King of Thieves is not depicted by Babel, but knowing that the word of Beni Krik does not diverge from the deed, there is no doubt that the wedding took place. Most likely, her description did not fit into the artistic world created by Babel in Odessa Stories. The masculine Baska and the handsome Benchik would have been a comic couple, while the wedding itself, built on a monetary agreement between Krik and Froim Grach, would have looked buffoonish, which is why the king’s appearance noticeably faded in the eyes of readers.

Despite the lack of description of an arranged marriage, I.A. Esaulov notes that “in essence, the carnivalesque nature of Babel’s artistic world is only external, since behind it lies a very rational approach to “dominion,” when everything is decided by money, not passion. In part, one can agree with the logic of the researcher’s thoughts, but the material background of the events does not correspond to the romanticized artistic world of Moldavanka, in which, according to Babel, “passion reigns.”

If we turn to the original origins of the wedding, then it itself goes back to a ritual meal that “produces” the family. Therefore, when analyzing the wedding of Dvoira Creek, the feast images deserve special attention.

About the creative power of food and drink M.M. Bakhtin wrote: “Food and drink are one of the most important manifestations of the life of the grotesque body. The features of this body are its openness, incompleteness, its interaction with the world. The body goes beyond its boundaries here.”

At the beginning of the story “The King” the preparations for the dinner arranged in honor of Dvoira’s wedding are described: “tables placed along the entire length of the courtyard stuck their tails out of the gates. Tables covered with velvet curled around the courtyard like snakes, with patches of all colors placed on their bellies, and they they sang in deep voices.”

Apartments have been turned into kitchens, where “fat”, “drunk and plump flames” blaze; the symbolic expansion of the image of the hearth pushes the boundaries of the space of the artistic text. The hyperbolic nature of the description creates a feeling of a universal feast, which is confirmed by the implicit comparison of the tables curling “like snakes”, which, not fitting in the yard, “stuck their tail out of the gate.” The traditional image of the tiny eighty-year-old Reisl, the hostess of the wedding kitchen, is both a comic contrast between the tiny Reisl and the giant kitchen in which she “reigns”, and a symbol of fertility (Reisl is hunchbacked, and the hump in the “laughter culture” is endowed with productive power). Fertility is conveyed through the description of the feast's abundance: "At this wedding, turkeys, roast chickens, geese, stuffed fish and fish soup, foreign wine and oranges from the environs of Jerusalem were served for dinner."

The energy condensed during the wedding feast gets an outlet: the Jewish beggars, “having drunk on Jamaican rum like club pigs,” knock on their crutches, and the raiders begin to rage: “Leva Katsap broke a bottle of vodka on the head of his beloved. Monya The artilleryman fired into the air.” Drunkenness and beatings are an integral part of both the wedding ceremony and the carnival and laughter culture in general.

If Benny Krik’s wedding with Baska is a “carnival hoax,” then the beating of a drunken man by Lyubka Schneeweiss in the short story “The Father” can be mistaken for “wedding punches.” She hit “with a clenched fist in the face, like a tambourine, and with the other hand supported the man so that he would not fall off,” after which “he fell on the stones and fell asleep.” The scene looks comical, thanks to the comparison of the man’s face with a tambourine and the author’s commentary on the actions of the boy-woman. The height of comedy is the unexpected ending. A beating that ends in sleep, or a bandit raid that results in a magnificent funeral, fit organically into the Moldavanka carnival.

In the short story “How It Was Done in Odessa,” the funeral of clerk Muginshtein, accidentally shot by a drunken raider, becomes a holiday, no different in solemnity from a wedding: “Odessa has never seen such a funeral, and the world will never see it. The policemen wore thread gloves that day. Sixty singers walked ahead of the procession. The elders of the synagogue of kosher poultry traders led Aunt Pesya by the arms. Behind the elders were members of the society of Jewish clerks, and behind the Jewish clerks were attorneys at law, doctors of medicine and midwives and paramedics...”

Death in Babel’s artistic world is the starting point of a farcical scene, for example, the rich man Tartakovsky meets a funeral procession that buries him, Tartakovsky, but there is a machine gun in the coffin, and the procession itself turns into raiders who attack the suburban thugs.

The Moldavian woman accepts death as a holiday, as a travesty, and even as mockery.

The story “Father” tells of a stopover in Odessa by Russian Muslims returning from holy places. One of the pilgrims is near death, but refuses medical help, because “the one who ends up on the way from God Muhammad to his home is considered their first lucky and rich man...” The watchman Evzel mocks the patient: “Halvash, Yevzel shouted to the dying man and burst out laughing, here comes the doctor to treat you...”

As suggested by I.A. Esaulov, such laughter is possible only at a “suffering and dying “stranger” who is not part of the people’s grotesque body, in this case, at a non-religious person. Within the framework of the “insider” opposition, the humorous context becomes clear, which includes the episode with the death of the mullah: drunkards lying “like broken furniture” in Lyubkin’s yard, and Benya Krik having fun with the public woman Katyusha. Such proximity, reducing the pathos of death, affirms the immortality of the life of the Moldavian woman, which Baska from Tulchin saw, with “sucking babies and wedding nights, full of suburban chic and soldier’s tirelessness.”

Death in carnival laughter culture is also the flip side of nascent life. The David from the final cycle of the story “Lyubka Kazak” symbolizes the fruit of love of the Moldavian weddings described above. Babel deprives Davidka’s genetic mother not only of maternal traits (Lyubka Kazak drinks vodka while standing, beats a man, swears, bears a man’s nickname), but also the ability to feed her child. When Lyubka runs out of milk, Tsudechkis puts a “thin and dirty elbow” into her mouth.

This gesture by Tsudechkis can be seen as a kind of familiarity that is established between the participants during the carnival. This also includes abusive addresses of the heroes (Lyubka “prisoner”, “unscrupulous”, “foul mother”, Tsudechkis “murlo”, “old rogue”). The original point of view of M.B. Yampolsky, who believed that “the elbow is the obvious “male” equivalent of the breast, but also the sterile phallus.” Perhaps this is due to the fact that Davidka’s mother, according to Tsudechkis’s definition, is “foul” and “greedy”, that is, in the carnival world she is “sterile” and cannot have children. Then it becomes clear why Babel introduces the scene of the child’s weaning from the mother’s breast. Now the hospitable, loving Moldavanka will take care of the baby, whose carnival laws will be taught to Davidka by the wise Tsudechkis.

Davidka, Lyubka Kazak, Tsudechkis and other heroes of Babel’s “Odessa Stories” are flesh and blood of “Moldavian woman, our generous mother.” Using the definition of M.M. Bakhtin, we can say that Babel depicted in the cycle “the folk-festive concept of the birthing, feeding, growing and regenerating national body.” David, adopted by Moldavanka, will in the future take the place of King Beni Krik, as evidenced by the royal name of the baby (cf. the Jewish king David). But the fate of the “new” King is hidden in the stories of Tsudechkis, which the author plans to tell about in the following short stories. Thus, Babel denotes the incompleteness of the Moldavian carnival, which has stepped beyond the boundaries of the cycle of “Odessa Stories”, spilling out beyond the temporal, spatial and official framework in order to gain immortality.

Thus, the analysis of the “funny word” in the “funny images” of Babel’s short stories allows us to assert that its role in the narrative fabric of the text is significant.

funny word novella

Literature

1.Babel I.E. How it was done in Odessa. M., 2005. P. 111 145.

