Red Cavalry
First collected in 1926, Red Cavalry is a cycle of short, ferocious stories drawn from Isaac Babel's time as a war correspondent embedded with Semyon Budyonny's First Cavalry Army during the Polish Soviet War of 1920. The narrator, a bespectacled Jewish writer named Lyutov, rides with semi literate Cossack horsemen whose cruelty and code of honor both repel and fascinate him. In a few pages each story can move from a sunlit field to a pogrom, from a soldier's love letter to a casual execution. Babel's prose is dense, image driven, and shot through with biblical cadence, and his stories refuse easy judgment about revolution, violence, and the price of belonging. Suppressed in the Soviet Union after Babel's arrest and execution in 1940, Red Cavalry has come to be recognized as one of the great story cycles of the twentieth century.
Also by Isaac Babel
All works by Isaac Babel →What you might want to know about Red Cavalry
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Isaac Babel's blistering linked stories about a Jewish intellectual riding with Cossack cavalry in the 1920 Polish Soviet War.
It is a cycle of linked short stories, usually read as a single book with a shared narrator and setting.
Very. Babel writes about war, pogroms, and rape in unflinching detail, though always in compressed, lyrical prose.
Red Cavalry was written by Isaac Babel, published in 2006 by Penguin Classics.
Red Cavalry is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Red Cavalry takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Red Cavalry is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.