SUNRISE, SUNSET: SWIFTLY GOES THE WAR
Red Cavalry, based on Isaac Babel’s diary kept during the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), presents a fictional literary account of the war. Babel was a young contemporary of Maxim Gorky, and had been writing short stories for literary magazines prior to the war. As a result of his experience as a short story author, even Babel’s more historical accounts in Red Cavalry are full of flowery figurative language. He is especially married to the motif of nature as a symbol, using the passage of the day as a harbinger of the death that became synonymous with the Russian Civil War and the events of the USSR in the years that would follow.
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The sunset is indicative of a villainous closing of life. As the sun sets, so too do the lives of Russian soldiers. In “Crossing the Zbrucz” Babel describes the sun as “rolling across the sky like a severed head.” This graphic and disturbing imagery captures the brutalization of a generation and the duality that now exists within them. Babel has not lost his capacity for acknowledging a sunset, but the comparisons from which he can choose are limited to the warfare he has witnessed. The beauty of a red sunset comes through the smoke and dust produced by war, just as the beauty of red communism will take the country through war. Likewise, in “The Rebbe” Babel points out that “the dying evening has surrounded him with the rosy mist of its sadness.” Not even a month has passed between these two entries, yet Babel is already losing sight of the glory of the sunset and focusing only on the death of the day it garners. The sunset brings the night and with it a close on all of the action of the day. This line follows a speech given by Gedali who announces that they will all die and be forgotten from history since they have done nothing to bring more life into the world, like a mother, whose immanence in future generations is like that of God through all things. But these men are neither immanent nor immortal and each setting of the sun brings them one day closer to the full institution of socialism, but individually it brings them one day nearer death. Finally, in “Kombrig 2” Babel says “the blaze of the sunset washed over him, crimson and improbable as approaching death.” Here, Babel states outright that the sunset is a metaphor for the end of life. The sun propels the days and each day brings with it more bloodshed and destruction of his country. The commander states “either we win or we die. There is no other way.” Either the sun continues to set every night or it sets for the final time in death. There is no other way. The sun, made red practically by the dust and smoke kicked up by warfare and metaphorically by the blood of Russians, and perhaps more metaphorically by the red of communism being spread across Russia, is a symbol of death.
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Always following the sunset is the moon, and with it comes the paralyzing fear of the night. The night is used in Red Cavalry as a pause in the fighting, at least for the men in the stories, during which they can reflect on their imminent mortality. In “The Ivans” Babel says “night flew towards me on swift horses” and that “on the earth, girded round with screams, the roads were dying.” This phrasing comes when the narrator is helping to collect wounded for the ambulance. The sun has already set for these soldiers, and the night has come quickly and unexpectedly upon them. They are conflated with the roads themselves as their final resting place lies beyond the dirt down into the earth. With the battle over, the night now allows the men to take in the destruction and death they caused in the day. In “The Widow” new imagery comes to mind as “the hazy moon loafed about the sky like a beggarwoman. Distant gunfire floated on the air. The feather-grass rustled on the troubled earth, and into the grass fell the August stars.” This scene personifies the moon as a beggar, looking for life among the stars. But the stars have all fallen to earth where they have perished with the wounded men in the grass to whom the nurse is tending, begging to find life among the casualties of war. If the red sun is the sign of death and communism, then the following moon is the realization of the same. It exposes that the civil war will be a long and hard fought battle that will break down Russia before it can rebuild the country.
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In the morning, of course, the sun returns. The morning brings with it a certain sense of hope, but only in the sense that it brings the war one day closer to ending. In “Zamość” Babel says “the morning was seeping over us like chloroform seeping over a hospital table.” As the army pushes on, Russia is subdued in this way. It becomes more and more numb to the violence of the war, and the violence that will truly characterize an entire era of history. This phrase comes after Babel acknowledges that “the sodden earth revealed to me the soothing embrace of the grave” as the narrator slept in the dirt and experienced an indecipherable difference between his living and dying state. The notion of Russia being rebirthed out of the war shows that it will be a society based on death even after the conflicts of the civil war are settled.
Sunset to sunrise, one day has passed, and yet the complexity of the conflicts through which the Red Army is fighting lasts much longer. A long string of these sunsets and sunrises spread death as much as they spread the socialist revolution across Russia during the civil war. The sunsets cast over the country the red glow of death and communism, which become synonymous. The nights brought a foreboding sense of self examination that revealed the numerous faults in the Bolshevik system. And the new day brought the realization of the horror and bloodshed in which socialism had been founded, and the awful price that had been paid for this political experiment.