2. Bakhtin M.M. The work of Francois Rabelais and the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance M., 1990.

3. Esaulov I.A. “Odessa Stories” by Isaac Babel: the logic of the cycle // Moscow. 2004. No. 1. P. 204 216.

4. Turbin V.N. About Bakhtin // Turbin V.N. Shortly before Aquarius: Collection of articles. M., 1994. P. 446 464.

5. Yampolsky M.B. Structures of vision and physicality // Zholkovsky A.K. Babel/Babe1/A.K. Zholkovsky, M.B. Yampolsky. M., 1994.

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A bunch of four short stories (“King”, “How it was done in Odessa”, “Father”, “Lyubka Cossack”)1, included in “Odessa Stories”, are perceived as exotic sketches of the life of Odessa Jews, entertaining readers with the spicy aroma of Odessa jargon, extravagant antics of heroes and detective plots.
In the 30s, Babel wrote the stories “The End of the Almshouse” and “Froim Grach,” directly related to “Odessa Stories.”
How does the Odessa of Odessa Stories compare with the real Odessa? “Odessa is a very nasty city. Everyone knows this." These are the first lines of Babel’s autobiographical notes, which he titled “My Leaves.” “Instead of “big difference,” they say “two big differences,” and also “back and forth.” It seems to me that a lot of good things can be said about this significant and most charming city of the Russian Empire.”
And further - in the same majestic spirit: “Think: a city in which it is easy to live, in which it is clear to live. Half of its population are Jews, and Jews are a people who have mastered several very simple things very well. First: they get married so as not to be lonely. Second: they love in order to live for centuries. Third: they save money in order to have houses and give their wives astrakhan jackets. Fourth: they are child-loving, because it is very good and necessary to love your children.”
This is, in essence, a kind of replacement of the Ten Commandments - familiarly domesticated. From time immemorial, these commandments served as a spiritual stronghold for the persecuted people, and in Odessa, they apparently acted quite effectively. It is no coincidence that Babel states: “The poor Jews from Odessa are very frightened by governors and circulars, but it is not easy to dislodge them from their position, it is a very old position. To a large extent, their efforts created the atmosphere of lightness and clarity that surrounds Odessa.”
But how is this system of spiritual self-preservation (and physical survival) of the people preserved without damaging their tablets in insulting and humiliating conditions - the Pale of Settlement, the percentage rate, pogroms?.. And, most importantly, do the people manage to maintain fidelity to these commandments for really?
Four Odessa short stories form a very unique unity, the basis of which is Moldavanka. Moldavian woman is the cosmos in which the lives of all the characters in “Odessa Stories” take place, where the events of their existence take place.
The realities of Moldavanka, the Odessa outskirts, which stretches from Staroportofrankovskaya to Slobodka-Romanovka - these realities appear in the fragrant names of the streets: Hospitalnaya, Kostetskaya, Dalnitskaya, Stepovaya, Okhotnitskaya, Balkovskaya. But in general, Babel’s Moldavanka is expanding, capturing the whole of Odessa, with its central streets - Ekaterininskaya, Bolshaya Arnautskaya and Sofievskaya, with the mighty port and the distant Peresyp. In Babel’s work, the whole of Odessa is painted with “Moldavian flavor”; everything Odessa bears the stamp of what can be called the “Moldavian mentality”. It is this “Moldovan mentality” that Babel paints and analyzes, trying to comprehend its essence, its light and dark sides, its dynamics.
The appearance of a Moldavian woman, her way of life and customs, her types are a kind of carnival embodiment of the spiritual world, the spiritual substance of Russian Jewry. Babel contrasts the practical knowledge of these dirty, poor, cramped nooks and crannies of Odessa with the enchantingly colorful, tetraized image of Moldavanka: “And so Baska from Tulchin saw life in Moldavanka, our generous mother, a life filled with sucking babies, drying rags and wedding nights full of suburban chic and soldier's tirelessness." The feast and luxury of the surroundings of Babel’s artistic world instead of the dirt and poverty of the real Moldavanka is a certain challenge: yes, Moldavanka, whatever one may say, is another hypostasis of the Jewish ghetto, but this ghetto does not ask for compassion, its inhabitants do not need condescending pity. They know their worth and realize their place in the universe.
The narration in Odessa Stories is told in a solemn biblical style. Already in the story “The King” there is a reference to the Holy Book of the Jews: “Three cooks, not counting the dishwashers, were preparing a wedding dinner, and over them reigned the eighty-year-old Reizl, traditional as a Torah scroll, tiny and hunchbacked.”
Epic tales usually sound like this, performed by professional aeds and rhapsodists, collectors and keepers of the legendary history of their peoples. “Odessa Stories” also has its own rhapsode - this is Arie-Leib. “A proud Jew, living with the dead” - this is how, without false modesty, he attests to himself. In Jewish culture, cemetery beggars are a special caste: holy fools and saints, jesters and mourners, annoying beggars and wise philosophers - they, willingly or unwillingly, act as guardians of age-old covenants - after all, at least they know Kaddish.
Arie-Leib leads his chant in full accordance with the epic canon: “And so I will speak, as the Lord spoke on Mount Sinai from the burning bush. Put my words in your ears. Everything that I saw, I saw with my own eyes, sitting here, on the wall of the second cemetery, next to the lisping Moiseika and Shimshon from the funeral office...” Arie-Leib is an aed of the “new formation”, he does not repeat the “traditions of deep antiquity” , he talks about what he saw with his own eyes. Aed-chronicler, reporter from the cemetery wall.

In “Odessa Stories”, tracings from Yiddish, Ukrainianisms and an elementary disregard for Russian grammar form such verbal corals that amaze with their grotesque pomp and some kind of graceful absurdity. Well, whoever quotes these passages: “What is such a dad thinking about? About drinking a good glass of vodka, about punching someone in the face, about your horses and nothing else..."; “Dad, ...don’t let this nonsense bother you”; "Listen, King, I have a few words to tell you..."
Presented in such a speech shell, the world of Moldavanka acquires the features of a kind of epic legend, where high pathos is intricately intertwined with a decreasing carnivalesque. And in the epic we should expect the appearance of legendary heroes and their great achievements. Expectations come true...
In this exotic world, among the mishmash of buyers of stolen goods, smugglers, brothel keepers, small brokers, cemetery beggars, rise the bearers of the high ideals of Moldavanka, its pride and glory, its knights. Who are they? The raiders are led by their Robin Hood, their king Benya Creek.
Why did these same “knights” appear on Moldavanka, why did the “Moldavian mentality” turn these raiders into knights? But because those who
offended by any form of humiliation - in this case, the planetary outcasts, which are the Jews, entangled, like barbed wire, by a sophisticated system of state, religious, social prohibitions and taboos - oh, how I want to see them in their midst “knights without fear and reproach”! Fair judges and brave defenders, whose word is immediately backed up by deeds.
The world of Moldavanka, created on the pages of Odessa Stories, is, of course, in general, a romantic world. “And then the King’s friends showed that there was blue blood and unextinguished Moldavian knighthood.”
And in what Flemish colors Benya himself is depicted: “He was dressed in an orange suit, with a diamond bracelet shining under his cuff.” Or: “He was wearing a chocolate jacket, cream pants and raspberry boots.” And this is what his friends look like: “The Moldavian aristocrats, they were dressed in crimson vests, their shoulders were covered with red jackets, and their fleshy legs had bursting skin the color of heavenly azure.”
This is how they go to the brothel: “They rode in lacquer carriages, dressed like hummingbirds, in colored jackets, their eyes were bulging, one leg was set back to the step, and in their steel outstretched hand they held bouquets wrapped in tissue paper.” . Solemnly, in front of the entire public, they proceed to a cultural event.
In this parodic and decorative depiction of the raiders, in these exaggerated delights of the narrator and in the worship of the inhabitants of Moldavanka before Benya Krik and his colleagues, there is some kind of all-encompassing ethical inversion.
Why exactly was Benya awarded the title of King?
First of all, as befits an epic hero, Benya is endowed with some kind of supernatural qualities. His temperament is spoken of in the most sublime terms. “And then Benya Krik achieved his goal, because he was passionate, and passion rules over the world.” His oratorical abilities are highly appreciated by Froim Grach himself, the “godfather” of Moldavanka: “Benya speaks little, but he speaks with relish. He doesn’t say much, but I want him to say something more.”
And indeed, how artistically sensitive Benya is! “Monsieur Tartakovsky,” Benya Krik answered him in a quiet voice, “it’s been two days since I’ve been crying for my dear dead man, like for my own brother, but I know that you didn’t give a damn about my young tears.” And what is the power of persuasiveness in his repentant word addressed to Aunt Pesya, the mother of the murdered clerk Joseph Muginshtein: “... It was a huge mistake, Aunt Pesya. But wasn’t it a mistake on G-d’s part to settle the Jews in Russia so that they would suffer like in hell? And why would it be bad if Jews lived in Switzerland, where they were surrounded by first-class lakes and mountainous air and solid French people?..” And how much social pathos is there in his farewell speech at Joseph’s grave: “What did our dear Joseph see in his life ? He saw a couple of trifles. What was he doing? He was counting other people's money. Why did he die? He died for the entire working class.”

