Isaac Bábel: escrevendo a revolução em linhas tortas

Abstract

This essay aims to present a reading of the book Red Calvary, from Isaac Babel (1893-1940). The perusal undertaken sought to investigate the dialetic relations between History and fictional texts, once the Bábel's narratives approach the Russian-Polish Civil War, which occurred between 1920 and 1921. At the same time, the particular forms of representation of the heroic and of the epic allowed to understand Red Calvary as a kind of "failed epic" and conducted to a reflection about babelian realism and the possibility of characterizing his book as a novel. On the book, fragmentation, non-linear and episodic organization of conflicts, the refusal to chronological order and the variety of narrators and voices of the text seem to stage the difficulty of the romanesque traditional form to aesthethically incorporate the experience of the war and of the contradicting and convulse matter.