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5 / a Russian Maupassant

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5 / a Russian Maupassant 5 / A Russian Maupassant A Literary Messiah In his programmatic essay of 1916, “Odessa,” Babelʹ looks to the south of Russia, to sunny Odessa, as the only city which could give birth to the much needed Russian Maupassant. …думается мне, что должно прийти, и скоро, плодотворное, животворящее влияние русского юга, русской Одессы, может быть (qui sait?), единственного в России города, где может родиться так нужный нам, наш национальный Мопассан. (Собрание сочинений, I, 44) Any day now, we will fully experience a fecund, revivifying influence of the Russian south, Russian Odessa—perhaps, qui sait, the only Russian town where there is a good chance our very own, sorely needed, homegrown Maupassant might be born. (Complete Works, 76). This would be Russia’s long-awaited literary messiah, who would banish the icy grip of Russia’s St. Petersburg tradition (which Babelʹ thought evident in the later Gogolʹ and in Dostoevsky)1 and bring some sunshine to the provincial north, which dominated Russian prose fiction with its ethnographic sketches of everyday life. Even Gorʹky—soon to become Babelʹ’s patron and mentor—gets short shrift as a mere herald of the literary messiah who will come from sunny Odessa. Чувствуют — надо освежить кровь. Становится душно. Литературный Мессия, которого ждут столь долго и столь бесплодно, придет оттуда — из солнечных степей, обтекаемых морем. (Собрание сочинений I, 48) 151 5 / A Russian Maupassant It is high time for new blood. We are being stifled. Literature’s Messiah, so long awaited, will issue from there—from the sun- drenched steppes washed by the sea. (Complete Works, 79) Was Babelʹ thinking of himself as the Russian Maupassant born on Odessa’s sunny shores? If so, this is a remarkable ambition for a twenty-four year old apprentice writer, eking out an existence in St. Petersburg as a student at a liberal arts college. Maupassant, though thought somewhat decadent at the time in Russia, was considered the last word in the art of the short story. Che- khov admired Maupassant’s “world-wide fame and reputation” as a short-story writer, who could not be surpassed, while Tolstoy actually prefered Maupassant to Chekhov for his “joy of life”.2 Babelʹ acquired a passion for French literature from his French teacher, a Breton by the name of Monsieur Vadon, and he got to know the French colony in Odessa, which, though not large, was influential, dating back to the first half of the nineteenth century. He began writing short stories in French at the age of fifteen. “I was writing them for two years,” Babelʹ says, “but then I gave up. The peasants and the author’s comments came out colorless; I was only good at the dialogue.”3 This comment is revealing, because dialogue in Maupassant’s Normandy tales is very important. Babelʹ’s did not inherit his love of France and Western culture from Russia’s French-speaking aristocracy, but breathed it in with the cosmopo- litan air of the Black Sea port, with its cafés chantants (described in “Notes from Odessa,” 1918) and Italian opera (described in “Di Grasso,” 1937). When the thirteen-year-old boy read Madame Bovary, Flaubert became his literary model; later it was to be Flaubert’s pupil, Maupassant. Babelʹ’s French translator relates: Babel me dit qu’il a lu et relu Maupassant et Flaubert; qu’il ne connaît rien ou a peu près rien de nos auteurs contemporains. Je pense que cette formation première a de lʹimportance et que c’est un explication très utile ici. Au surplus, Babel, qui ne s’est jamais occupé de Proust, ni de Gide, ni de Paul Claudel, a suivi les chemins de lʹesprit et de lʹart français en remontant vers le passé.4 152 A L i t e r a r y M e s s i a h Babel told me he has read and reread Maupassant and Flaubert, and that he knows nothing, or almost nothing, of our contemporary authors. I think that this primal formation is significant and that it explains a lot here. On top of that, Babel, who has never been interested in Proust, in either Gide or Paul Claudel, has followed the paths of French art and the French spirit in going back to the past. Maupassant was not then so popular in France, but was well known in Russia, where he had been introduced by Turgenev, almost simultaneously with the publication of A Life (Une vie) in 1883, as the best thing since Madame Bovary and free of the naturalism of Zola.5 In his preface to Maupassant’s Complete Works, which appeared in Russian translation in 1908-11, Tolstoy praised his clarity of vision, but deplored his lack of moral judgment. Having himself embarked on a new spiritual path, and believing that the writer cannot divorce himself from moral