The narrator gives the floor to Beni with respect and delight. But how absurd and funny this combination of high expression and sentimental lyricism looks against the background of literary speech.
Let's move on to the description of the hero's exploits.
Benny Krik's first exploit (short story "The King") - setting fire to a police station - was a sign of his self-affirmation. Once the bailiff said: “...Where there is a sovereign emperor, there is no king,” so Benya will show that there is a King! In Russia, the arson of a police station or, in general, any damage caused to the authorities, was always perceived not without approval: power, not power!
But Benya’s second feat (the story “How It Was Done in Odessa”) - the raid on Tartakovsky - is not so ethically impeccable. “We’ll try it at Tartakovsky,” the council decided, and everyone who still had a conscience blushed when they heard this decision.” Why did even the seasoned secret masters of Odessa blush? But because, although Tartakovsky is far from an angel, nine raids have already been carried out on him. The tenth raid on a person who has already been buried once is a rude act. Benya Krik, in order to be accepted into the community of Moldavian knights, even crossed the ethical boundaries existing among thieves.
And then there is a whole series of ethical failures, paradoxically covered up by aesthetic grandeur. During the raid, poor Joseph Muginshtein, the only son of his mother, is accidentally killed. What follows is retribution, which is carried out through new blood: for the murdered clerk, the raiders killed the murderer himself, Savka Butsis.
Benny Krik’s third act, described in the story “Father,” can hardly be called a feat. But still, there is something heroic in how long he works in a brothel with the “thorough Katyusha.” And especially in the fact that immediately after these exercises he conducts business negotiations with Froim Grach about marrying his daughter. And if we keep in mind what this Baska, the daughter of Froim, is like (“a woman of gigantic stature,” “she weighed five pounds and several more pounds,” she says in a “deafening bass”), then Benya’s consent is nothing short of a feat You can't call her for marriage...
In Odessa Stories, often the legendary love of children, the cult of family, and tender reverence for parents turn into not only cynicism, but also violence against the most sacred human feelings. What is the scene when Mendel Krik tells how he was crippled by his own sons, Benya and Levka. “He screamed his story in a hoarse and scary voice, showed his ground teeth and let them touch the wounds on his stomach. The Volyn tzaddiki with porcelain faces listened in stupor to the boasts of Mendel Krik and were amazed at everything they heard, and Hrach despised them for this.”
Why does Froim Grach despise them? Because they cannot break through ethical taboos.
Why did Benya Krik deserve the title of King? It turns out that he was able to commit crimes - to rob someone who had been robbed, to kill a man, to marry for rough reasons, to beat his own father. But “the first to utter the word “king” was none other than “the lisping Moiseika” (an absolutely carnival replacement for Moshe, the keeper of the sacred commandments, who, according to legend, was tongue-tied). This means that the highest authority - Moshe inside out - blessed the exploits of Benny Krik.
The author of "Odessa Stories" is most interested in this process - the process of inverting ethical norms, the cynical trampling of the covenants written on the tablets. Apparently, it is no coincidence that the short story “Lyubka Kazak” completes the cycle. There is no longer Beni here, nor the story of his next exploit. But there is a plot about the most terrible crime that traditional Jewish morality can only imagine - a plot about a mother who neglects her maternal duty. The Jewish mother, whose maddening love has long since become legendary, here “thinks of her son as of last year’s snow.” A woman whose nature is to be tender and affectionate (after all, her last name is “Schneeweiss,” that is, Snow White!), has turned into a rude, disheveled woman whose pursuit of “profit” has completely atrophied her maternal feeling. “You want to grab everything for yourself, greedy Lyubka...” cries old Tsudechkis, “and your little child, a child like a star, must starve without milk.”
Everything is turned upside down. Ethics are broken. Even fear of God turns into blasphemy in the scene when Benya orders the funeral service for his murderer, Savka Butsis, together with poor Joseph Muginstein. Now it becomes clear to numerous participants in the funeral rite that another bloody crime has been committed, and they are inevitably soiled by their participation in this matter. And the solemn, magnificent funeral service ends with a stampede: “And so the people, quietly moving away from Savka’s grave, rushed to flee, as if from a fire. They flew in phaetons, in carts, on foot.”
This apocalyptic flight is a spontaneous and therefore true ethical assessment by people of the exploits that Benya Krik, the hero of the Moldavian epic, accomplished.
This result is not a surprise, at least for the Author. A warning was made about the doom of the strategy of self-affirmation that Benya Krik chose at the very beginning of the very story that told about his rise. Let us remind you: The author-listener asks the epic storyteller: “Reb Aryeh-Leib... let's talk about Ben Krik. Let’s talk about its lightning-fast beginning and its terrible end.” It can be assumed that, when conceiving his cycle, Babel intended to complete it with the story of the death of Benny Krik. Perhaps Babel was referring to the fate that befell Mishka Yaponchik, the prototype of Benny Krik.
This story is not in Odessa Stories. But there are stories “The End of the Almshouse” and “Froim Rook”. They represent the completion of the story about Moldavanka and her knights.

