Национальный мир глазами ребёнка в прозе И.Э. Бабеля

Abstract

Attempts to reproduce the lost world of national tradition arose in the works of many authors of the first third of the 20 century as a consequence of the collapse of traditional culture, a process typologically similar for both Russian and Jewish civilizations. The desire to recreate the world of the past is also one of the characteristic features of I.E. Babel's prose. Having described the collapse of the national world in “Red Cavalry”, I.E. Babel reconstructs it not only in “Odessa Stories”, but also in an unfinished cycle of short stories about childhood. The main character and, concurrently, “the narrator” of this book is a child. However, the connection between him and the adult narrator is not as strong as in the autobiographical prose of most I.E. Babel’s contemporaries (representatives of both Russian and Jewish literature). The adult narrator doesn’t dream of escaping the reality, he has no desire to return to prerevolutionary Odessa; on the contrary, he dreams of growing up as soon as possible and gaining strength sufficient to prevent the collapse of the national world, to repel the rioters, even at the cost of his own life. The ideal in the prose of I.E. Babel is not the past, but the future, in which his hero will get stronger and be able to create a “brave new world”, “The International of good people”.