Art and the Artist in Babel's "Guy de Maupassant"

Abstract

Of stories of Isaak Babel that deal explicitly with theme of art and artist, Guy de Maupassant (1932) is in many ways most interesting. It is certainly most literary of his works, alluding in its seven short pages to numerous other writers, polemizing with Tolstoi, and incorporating three of Maupassant's stories into its narrative fabric. Two of Babel's most authoritative comments on craft of writing are also found there, and autobiographical frame in which tale is set allows it to be read against background of his early pronouncements on art. It contains, in perhaps an even broader sense than Renato Poggioli meant by remark, the whole of his ars poetica, so to speak, in a nutshell.2 As in all of Babel's stories, plot of Guy de Maupassant is reduced to bare essentials. The autobiographical narrator, a destitute young writer in St. Petersburg in winter of 1916-1917, is introduced to Raisa Benderskaia, wife of a wealthy lawyer and publisher, to help her in her clumsy attempts to translate Maupassant. He accepts offer, becomes more and more intimate with his benefactress as they work on translation of three stories, and (evidently) finally seduces her. He returns that night to his garret, reads Edouard Maynial's biography of French writer, and is suddenly seized by a portent of some disturbing truth. As is evident from even this brief outline of narrative structure, story exemplifies a familiar pattern especially favored by Babel in which a young narrator experiences an epiphany initiating him into a deeper reality. To discern nature of that truth, we shall first of all have