The almshouse at the Jewish cemetery, where the cemetery's beggars huddle, is the bitter quintessence of the Jewish lot and the center of folk wisdom. This world is collapsing not only because Soviet power came in the person of the head of the cemetery, Broidin, but because it decayed on its own. Because the great covenants written in the Holy Books are displaced in it, because the tablets are turned upside down. That is why the Broidins manage to sweep away the old almshouse so easily, like unnecessary rubbish. And at the same time, throw out of life its inhabitants - holy fools and saints, sages and aeds.
And the story “Froim Grach” is already an epilogue to the history of the Order of the Knights of Moldavanka. Not with the death of Benny Krik, but with the death of Froim Rook, the entire cycle ends. And this is no coincidence. If we remember that it was Benya who turned to Froim with a request to accept him into his business, that Froim gave Benya a recommendation at the council, then we can guess what was hidden behind Arie-Leib’s words about Grach: “...Then I was already looking at the world with one eye was what it is.” But only in the last story is this stated openly: “One-eyed Froim, and not Benya, was the true head of forty thousand Odessa thieves.” But when Froim came to Cheka and tried to talk with the new government in the language familiar to him: “Let my guys go, master, tell me your price,” - in a language that was understood and accepted not only by the Tartakovskys and Eichbaums, but by the police officers and police officers, - No one began to talk to him. He was simply shot without trial or investigation, in a matter of minutes. That's all. The explanation given is quite Soviet: “...Why is this person needed in the future society?” - asks the chairman of the Cheka. The author clarifies - “he came from Moscow,” that is, he does not know the history of Odessa, is not familiar with its legends and its heroes. But investigator Borovoi, to whom Froim Grach is dear in his own way as a legendary figure, as a landmark of Odessa, also says: “Probably not needed.”
This is the terrible end that awaited Benya Krik and the entire order of Moldavanka raiders.
According to Babel, this world and its heroes doomed themselves to such an end by the very way they lived. The code of anti-morality, the code of shameless mockery of age-old foundations, which they followed with such chic cynicism, could not but lead to self-destruction
The carnival quality of “Odessa Tales” is the carnival quality of “creepy fun”. There is a Jewish expression that is similar to the Russian one: “It’s so funny that you just want to cry.” This is precisely the aesthetic pathos of Odessa Stories.
Why, despite all that? Do Benya Krik and his raiders evoke sympathy from both the storyteller, Arye-Leib, and his listener? And not only among them: even the Bolshevik Borovoy calls Froim Grach “a grandiose guy” and cannot hide his sadness when he was shot. Why do the Russian people have so many beautiful songs, tales and legends about Stenka Razin, Emelyan Pugachev, Kudeyar-Ataman, the Sagaidachnys and the Doroshenkis? After all, they are robbers, thieves, rapists, murderers, pogromists. Behind each of them are rivers of blood of innocent people. And they are called “people's defenders.”
Reading “Odessa Stories”, it seems that you begin to understand what’s going on here. The humiliated and insulted make up for the shortcomings of their real existence with virtual permissiveness. And in breaking boundaries there is some kind of perverted pleasure and ugly delight. Of course, all this is a manifestation of ethical dislocation, moral corruption that affects those who drag out a slave existence.
As long as the “Pale of Settlement” exists not only on the geographical map, but also in the minds of people, everything holy, good, humane, everything worthy and proud will either be cruelly destroyed or farcically distorted. There is no other option.

1 Other stories that publishers sometimes include in this cycle only on the grounds that their action takes place in Odessa or nearby, in Nikolaev (“The Story of My Dovecote”, “You Missed, Captain!”, “The End of the Almshouse”, “Karl- Yankel”, etc.), “Do not belong to Odessa stories - these are different characters, other conflicts, a different style.

Composition

The apotheosis of the liberated forces of life was “Odessa Stories” (1921 - 1923). Babel always romanticized Odessa. He saw it as unlike other cities, inhabited by people “foreshadowing the future”: the Odessa residents had joy, “enthusiasm, lightness and a charming - sometimes sad, sometimes touching - sense of life.” Life could be “good, bad,” but in any case, “extraordinarily ... interesting.”

It was precisely this attitude towards life that Babel wanted to instill in a person who had survived the revolution and entered a world full of new and unforeseen difficulties. Therefore, in “Odessa Stories” he built an image of a world where a person was open to life.

In real Odessa, Moldavanka, recalled K. G. Paustovsky, “was called the part of the city near the freight railway station, where two thousand raiders and thieves lived.” In Baba-Levskaya Odessa, this world is turned upside down. The outskirts of the city have been turned into a stage, a theater where dramas of passion are played out. Everything is taken out into the street: weddings, family quarrels, deaths, and funerals. Everyone participates in the action, laughing, fighting, eating, cooking, changing places. If it is a wedding, then the tables are placed “the entire length of the courtyard,” and there are so many of them that they stick their tails out of the gate onto Hospital Street (“King”). If this is a funeral, then such a funeral as “Odessa has never seen, but the world will not see” (“How it was done in Odessa”).

In this world, the “sovereign emperor” is placed below the street “king” Benny Krik, and official life, its norms, its dry, escheat laws are ridiculed, lowered, destroyed by laughter. The characters’ language is free, it is full of meanings that lie in the subtext, the characters understand each other in half a word, half a hint, the style is mixed with Russian-Jewish, Odessa jargon, which was introduced into literature at the beginning of the 20th century even before Babel. Soon Babel’s aphorisms dispersed into proverbs and sayings, they broke away from their creator, acquired an independent life, and more than one generation has been repeating: “it’s not evening yet,” “colder-blooded,” Me, you’re not at work,” or “in your soul autumn". The Odessa material helps today to understand the evolution of Babel.

Even before the release of “Cavalry,” work began on the scripts as a separate book: “Benya Krik,” “Wandering Stars” (both 1925), etc. The ability to see the world as a spectacle, as a stage, now turned out to be the road to a new turn in life and work. But his self-assessments are strict and uncompromising: “Talentless, vulgar, terrible.” So in 1926 no one allowed themselves to write about him. In 1926, Babel wrote the play “Sunset”. It then seemed to him that the short theatrical life of the play was connected with unsuccessful productions, from which the “lightness of comedy” was lost. Critics would like to see in “Sunset” what was in “Odessa Stories”: a “light tint” of everyday life, the comicality of colloquial southern humor. The result, critics wrote, was “a tragic breakdown.” From what? Why? Everyone was at a loss.

The origins of the misunderstanding were laid in the changed times. The meaning of the play was revealed in the title "Sunset". This name was a symbolic foreshadowing of the coming changes. Critics tried not to notice the writer’s gloomy forecasts. Read literally, the play was interpreted as a theme of the destruction of old patriarchal family ties and relationships - and nothing more. But in this form, few people were interested in her. And Babel was seriously upset.

Talent and fame did not bring him peace. As already mentioned, the guardians of the “barracks order” in literature crossed their spears over his very first stories: they saw in “Cavalry” slander of the Red Army, a deliberate de-heroization of history. Babel tried to defend himself, explaining that the creation of a heroic history by the First Cavalry was not his intention. But the controversy did not subside. In 1928, the “Cavalry” was again fired upon from the position of “non-commissioned officer Marxism”: outraged by the rebuke of M. Gorky, who took Babel under protection, “Pravda” published an open letter from S. Budyonny to M. Gorky, where the writer was again accused of slandering the First Cavalry . Gorky did not renounce Babel. This did not mean the dispute was over. The tension around Babel's name persisted, although his business seemed to be going even better than before: in 1930, Cavalry was reissued, sold out in record time (almost seven days), and Gosizdat began preparing the next reissue.

* But something was happening in Babel himself: He fell silent. The crisis overtook him at the zenith of his creative maturity. The critics' admiring articles did not please him. He wrote about them: “I read as if we were talking about the dead, so far is what I write now from what I wrote before.” Babel's name appeared less and less in print. His correspondence with publishers (with Vyacheslav Polonsky, for example) betrayed his despair. “...You can’t escape fate,” he wrote in 1928.

He tried to overcome himself: he either took part in the work on the collective novel “Big Fires” (1927), or published his old stories in the almanac “The Pass” (No. 6). He associated the internal causes of the crisis not only with his maximalism, but also with “limited possibilities of implementation,” as he carefully wrote in a private letter from Paris in July 1928. “It’s very difficult to write on topics that interest me, very difficult if you want to be honest,” he blurted out, far from self-pity.

