Art and Reality: A Note on Isaak Babel’s Metaliterary Narratives

Abstract

in no way detracts from the seriousness and intensity of Isaak Babel's imaginative involvement with the theme of the Revolution and of the society it spawned to say that throughout his brief career, it was the craft of fiction that claimed his deepest and unswerving allegiance. Small wonder that some of his most accomplished narratives bear on the nature and uses of art, most notably, on the relationship between art and reality. The dichotomy of truth versus fiction which shapes Babel's splendid short story In the Basement (B noABajie 193 1)1 is announced in its opening passage: was an untruthful little boy. was because of my reading. My imagination was always inflamed... read during my classes, in the intermissions, on the way home. Clearly, the young narrator's untruthfulness (the original's Izhivyi actually means lying) aims not at personal advantage, but at dramatic effect. His overheated imagination works non-stop to improve upon mere reality, injecting color, texture, and poetry into accurate but pedestrian accounts of what actually happened. Thus at school, a sober recital of facts bearing on the excommunication of Spinoza, offered by the top student, Mark Borgman, prompts the narrative I to butt in so as to heighten the drama of Spinoza's free and lonely at the cost of an exuberant anachronism: It seemed to me that Rubens was standing at Spinoza's death bed, taking a mask of the dead man's face (179). The sober, reality-oriented Borgman and the queer, fanciful lad strike up a friendship (in art as in life, opposites attract each other). Soon it becomes clear that their backgrounds are every bit as different as are their mental dispositions. The narrator comes from an indigent and ramshackle family3 which includes an erratic loudmouthed bully of an uncle and a defrocked rabbi grandfather