Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Vladimir Toporov writes: "The text enters along with other facts into the plural quantity [mnozhestvo1understood as space, and the space together with other kinds of texts forms the plural quantity understood as the text." V. N. Toporov, "Prostranstvo i tekst," in Tekst: Semantika i struktura, ed. T. V. Tsiv'ian (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 227. 2. lu. M. Lotman, "Simvolika Peterburga i problemy semiotiki goroda," in Semiotika goroda i gorodskoi kul'tury: Peterburg (Tartu: Uchenye zapiski tartuskogo gorodskogo universiteta, 1984),35. 3. Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1,5, my italics. I follow Buckler's lead in expanding Toporov's notion of the "city text" to comprehend not only an agreed-upon canon ofworks belonging to "high" literature but also "cultural and literary history, social and political thought, biography, autobiography, memoir, and oral lore" (Buckler, 25). 4. I. E. Babel, Sochineniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 1:64. I will analyze this text in detail in chapter 1. 5. V. N. Toporov, "Peterburg i 'peterburgskii tekst' russkoi literatury," in Semiotika goroda i gorodskoi kul'tury, 11. 6. Vladimir Jabotinsky, "Memoirs by My Typewriter," in The Golden Tradition :Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (Syracuse , N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996),397. 7. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Washington: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 1. 8. Philippe Lejeune, "Qu'est-ce que Ie Pacte Autobiographique?," 2006, published online at http://www.autopacte.org/pacte_autobiographique.html. In this essay, Lejeune concisely summarizes the arguments advanced in his seminal work on autobiography, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 9. Quoted in J. D. Clayton, Ice and Flame: Aleksandr Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1985), 18. 147 Notes to Pages 7-9 10. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, The Invisible Land: A Study ofthe Artistic Imagination ofIuni Olesha (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 4. 11. VB. Shklovskii, "Iugo-zapad," Literatumaia gazeta, no. 1 (Jan. 5, 1933); reprinted in Gamburgskii schet: Stat'i-vospominaniia-esse (19141933 ) (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1990), 470-75 (this quotation, p. 475). The article takes its name from Bagritskii's 1928 collection ofverses. 12. More detailed attention will be paid to the interrelationship of"autobiographicity " and the critical reception of the Odessa school in chapter 2. 13. E. Karakina, Po sledam "Iugo-Zapada" (Novosibirsk: Svinin i synovia, 2006), 53, my italics. 14. See Petr Ershov, "Odesskaia literatumaia kolybel'," Opyty 8 (New York, 1957): 93-106. 15. As later chapters will show, it is a dangerous business to take Babel at his word; I remain skeptical about these alleged French juvenilia, which as far as I know have never surfaced (he claims them in "Avtobiografiia," in Sochineniia 1:31-32). His Hebrew and Yiddish credentials are confirmed by Efraim Sicher in Jews in Russian Literature After the Revolution (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995): Babel's grandparents spoke Yiddish, and his parents also knew Yiddish, but they talked with their children in Russian. This is a familiar pattern of acculturation in a fairly assimilated middle-class Jewish family that was urbanized and aspired to social mobility. Isaak Babel was nevertheless and quite naturally tutored at home in Hebrew, Yiddish, the Bible and Talmud.... Babel, though brought up speaking Russian, had a command of Yiddish as well as some knowledge of Hebrew. (74) Regarding Olesha, it seems clear from his autobiographical writings (discussed in detail in chapter 4) that Polish was his first language, though his competence in it may not have progressed past childhood. In No Day Without a Line, Olesha recalls that the first book he ever read was "probably one in Polish called Bainie ludawe (Folk Tales)," and consoles himself for his difficulty completing a sentence "with the fact that I'm a Pole and that Russian is, after all, alien to me and not my native tongue." While the latter pronouncement must be at least partly tongue-in-cheek, Judson Rosengrant concurs with my conclusion that Olesha's Russian "seems to have [been] learned on a substratum of childhood Polish." Olesha, No Day Without a Line, trans., ed., and intro. Judson Rosengrant (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979),28-29, vii. 16. Maxim Shrayer asserts that "by writing in Russian, a Jew becomes a Russian," in Russian Poet/Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagntskii (Lanham , Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 1. For a parallel discussion ofthe motives that led S. Y. Abramovitsh and others to select Yiddish as their language of composition...