When, having admired the fire to his heart’s content, Benya returned home, “the lanterns in the yard had already gone out, and the sky was dawning. The guests had gone away. The musicians were dozing, with their heads on the handles of their double basses. Dvoira pushed her husband to the door of their wedding room and looked at him carnivorously like a cat holding a mouse in its mouth and gently testing it with its teeth.” Using cinematic terminology, we can say that it was a panorama shot from one point, including details that looked equivalent: dying lanterns, a brightening sky, an empty courtyard, dozing musicians, Dvoira and her husband. But it was precisely this couple that Babel needed to draw the reader’s attention to, and he combines phrases about the guests and musicians, writes a new one after them, and modifies the final one: “The guests dispersed and the musicians dozed, lowering their heads on the handles of their double basses. Only Dvoira was not going to sleep With both hands she pushed the timid husband to the door of their wedding room...” This seemingly insignificant edit allowed him to show in “close-up” against the backdrop of the courtyard Dvoira, who had waited for the desired moment, and her newly-made husband, who was timid from the realization of what had come time to earn back Sender Eichbaum's money.

The edition of this episode, in which it was published in the collections of 1925 and 1927, became final, which cannot be said about the story as a whole, because, as in that old joke, “you will already laugh,” but Babel later added to the text about a dozen changes.

When the policemen, fearing sad consequences, tried to reason with the bailiff who had started the raid, he, afraid of “losing face,” categorically declared that “conceit” was more valuable to him. Only, after all, the bailiff is not a police officer, and certainly not a policeman, who, in order to bolster his own budget, did not hesitate to go to the apartments of wealthy citizens on holidays, where, in response to duty congratulations, they brought him a shot of vodka on a silver platter and handed him a silver “ruble.” And, unlike the policemen, there were only eight bailiffs in Odessa - according to the number of police stations, they reported directly to the police chief, held an officer rank or a class rank according to the Russian table of ranks and, one must think, knew how to pronounce this correctly, far from a rare word, like pride, with which Babel replaced the illiterate “self-love.”

The letter with which Benya Krik asked Eichbaum to put money under the gates also became “ennobled,” frankly warning that “if you don’t do this, something awaits you that is unheard of and all of Odessa will talk about you.” Having re-read this phrase once again, Babel decides to limit himself to the colorful phrase “such that it is unheard of,” which is quite enough to convey the specific jargon of the King, and in subsequent editions, instead of the deliberate Odessaism “to speak from you”, the not jarring “to speak about you” appears ".

And at Dvoira’s wedding, Eichbaum, who financed this action, initially looked at him with a “squinted eye,” which smacked of a tautology, because in this case the eye always seems smaller. And in the final version of the story, the King’s pacified and overfed father-in-law, sitting at the table, already looks condescendingly at everyone with a “squinted eye.” Back in 1921, Babel wrote that the raiders threw their gifts there on silver trays “with an indescribably careless movement of the hand,” and now the word “indescribable” is crossed out, because, if you think about it, everything is completely transferable, understandable and explainable. The King’s generous, but not devoid of posing, friends, in defiance of the other guests, pointedly casually throw on the tray not some banal silver spoons, but real jewelry, showing with all their appearance that for them this means nothing and, in general, “know ours!”

And in other episodes, a lot is taken “behind the scenes”, where an attentive reader, as in a good movie or real life, can conjecture something, verify something, guess something. That’s why, reading about how Benya forbade the guests to go watch the fire, and the musicians dozed off, but did not dare to leave the courtyard after the last guests before his return, it becomes clear who “played first violin” there. Likewise, Babel does not directly write about why Eichbaum initially did not agree to marry his daughter to Benya, despite all sorts of promises like a dacha at the 16th station and a future pink marble monument at the first Jewish cemetery at the very gate. But it is not difficult to understand that his main argument was something like Ostap Bender’s favorite companions’ “Who are you?” And then the raider Bene Krik, indignant at such injustice and offended in his best feelings, had to delicately remind the owner of sixty milk cows without one about the long-standing source of his wealth: “And remember, Eichbaum, you, too, were not a rabbi in your youth. Who forged the will, we will not talk about this loudly?.." With this “you too,” the King pacifies the ambition of the obstinate milkman, equalizes him with himself, or even puts him one or two steps lower, since, in his opinion, probably, violating the will of the deceased by forging a will is a dirty business, unlike the “honest raid”... More or less clearly visible “behind the scenes” is Aunt Hana, barely mentioned in the story. She could have been an old spotter or a buyer of stolen goods revered in her circle, like the famous Sosya Bernstein, who also lived on the famous Kostetskaya, and in the same house with two of her male colleagues. This public often ran a grocery store, a buffet or a pate shop for the blezir, where, for the benefit and safety of the business, they fed the small fry, from which Aunt Hana could well have found out “in advance” for the raid. Unlike Manka from Peresyp, she was not among the wedding guests and, it seems, was not part of the King’s “retinue,” but considered it her corporate duty to warn him of the impending danger.

Aunt Hana sent a young man to Ben Krik, who, unknown how soon, arrived with Kostetskaya at the neighboring Hospital, only expressed his thoughts at such a pace that by the time he got to the point, Father Krik could well have had time to drink, have a snack and repeat this cycle. But Benya, being preoccupied with the wedding, did not have time to listen to his lengthy tirades, answer rhetorical questions and impatiently hurried: “I knew about this the day before yesterday. Next?”, “He wants a raid. Next?”, “I know Aunt Hana.” . Further?". In Babel’s “concentrated” phrase, even punctuation marks carry the utmost meaning and often become the object of editing. This time, after each word “further”, the author puts a dot instead of a question mark, as a result of which Benya no longer questions, but orders, because he is the King, and his interlocutor is just Aunt Hana’s “six”. And it was flattering for him, communicating with the King himself, to rise above his humble level, just as a soldier often dreams of becoming a marshal or a child stands on tiptoe in order to appear taller. Therefore, having fulfilled Aunt Hana’s instructions, on his own, most likely, he monitors the situation near the police station and, with the start of the fire, reappears at the wedding, where he enthusiastically tells Ben Creek about it, “giggling like a schoolgirl.” But Babel, looking at the seemingly carefully “weeded” story with the gaze of a diligent gardener, removes this comparison, since such a manifestation of emotions is by no means the prerogative of schoolgirls, as well as high school students, students, students and other young representatives of the fair sex.

