Red Calvary: An Overview, Part I (pages 1-65)

“The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill” (39).

Isaac Babel’s diary of the 1917 war between Russia and Poland: the Cossacks and the Poles, is a perplexing and disturbing diary of exploitation, destruction, and carnage. At the onset, the reader is placed in Babel’s emotional periphery. His objective, abstract, and non-responsive reporting of the brutal and seemingly arbitrary slaughter of people, livestock, and religious artifacts, reveal a systemized method of dehumanizing, degrading, and annihilating resistors in Poland’s towns, communities, and villages. “The naked shine of the moon poured over the town with unquenchable strength” (59). Babel incorporates provocative imagery and poetic description of war and its aftermath.

Edith