The Revolutionary ‘Hero’ in Isaac Babel’s the Red Cavalry

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The Revolutionary ‘Hero’ in Isaac Babel’s The Red Cavalry Isaac Babel’s The Red Cavalry is a set of stories that present a subjective view of the war of an individual who valued moral and revolutionary ideas. The stories are based on Babel’s own diary entries during his travels as a reporter of the Red Cavalry. Babel adopts a ‘name of war’, Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov, who narrates The Red Cavalry stories. He is journalist who accompanies Budyonov’s Red Cavalry and observes “his effective colleagues-in-arms” (Wood 78). James Wood sees limitation in Babel’s art because of the latter’s “great lack of any inwardness in any of the characters” (Wood 77). However, the lack of inwardness, sensitivity, and vulnerability in his characters is Babel’s way of portrayal of the revolutionary ‘hero’, a person, who lost all values and fought against people like himself for the sake of revolutionist ideologies. In “My First Goose” Babel describes a vivid episode, that not only accurately depicts the essence of Red Cavalry soldiers but also shows the betrayal of values the narrator needs to go through in order to be accepted. Upon his first meeting with the commander of the Sixth Divison he comes across contempt towards himself as a representative of a different class. “Here you get hacked into pieces just for wearing glasses!” (Babel 231), the commander’s response to the fact that the narrator was an educated person who could read and write unlike other members of the Sixth Division and consequently did not fit in with them. The quartermaster warns the narrator, “a man of high distinguishings they’ll chew up and spit out - but ruin a lady, yes, the most cleanest lady, and you’re the darling of the fighters!” (Babel 231). This gives the Lyutov a clue about the fact that people in the Sixth Division value violence and cruelty and they only treat
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