Finally, Babel once again “touches” and finally finishes off the first phrases of the story, because they are the ones that can charm, attract, intrigue, alert, disappoint or, God forbid, repel readers. Initially, in the newspaper "Sailor" the story began with the words "The wedding is over. The rabbi - bushy-bearded and broad-shouldered - wearily sank into a blue chair. Tables were placed along the entire length of the courtyard." Two years later, when the story was published in the Izvestia newspaper, the rabbi, who in this case does not personify a specific person, appears before readers as devoid of individual features and they are given the full opportunity to complete his appearance themselves in accordance with their knowledge, imagination and understanding. And he no longer sits in a blue one, but simply in a chair, which also has an explanation. A soft blue chair should be upholstered in the appropriate color with velvet, silk or, in extreme cases, satin, but the inhabitants of Moldavanka could hardly afford such a luxury. Most likely, it was a simple, covered with varnish and equipped with semicircular wooden armrests, a hard chair from the local Kaiser factory on Novaya Street, the last examples of which are still preserved today in the houses of the same last Odessa old-timers. After this edit, the beginning of the story looked more laconic: “The wedding was over. The rabbi tiredly sank into a chair. Tables were placed along the entire length of the courtyard.” Before the next publication of “The King” in the magazine “LEF”, Babel complements and reworks the third phrase in such a way that it is included in the chain of sequential actions of the rabbi: “The wedding is over. The rabbi tiredly sank into a chair. Then he left the room and saw the tables set up the entire length of the yard." And in the 1925 collection, the second phrase is combined with the third: “The wedding is over. The rabbi sank into a chair, then he left the room and saw tables set up along the entire length of the courtyard.” Now, it would seem, it was necessary to cross out the pronoun “he” and thereby “close” the phrase to one subject “rabbi”. But Babel did not do this, because in this case the rhythm would speed up, and it might seem to the reader that the rabbi, as soon as he sat down in his chair, immediately rose from it and left the room. A short story is generally more “sensitive” to rhythm than, for example, a novel, which is why Babel used it as one of the tools for realizing his creative plan. And, as you know, the more tools, the better. True, there were masters who managed to create a masterpiece with just an ax, but the expression “hatchet work” also exists. Combining two phrases, Babel omits the indication that after the wedding ceremony, the rabbi sank into a chair tiredly. Indeed, this tells little to the reader who knows nothing about the rabbi himself - whether he is young or old, strong or weak. Subsequently, after the release of the collection, Babel removes the point between the first two phrases, combining them into one, which is completely devoid of “mosaic”, smoothly, easily and freely introduces the reader into the atmosphere of the story: “The wedding was over, the rabbi sank into a chair, then he left from the room and saw tables placed along the entire length of the yard"

Best of the day

It seems, at least in the Russian translation, that the fourth chapter of Maupassant’s novel “Life,” written eleven years before Babel’s birth, begins, telling about the marriage of the main character Jeanne and Julien: “The wedding was over. Everyone went into the sacristy, where it was almost empty.” . Of course, Babel could subconsciously and in general terms use the plot of one of the chapters of the novel he had read and reread - such cases are known in literary practice - especially since the words “the wedding is over” made it possible to avoid many unnecessary details and tie the beginning of the story to a specific moment. However, this is nothing more than an assumption. But in any case, there is no need to talk about direct borrowing, if only because Babel stubbornly, for a long time and carefully finished the first phrase of the story, bringing it to a degree of perfection that satisfied him. And he strictly followed Maupassant throughout his creative life in other ways.

In 1908-11, the complete works of Maupassant were published in St. Petersburg. And the young man, born and raised in a city that was not for nothing called “little Paris”, introduced to French culture by Monsieur Vadon, at first, as they say, devoured all fifteen volumes of the classic. And then he kept returning and returning to his sun-drenched short stories and novels, “populated” not by ethereal figures or moving silhouettes, but by the most living people with all their joys and sorrows, problems and concerns, virtues and vices, nobility and deceit, passions and pleasures: “Pumpkin”, “Tellier’s Establishment”, “Life”, “Mademoiselle Fifi”, “Dear Friend”, “Mont Oriol”... And the novel “Pierre and Jean” had a symbolic meaning for Babel , since in the author’s preface to it, Maupassant very precisely, concisely and clearly revealed the secret of his work with the word: “Whatever the thing you are talking about, there is only one noun to name it, only one verb to denote its action , and only one adjective to define it. And one must search until this noun, this verb and this adjective are found, and one should not be satisfied with the approximate, one should never resort to fakes, even successful ones, to linguistic tricks, to avoid difficulties." Perceived as immutable and not promising an easy life, the edifications of Maupassant, who conquered the pinnacle of fame, could discourage young Babel, who began to think about literary work early, from his intentions. But they were also able to instill hope, because if the master claims that you need to look, then you can find it. And he raised Maupassant’s words to a postulate for himself, searched, seemed to find, crossed out, searched again. It was necessary to value, respect and trust the word so much that, often, without a penny in your pocket, an extra sheet of paper and, as he wrote, “the lousiest desk”, in response to the editor’s demand to present a long-promised and paid for story, half-jokingly, but categorically declare: “You can flog me at 4 o’clock in the afternoon on Myasnitskaya Street (one of the central streets of Moscow - A.R.) - I will not hand over the manuscript before the day when I think it is ready.” And sometimes he could only smile disarmingly and ask in a friendly manner: “As they say here in Odessa, or do you want to hurt me?”

You shouldn’t try to check the harmony of the story “The King” with algebra, but elementary mathematics indicates that, starting in 1921, Babel made more than two hundred edits to it. Likewise, we will not list them all and even less characterize them. Let us be like archaeologists who do not completely excavate an ancient settlement or settlement, leaving some part of it to future researchers, armed with new knowledge, approaches, methods and techniques. But there are a few more examples that it would be a pity to ignore.

Not telling, but showing the reader the courtyard where the wedding festivities were about to break out, Babel first wrote that “the tables covered with heavy velvet tablecloths curled around the courtyard, like snakes with patches of all colors placed on their bellies, and they sang in thick voices - these stripes of orange and red velvet." Only in the second version of the story Babel does not indicate that the tablecloths are heavy, since this, in particular, is the quality of velvet that differs from other fabrics. There are no longer “velvet tablecloths” on the tables, but simply “velvet”, since the word “covered” defines both its purpose and location, “stripes of orange and red velvet” are replaced by “patches”, which is what tablecloths are called in the first half of the phrase. As a result of this editing, “the tables covered with velvet curled around the courtyard like snakes whose bellies had been patched with patches of all colors, and sang in deep voices - patches of orange and red velvet.” Not only can nothing be thrown out of this phrase, but nothing needs to be added, and the orange and red velvet singing in thick voices is an unexpected metaphor akin to color music, which was born in Scriabin’s beautiful “Poem of Fire” and migrated to variety shows, bars and discos. And “behind the scenes” a naive Moldovan force is highlighted, according to which the festive tables are covered with velvet instead of the crisply starched white tablecloths, so familiar at family feasts, in restaurants, in the Fanconi cafe on Ekaterininskaya Street and in the tavern on Greek Square, which was once cutely called then "White Tablecloth". The multi-colored velvet luxury at Dvoyra Krik’s wedding was, apparently, purchased especially for this occasion, because for the tables that “stuck their tail out of the gate onto Hospital Street,” no host’s tablecloths, even if they exist, would be enough to collect The King would never have allowed them to be neighbors. True, during a stormy and riotous meal, something will certainly spill, spill, or be burned by drunken guests with cigarettes on the precious tablecloths, but is it worth worrying when Eichbaum pays?

At the festive table he sat, as Babel wrote, “in second place” by right of the person who took upon himself the wedding expenses - from the purchase of exquisite dishes to payment to the musicians, then, as they say, everywhere. The bride and groom sat in the first place, but this was a purely table gradation. In fact, the first person at the wedding was Benya. And not the last to be there were his friends, whom Babel dressed, as they say, to smithereens for the first time: “The aristocrats of Moldavanka - they were dressed in crimson velvet vests, their steel shoulders were covered by red jackets, and on fleshy plebeian legs with bones, squeezed into suede shoes, the skin the color of blue steel wanted to burst."

