I am wondering after reading this book in what ways we still may or may not have books like this any more. I guess it’s technically fiction — and you won’t get much argument out of me about definitions between fictions and nonfiction and memoir and other related forms because I really do believe that the narrative and literary impulse that produces fiction or more to the point literary writing does not need to worry too much about genre and definitions. But this is a series of sketches — some biographical, some based in event, and some in vignette, landscapes and captured moments. But it’s also a war diary in some ways. It’s written as a soldier’s account in the Polish-Soviet War — a war I know nothing about and honestly didn’t know happened. But this isn’t an accounting of events so much as an accounting of humanity. It’s not that different from the more serious episodes of MASH — where you won’t learn a lot about the history of the Korean War, but you will learn about the effects of war on people.
So all of this is true and it’s a very old literary form both in and out of war.
It’s a kind of eye-witnessing and reckoning and even a travel-writing in a way.
But all that aside, I don’t actually enjoy reading this kind of writing very much. It reads a lot like Tim O’Brien’s first book If I Die in a Combat Zone, but I know about that war and can conceive of that war and no war adds much to a growing understanding of war for me. So this is what it is, but I was looking for more short stories. I blame this on my having only ever previously read a short story in the vein of Chekhov by Babel called “Guy de Maupassant” that I remember liking.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Cavalry-Pushkin-Collection-Isaac-Babel/dp/1782270930/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=red+cavalry&qid=1552147189&s=books&sr=1-2)