Babel’s Petersburg Diary and the Language of Early Post Revolutionary Petrograd

• In Event: Literary Babel: The Multilingual Institutions of Soviet Jewish Writing

Abstract

In his Petersburg Diary (1918) Isaac Babel attempts to create an aesthetic form which seeks to represent two contradicting characteristics of the early post-revolutionary period, the discursive overproduction created by the early Bolshevik state and revolutionary movement, and the material underproduction and deprivation which had resulted from Russia’s involvement in World War I. Throughout the sketches, this contradiction is reflected in how Babel deals with the discursive and material aspects of literature and in how he treats paper as a symbol for the overproduction of revolutionary discourse, but also as a product which is at the same time in short supply as a material for the production of literature, and abundantly available in the form of worthless paper money. In the Petersburg Diary, the revolution, which Trotsky once called “the masterbuilder of symbols” expresses itself through the production of symbols which point not towards the grandeur of the revolutionary moment, but towards the material depravations which existed in Petrograd in 1918. On a sociological and cultural level, given how Isaac Babel is usually seen as a paradigmatic example of how Jews, and in particular, how the Jewish literati related to the Soviet state, an investigation of his Petersburg Diary (which was published in Gorky’s left-wing, but crucially anti-Bolshevik daily newspaper Novaia’ Zhizn) allows us to reexamine how Babel related to the Bolshevik project at a time in which many doubted the regime’s stability, and were critical of its exclusion of other social-democratic parties.

Author

• Michael Tobias Lerner, UC Berkeley