But in this form, this phrase survived only the first edition, and then work began on it, like a canvas: doubts, questions, assessments, searches, finds, disappointments, replacements... Is it worth mentioning the steel shoulders when, applying for The raiders, Moldavian guys, of course, did not undergo a qualifying medical examination and in their environment, audacity, for example, was valued no less than “pumped up” muscles? Is it really necessary to call the feet plebeian because of the overgrown bones on the feet, which are a consequence of gout, and it does not at all distinguish between plebeians and aristocrats? Is it possible to consider an accurate comparison of the colors of the softest leather and the hardest steel, and is it not possible to replace it with the same color with heavenly azure, which everyone has seen, but no one has touched? And isn’t it more appropriate for the courtiers of the King of France to show off in blue suede shoes than for raiders at the wedding of the King of Moldavian women? Should the leather “want to burst” or is it better to write that it simply “bursts”, and everyone will understand that the fleshy legs of the raiders for the sake of panache are squeezed into tight shoes, and it doesn’t matter whether they are shoes, boots or boots? Is it necessary to focus on the fact that crimson vests were velvet if they were made from cloth, wool or some other fabric, and velvet was most often used on curtains, bedspreads, drapes, tablecloths... By the way, when I once asked about this from the old Odessa tailor Kramarov from Kartamyshevskaya Street, he looked at me like a specialist looks at an amateur: “You still don’t know how old I am? So in one month and six more days it will be one hundred and two years, exactly as the dial says.” ,” he tapped his fingernail on an antique watch with a massive chain lying on the nightstand, “but may I never be one hundred and three again if I ever worked a velvet vest.” Babel himself stopped “working” velvet vests and suede shoes for raiders who were not guilty of refined taste: “The aristocrats of Moldavanka, they were dressed in crimson vests, their shoulders were covered by red jackets, and on their fleshy legs the skin the color of heavenly azure was bursting.” Compared to the first edition, this phrase has become shorter, but the figures of the raiders are drawn more clearly at the wedding table, primarily due to the fact that each noun is now defined only by a single adjective, and one is completely left on its own without any, however, for it damage. A similar thing, in particular, happened with the story as a whole, from which, with numerous step-by-step edits, Babel mercilessly removed no less than a quarter of all adjectives.

And about why, how and with what difficulty all this is done, how the perfection of the story is achieved, Babel, it seems, told Paustovsky during their common stay in Odessa: “When I write down a story for the first time, then My manuscript looks disgusting, simply terrible! It is a collection of several more or less successful pieces, connected among themselves by the most boring official connections, so-called “bridges,” a kind of dirty ropes... But this is where the work begins. Here is its source I check phrase by phrase, and not just once, but several times... A sharp eye is needed, because the language cleverly hides its garbage, repetitions, synonyms, just nonsense, and all the time it seems to be trying to outsmart us. When this work is finished, I rewrite the text on a typewriter (the text is clearer this way). Then I let it sit for two or three days - if I have the patience for it - and again I check phrase by phrase, word by word. And I definitely find some more amount of quinoa that I missed and nettles. So, each time rewriting the text anew, I work until, even with the most brutal pickiness, I can no longer see a single grain of dirt in the manuscript. But that's not all... When the garbage is thrown out, I check the freshness and accuracy of all images, comparisons, metaphors. If there is no exact comparison, then it is better not to take any. Let the noun live on its own in its simplicity... All these options are weeding, pulling the story into one thread. And so it turns out that between the first and last versions there is the same difference as between salted wrapping paper and Botticelli’s “The First Spring”... And the main thing, said Babel, is not to kill the text during this hard labor. Otherwise, all the work will go down the drain and turn into God knows what! Here you need to walk like on a tightrope. Yes, that's it..."

In Babel’s revelations one can sense Paustovsky’s intonations, and this is not surprising. According to the author of the story “Time of Great Expectations,” this conversation happened at the end of the “merry and sad” summer of 1921 at the blessed 9th station of the Bolshoi Fontan after Babel allegedly showed him a thick, two hundred pages, manuscript containing all twenty-two versions of the story "Lyubka Cossack". But the story about Madame Lyubka first appeared only in the fall of 1924 in the Moscow magazine "Krasnaya Nov" and, had it been ready, at least in the first version, in the summer of 1921, Babel probably would not have failed to give it to "Sailor" or "News". And it's not just that. Judging by the story “The King” published at the same time, which resembled more of a draft than a finished work, it does not seem very likely that Babel by that time had already defined for himself such clear principles of working on the word. And if he did, then, being not the most open in everything related to his own creativity, he would hardly have shared them so straightforwardly, especially since he never considered or behaved like a master or mentor. And even if, more than aspirations, he shared, it is difficult to imagine that even Paustovsky, who treated him with the greatest reverence, for almost forty years, as they say in Odessa, kept in his head everything that Babel said with all the nuances and specific details. Or did he not need to remember anything? In support of such a daring assumption, we can recall that, having conceived “A Time of Great Expectations,” Paustovsky came to Odessa, where he settled down in the Gorky Scientific Library, which he still remembered as “Publichka.” And he studied there the dilapidated file of “The Sailor” of 1921, in order to revive his memory and, in accordance with the romantic mood of the story, then to capture on its pages the newspaper’s then headline, its paper, layout, fonts and, most importantly, those who printed the articles there, the naval chronicles, essays, poems, feuilletons, stories. Paustovsky initially intended to make Babel one of the characters in his book and, having read the already forgotten first edition of “The King” in the hundredth issue of the newspaper, marveled at its striking differences from the well-known canonical text, scrupulously analyzed them and then talentedly “constructed” the author’s brilliant monologue about the writer’s labor And this is quite legitimate, since Paustovsky did not at all intend to turn the story into a chronologically verified list of Odessa events of the early 1920s, but, as far as was permissible in the late 1950s, he sought to convey the very spirit of the era and create images of some of the people who inhabited it. Or maybe everything was different...

But for the first image of Babel in fiction, written by a benevolent pen, with which the author incurred unexpected, offensive and even offensive claims from the editors of the New World magazine, we should only be grateful to Konstantin Paustovsky. Likewise, those who, despite the danger of such an act, saved Babel’s letters deserve our deepest bow. Now, after the disappearance of his archive and the passing of his contemporaries, they have acquired special value, if only because they still contain the living voice of the writer, his thoughts, hopes, daring, torment and confessions like what Ize Livshitsu wrote about: “The only vanity What I have is to write as few unnecessary words as possible."

Indeed, Babel tirelessly recognized and discarded such words without pity, built up, as he called, the “internal muscles” of the stories, and sought to bring them closer to the “great traditions of literature,” which he considered “sculpturalism, simplicity and figurativeness of art.” The sculptor cuts off unnecessary pieces from a block of marble, releasing a figure hitherto hidden in it, and one wrong blow of a hammer on the instrument, like one unnecessary word, can ruin everything. As for the speed of this work, it depends on the creative individuality of the master. Once upon a time, one Odessa woman who returned from Italy admired the local sculptor: “You just have to think how he made a bust of my hand in half an hour!” Babel worked slowly, but he made a “bust of the soul,” freeing the hidden romance of Moldavanka from the block of everyday life. The sculptor first rather roughly outlines the general outlines of the figure, and only then works out and finishes the details with a finer tool, but the intermediate results of this work are left with fragments, crumbs and marble dust. Visible, or rather, revered traces of the stage-by-stage implementation of the writer’s plan can remain in his draft manuscripts and, as the famous literary critic and text critic Boris Tomashevsky argued, “all editions and all stages of creativity are important for science.”

