Cavalry Corps

Author: Isaac Babel
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-09-01
Features: Babel appears in literature as a victor and innovator, a master. Babel's language is astonishingly fresh and compact, or more accurately, captivating. This person brings a novelty that we lack, observing and listening to the world. — Konstantin G. Paustovsky
Ever since Babel's novella was translated into French, I have known Babel, read his Cavalry Regiment, and I greatly admire his work. — Ernest Hemingway
Nowadays, people should examine Babel and Kafka, two perceptive Jewish writers, who can be regarded as writers of equal stature in European literature in the 20th century. — Cynthia Ozick
This is a remarkable book that has been passed down for eighty years, forged from the iron and flowers of youth into a literary treasure. The author is Isaac Babel, a genius of 20th-century Russian literature. In 1920, at the age of twenty-six, he joined the Soviet Red Army's Cavalry Corps under Budenny in their advance into Poland. The war lasted three months. Babel witnessed the last large-scale, unprecedentedly brutal cavalry battle in European history—and in human history. From 1923 to 1924, he wrote more than thirty short, incisive pieces based on this campaign, including battlefield sketches and military tales—this is Cavalry Regiment. This finale of the Soviet-Polish War, which once shook the world and sold well in Europe and America, is both a record of a bespectacled Jewish scholar on civilization and violence, conquest and resistance, and a chronicle of the fierce, heroic, and rugged Cossack cavalry soldiers.