questions, Tolstoy mistakes Maupassant’s skillful detachment for uncertainty, while applauding his genuine talent for seeing through the hypocrisy of social convention. It is not difficult to understand why Tolstoy seeks moral sensitivity in the short stories of Maupassant and why they attracted Babelʹ, who shares with Chekhov an authorial detachment combined with the deepest concern for the moral imperative of humanity.6 In his 1916 essay “Odessa,” Babelʹ wrote, А вот Мопассан, может быть, ничего не знает, а может быть — все знает; громыхает по сожженной зноем дороге дилижанс, сидят в нем, в дилижансе, толстый и лукавый парень Полит и здоровая крестьянская топорная девка. Что они там делают и почему делают — это уж их дело. Небу жарко, земле жарко. С Полита и с девки льет пот, а дилижанс громыхает по сожженной светлым зноем дороге. Вот и все. (Собрание сочине- ний I, 47) Maybe Maupassant knows nothing, or maybe he knows everything. The carriage rumbles along the sun-baked road carrying the fat and crafty lad Polyte and a coarse, robust peasant girl. What they are doing and why they are doing it is their own business. The sky is hot and the earth is hot. Sweat pours from Polyte and from the peasant girl, while the carriage rumbles along the sun-baked road in the scorching heat. And that is all there is to it. 153 5 / A Russian Maupassant This scene is taken from Maupassant’s “The Confession” (“L’Aveu”), a story which Babelʹ translated into Russian for the three-volume collection of Maupassant’s stories which he edited.7 “The Confession” figures in his own story “Guy de Maupassant” (“Гюи де Мопассан”), where it is both the intertext for the plot and the story which the narrator is translating with the seductive Raisa Benderskaia, the wife of an assimilated Petersburg Jewish magnate. “Guy de Maupassant” is set in Petersburg in 1916 and was written in the years 1920-1922, though only published ten years later.8 Maupassant, of course, was more concerned with the mother’s calculating avarice than with the coachman’s sexual exuberance, but then Babelʹ felt free to adopt and adapt as he wished. What he admires in Maupassant is the passion for, and the intimate knowledge of, life. Refusing to take a desk job, the narrator explains in “Guy de Maupassant”. Мудрость дедов сидела в моей голове: мы рождены для наслаждения трудом, дракой, любовью, мы рождены для этого и ни для чего другого. (Детство, 81) The wisdom of my forefathers, was ingrained in me: we are born to delight in labor, fighting and love. This is what we have been born for, and for nothing else. (Complete Works, 680) All-consuming curiosity and a passion for life, however, had their price. Babelʹ realized to exactly what tragic dilemma Maupassant’s passion for life led, and, indeed, it was just this danger of the morbid obsession with sensuality as an ideal that Tolstoy had criti- cized. The deeper he penetrated into life with this ideal, the more com- pletely all veils were torn away, leaving bare the dark consequences and still darker realities. He begins to perceive the chasm be- tween man and beast not in sexual passion alone, but in the whole fabric of life.9 Maupassant’s tragedy, wrote Tolstoy, was that he perished because he could not free himself from his indulgence in life. Tolstoy pointed to the bitter irony that Maupassant could clearly see the repulsion of a view of life reduced to the pursuit of pleasure. 154 A L i t e r a r y M e s s i a h Babelʹ’s story “Guy de Maupassant” sets up a polemic between Tolstoy’s and Maupassant’s aesthetics, but in a way that is relevant more to the time of publication than to the time of the events in the story. The Swedish scholar Nils Åke Nilsson has emphasized the context of the story in the autobiographical theme of the writer’s maturation and apprenticeship, as well as Babelʹ’s legendary silence, his noncompliance with demands to produce ideologically suitable material.10 Nilsson underscores the irony that, in an age of verbiage and long novels extolling Stalinism, Raisa pays the narrator-translator for his saving of literary capital, something that might put Babelʹ’s Chekhovian economy in the same league as Maiakovsky’s “Conversation with a Tax Inspector about Poetry” (“Разговор с фининспектором о поэзии”). Once Chekhov was caught rewriting stories by Turgenev and Tolstoy as an exercise in style.11 Babelʹ’s translations and adaptations of Maupassant may be seen as a similar attempt at apprenticeship. This would explain Babelʹ’s renewed love for Maupassant at a time when, after the publication of Red Cavalry, he was seeking a new simpler and sparser prose style.12 It is from Maupassant that Babelʹ has evidently learnt the secret of how language must grip the reader.
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