4 / Midrash and History: a Key to the Babelesque Imagination

4 / Midrash and History: A Key to the Babelesque Imagination Myth as History Myth in Babelʹ’s fiction gives an illusion of the epic while mocking it, and reads unorthodox interpretations and essential truths into history. For Babelʹ, the myths of history and religion were a subtle medium for allegorical parallels, as well as ironic allusions to a moral message. This is an essentially midrashic approach to history, fol- lowing the ancient Jewish storytelling tradition that imaginatively elaborates on biblical and historical narrative, usually for exegetic or homiletic purposes, and playfully draws on intertextual, ver- bal, and semantic associations. Often new, contemporary meaning is introduced into the reading of familiar stories, or biblical ver- ses are given unexpected levels of meaning that dramatizes biblical figures as human. As Daniel Boyarin has demonstrated, midrash, the biblical metacommentary that forms part of Tal- mudic lore, is fundamentally intertextual and sets up a coded dua- lity between the exegetical text and the quoted or referenced pas- sage. When a textual moment is felt to be awkward, what Michel Rifattere terms “ungrammaticality” points to gaps that provide the key to decoding through another text.1 The midrashic mode informs the Jewish imagination at times of cultural repression (such as under the Romans or the Tsars), and characterizes the way the canon of Jewish literature has developed and renewed itself. There is something we might call midrashic in Babelʹ’s view of history. 129 4 / Midrash and History We may find a key to Babelʹ’s midrashic view of history in the art of the Polish painter in Red Cavalry. The story “Pan Apolek” introduces us to the first direct encounter in the book with Western art and culture. “Pan Apolek” has been read as a key to a Christian reading of Red Cavalry,2 but in fact its attitude toward Catholicism is ironically ambivalent and repeats Russian stereotypes of the Poles and of Jesuits (who are seen as sly and conspiratorial). The story presents a picture not only of a rich Western culture unfamiliar to backward, provincial Russia, but also of ancient enmity towards Russia and a satanically heretical religion.3 In the diary which Babelʹ wrote while on the Polish-Soviet front in 1920, and which served as raw material for the later Red Cavalry stories, there is no mention of a Polish painter, but in the ruins of Catholic churches and in the home of the priest Tuzinkiewicz with its ancient tomes and Latin manuscripts, Babelʹ stumbles upon the Catholic mystery. Pan Apolek is himself an instance of the playful use of myth that demonstrates an aesthetic credo and a singularly non-Marxist understanding of history as cyclical and repetitive. Apolek is christened Apollinarius, which identifies him with Apollo, Greek god of poetry and music, representative, in direct opposition to Dionysus, of the intellect and of civilization.4 Apollo has a confused history in Greek mythology, but out of his many functions it is as Apollo Smintheus (associated with a mouse, possibly because of a historical confusion with a dialect word for mouse) that Apolek is recognized. Apolek wanders the earth with two white mice tucked behind his shirt, here an epithet for the archetypal victim. Apolek lacks his classical forebear’s lyre, but he does have the blind musician Gottfried from Heidelberg to play to him,5 and it is in Western Europe, to whose influence Babelʹ, as an Odessa Jew, was naturally predisposed, that we must seek clues to Babelʹ’s hagiography of Pan Apolek.6 The narrator first comes across the art of Pan Apolek in the story “Pan Apolek.” In his exposition to the story the narrator takes vows to the aesthetic ideal of Apolek’s art, a “gospel hidden from the world,” and writes with hindsight that the saintly life of Pan Apolek “went to his head like old wine”; it later transpires that Apolek is a drunken heretic. The invented aesthetic model of the Polish painter 130 M y t h a s H i s t o r y expresses, in characteristically visual imagery, Babelʹ’s concept of art and history that juxtaposes the real and the ideal. The narrator chats to Apolek about the romantic past of the Polish gentry and about Luca della Robbia, the fifteenth-century sculptor who created a spi- ritual beauty in his church art, but the treatise on Apolek’s artistic ideal ends with the narrator returning to the gruesome reality of his plundered Jews; the story concludes with his loneliness, homelessness, and impossible idealism: По городу слонялась бездомная луна. И я шел с нею вместе, отогревая в себе неисполнимые мечты и нестройные песни. (Детство, 120) The vagrant moon trailed through the town and I tagged along, nurturing within me unfulfillable dreams and dissonant songs. (Complete Works, 222) The first of Apolek’s chefs-d’oeuvre to be exhibited is his portrait