The manuscript of the story “The King” has not survived, but the five author’s editions of its text remaining on the pages of books and periodicals provide a happy opportunity almost “from the first moment to the last” to trace Babel’s work on the text, which, in addition to purely qualitative changes, ended up in reduced by ten percent. And one gets the impression that it has become much shorter, because the reader, in his perception of the story, no longer slows down at sharp turns of the plot, does not make his way through the palisade of adjectives, does not stumble over inaccurate comparisons, and is not distracted by the contemplation of unnecessary details. And the aphorisms flying like pillars outside the carriage window only emphasize the swiftness of the movement: “If you don’t shoot in the air, you can kill a person,” “Stupid old age is no less pathetic than cowardly youth,” “The lining of a heavy wallet is made of tears,” "Passion rules the world." Continuing this “railway analogy,” we must remember that the reader of the story “The King” then had an unsolicited opportunity, intended only for great originals, to change from a courier or, as they say now, fast train to a so-called work train, which is not in a particular hurry and has a habit of stopping at every God-forsaken stop or platform favored by summer residents.

In 1926, Babel wrote and soon published the script “Benya Krik,” which critics immediately called a film story and even a film novel, which, however, did not add merit to either it or the film based on it of the same name. The first part of the script was an expanded version of the story “The King” “translated” into the language of the then silent cinema, and the laws of the genre, multiplied by the “rules of the game” accepted in the then “most important of the arts,” did their job. Is it worth complaining that the magnificent lines and dialogues of the characters were torn into narrow ribbons of credits, when the very witchcraft of the story suddenly evaporated, its aphorism, romance, wisdom, going back to myth, and laconicism, reeking of significance, disappeared. According to Babel’s original words, in the story of Benny Krik “it’s all about the raid,” but here this episode has completely disappeared, Eichbaum himself has disappeared somewhere, and the pathetic informer who “settled” in the plot whispers to the bailiff the date of the wedding of the King’s sister, as if about this The whole Moldavanka was not gossiping about the epoch-making event in advance. And sixty-year-old Manka from Peresyp no longer expresses her irrepressible delight with a shrill whistle, Benya does not advise his father to give up “this nonsense”, Dvoira Krik does not look carnivorously at her new husband, but simply drags him into the double bed, and Aunt Khana’s young assistant has no more to say To the king my eternal few words.

Aunt Hana, as you know, lived on Kostetskaya, and to Odessa residents this specific address link says more than any lengthy description. Nonresident and, especially, foreign readers find themselves in a different position, not to say in the dark. By the way, in the French translation of the story, the young man announces to the King that he was sent by “Aunt Hana from Kostetskaya Street.” Only in Odessa they don’t and never did say that, because everyone knows from a young age that Kostetskaya is not a square, a settlement or a dacha area, but a street on Moldavanka. And in French you cannot say “Aunt Hana with Kostetskaya” - this is the specificity of the language, which, according to Babel, who spoke and wrote fluently in it, “is honed to the utmost degree of perfection and thereby complicates the work of writers.” Difficulties and, often, insurmountable obstacles also arise when translating such specific expressions, phrases and constructions, born of Odessa and, as Babel wrote, “in her own bright words made with her own hand,” such as “Benya knows for the raid,” “what awaits you is that this unheard of”, “what will happen from this?”, “they are disrupting the holiday” and others. But the greatest difficulty is created, of course, by the skill of the author of the story, which requires, if not adequate, then at least a comparable level of translator.

Nevertheless, whether successfully or not, closer to the original or to the interlinear version, Babel’s stories are translated and published, periodically repeating this as the years pass and the appearance of new people willing to do such a difficult task. And Hospitalnaya, Balkovskaya, Dalnitskaya, Kostetskaya, Prokhorovskaya - the legendary streets of Moldavanka, “crossing” Babel’s stories, from his words, are known today by readers in England, Germany, Israel, Italy, Spain, the USA, Turkey, France, somewhere else. .. But only Odessa residents have the opportunity to touch the origins, look into the courtyards on Kosvennaya and Gospitalnaya, where weddings once took place, the echo of which remained in Babel’s story, go to the “original” addresses of Richelieuskaya, Primorsky Boulevard, Krasny Lane, where " King" was written, prepared for printing and printed for the first time. And only Odessa residents have every right and considered it their duty to elevate the 80th anniversary of the first publication of “The King,” which laid the foundation for “Odessa Stories,” to the rank of a significant date. And only Odessa residents celebrated this in the only way worthy of a literary anniversary...

If you say “Borya” or “Sasha” without naming names, then this will tell absolutely nothing to anyone, because citizens with such euphonious names in Odessa are like sand on Lanzheron. But if you say “Borechka”, then everyone who is not indifferent to the fate of our city will immediately understand that we are talking about Boris Litvak, the creator and director of the children's rehabilitation center on Pushkinskaya Street, the good angel of this, as they call it, “House with an Angel” . And those who have a touch of the cultural life of Odessa and follow the latest book releases, having heard “Borya and Sasha”, will immediately understand that they mean Boris Eidelman and Alexander Taubenshlak, respectively the director and editor-in-chief of the Optimum publishing house, whom the famous philologist, Professor Mark Sokolyansky invariably calls them “optimists.” Indeed, one must be such a person in order to publish, at one’s own expense, peril and risk, in our difficult times, a collection of Babel, and, moreover, in a very large circulation.

This idea was born in the basement occupied by the publishing house, clouded with blue cigarette smoke and flavored with red Bessarabian wine, and then turned into a book in which destinies, principles, and coincidences were intertwined. It turned out this way by chance, but it is symbolic that the publishing house is located just one and a half blocks from that house on Dvoryanskaya Street, where, at the behest of his father, Babel took violin lessons from Maestro Stolyarsky himself. But it is absolutely no coincidence that philologists Borya and Sasha, who, of course, would have found the words and time to write a preface of five, or even ten, pages, limited themselves to a few introductory phrases, rightly believing that in this case “the best preface there is the author's name on the cover." It was possible to include a variety of Babel’s works in the collection, only the publishers, the author’s native countrymen, considered it necessary for the first time to collect under one cover everything he wrote about his native city, and to dedicate the book to the anniversary of the story “The King”. It was finally possible to emboss it in Odessa without any hassle, but, unfortunately, it would not have turned out the way I wanted. And the publishers had to travel several times to Simferopol, where the local craftsmen managed to produce a book as good as a loaf of good bread and warm as the gentle hand of a woman. And placed there, in particular, is a wonderful lithograph by the famous artist Ilya Shenker, who has been far from Odessa for many years. And in his workshop now works inseparable from Odessa, as Odessa is from him, Gennady Garmider, whose works on the themes of Babel’s stories are also included in the book. Opposite Garmider's workshop, in a basement on Belinskaya Street, corner of Lermontovsky Lane, Eduard Bagritsky once lived and his pencil drawing, depicting the mighty binder Mendel Krick with the constant whip and a glass of vodka, precedes the play "Sunset" in the book. And as a kind of “invitation to the book,” the cover depicts a delicious “red watermelon with black seeds, with slanting seeds, like the eyes of crafty Chinese women” - the work of Tanechka Popovichenko, whose ancestors from time immemorial lived on Peresyp, which, according to Babel, is better than any tropics. And what gives this book the most complete charm are the words addressed to the reader, full of bright sadness and quiet joy, by Babel’s relative Tatyana Kalmykova, who still lives on the blessed Moldavanka, very close to the long-destroyed “family nest”...

I think Babel would be pleased with this book. As for the opus about “The King,” it could evoke a sly and ironic smile from the author, since the story takes up only a few pages, and I had to write about it... however, the reader himself knows how much I had to write, unless, of course , he had enough interest and patience to master it to the end.