Fat Tuesday in Odessa: Isaac Babel's "Di Grasso" As Testament and Manifesto

Abstract

If one were to search among the painters of the past for an illustrator who could do justice to the collected works of Isaac Babel, the name of Peter Bruegel the Elder, the Hellish Bruegel, would surely be the first to come up. For even though they were separated by four centuries, both the artist and the writer looked at life in a similar way-as a ceaseless combat between the upside-down world of Carnival and the grim and right side-up world of the philistine Lent.1 The editor of this hypothetical illustrated collection of Babel's writings would most likely assign Di Grasso (1937) the ultimate place. Written two years before the author's arrest and disappearance, the story deserves to be read as a testament or, better still, as a retrospective manifesto that Babel issued as a parting festive shot at the encroaching army of Lent. The story's very title would justify the editor's choice, for the title Di Grasso refers not only to the central character of the tale but also to the festival, central to the carnival tradition, namely, Shrove or Fat Tuesday, Mardi gras or, in Italian, Martedi Grasso. Indeed, camivalesque vision, to borrow the term from Mikhail