of St. John. This is evidently a portrait of St. John the Baptist, for his head lies on a clay dish after his execution, but it also portrays St. John the Apostle-Evangelist, for out of the mouth slithers a snake, a reference to the legend in which a snake saved St. John the Apostle’s life by extracting the venom from a poisoned chalice. The dead St. John’s face seems familiar to the narrator, and he has a presentiment of the truth: the severed head is drawn from Pan Romuald. Pan Romuald, we recall, was the treacherous viper of “The Church in Novograd” (“Костел в Новограде”), the runaway priest’s assistant who was later shot as a spy. His venomous character is introduced in that story by the image of his cassock snaking its way through the dusk, and his soul is merciless, like a cat’s. Incidentally, the association of Romuald with the serpent and the cat makes him both the natural and mythological enemy of Apollo the mouse god and slayer of the python. The monkish eunuch Romuald, who would have become a bishop had he not been shot as a spy, stands in direct contrast to the aesthetic and doctrinal heresy of Apolek. Pan Robacki, who pours anathema on the heretical painter in “Pan Apolek,” is also likened to a cat, and his “grey ears” help to identify him with the “gray old men with bony ears” in “The Church in Novograd,” all senile attributes of a dead world opposed to the life-giving, joyful art of Apolek. 131 4 / Midrash and History The narrator finds himself half-way towards solving the riddle of Apolek’s iconography when he spots the Madonna hanging over the bed of Pani Eliza, the priest’s housekeeper, for it is she who is portrayed as a rosy-cheeked Mary. Apolek first came to Novograd-Volynsk thirty years before, as the narrator relates in his apocryphal rendering of the coming of this questionably holy fool who sparked off a long and bitter war with the established church. Like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Apolek climbs along the walls of the Novograd church and paints into his frescoes a psychological, though ahistorical, truth. The lame convert Janek is depicted as Paul— who was disabled with blindness in the story of his conversion (Acts 9:1-19). The scene of the stoning of the adulteress (compare John 8:3-11) is referred to as the stoning of Mary Magdalene, who is appropriately depicted as the Jewish prostitute Elka, for all three are fallen women. Apolek’s heresy is to elevate ordinary folk into mythical heroes with the haloes of saints, while bringing the divine, supernatural myths down to the level of comprehension of mortals. In the same way that Renaissance painters flattered their patrons, Apolek wins a smile and a glass of cognac from the old priest who recognizes himself among the Magi, and he peoples the homes of the local population with peasant Josephs and Marys. For an extra ten złoty their enemy can be depicted as Judas Iscariot. Apolek even offers to paint the narrator as St. Francis of Assisi, with a dove or a goldfinch on his sleeve, an ironical reference to the horse’s head insignia on the sleeve of the narrator’s Red Cavalry uniform. Apolek realizes in ordinary folk with all their human vices their potential for spirituality and epic deeds. Above all, Apolek brings out the aesthetic beauty of human flesh, which he colors like a “tropical garden.” Lush and sensuous, Apolek’s paintings beatify mundane existence as if mythical, while the mythical is revitalized to reveal hidden truths. Apolek’s scenes of the nativity resemble Babelʹ’s impressions of the religious paintings of Rembrandt, Murillo, and the Italian masters which he saw in a Polish church in Beresteczko. The hint at the pre-Christian and pagan origins of the Church in the “Chinese carved rosary,” which the Novograd priest holds as he blesses the infant Jesus in Apolek’s painting, is also clear in the description in Babelʹ’s diary entry for 7 August 1920: 132 M y t h a s H i s t o r y великолепная итальянская живопись, розовые патеры, качающие младенца Христа, великолепный темный Христос, Рембрандт, Мадонна под Мурильо, а может быть Мурильо, и главное — эти святые упитанные иезуиты, фигурка китайская жуткая за покрывалом, в малиновом кунтуше, бородатый еврейчик, лавочка, сломанная рака, фигура святого Валента. Служитель трепещет, как птица, корчится; мешает русскую речь с польской, мне нельзя прикоснуться, рыдает. Зверье, они пришли, чтобы грабить, это так ясно, разрушаются старые боги. (Собрание сочинений, II, 287) magnificent Italian art, pink Paters rocking the infant Jesus, a magnificent mysterious Christ, Rembrandt, a Madonna after Murillo or perhaps a real Murillo, and the main thing is these pious, well-fed Jesuits, a weird Chinese figurine behind the veil, [Jesus is] a bearded little Jew in a crimson-colored cloak, a bench, the shattered shrine, the figure of St.

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