I was amazed anew at the varieties of human experience: to think we had both read the same story under such similar circumstances, and it had had such different effects on us.
“Babel was like the father to me,” continued the screenwriter. “I consider myself Babel’s son. Therefore, Nathalie and Lidiya are my sisters.” Something in the air suggested that not everyone in the audience had followed him in these logical steps. “Today I was able to shake hands with Nathalie, Lidiya, and Pirozhkova. I feel that I touched Babel’s hand. I hope Babel is up there watching us right now!”
Next, the director gave a short address in Chinese, and the screenwriter translated. “I had the foundations of my existence rocked by Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. His prose is so concise.” The director gave a little nod when he heard the English word “concise.” He went on to express his admiration of Babel’s deep understanding of the relationship between men and horses. He himself was a horseman, and had filmed the movie known as the first Chinese Western. He had made films in all genres, including action, war, and family.
“I am so grateful because here I met Babel scholars from all over the world and the universe,” the address concluded. “I saw so much passion! I can’t show you my film of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, because I haven’t made it yet. Instead I will show you some of my film, the first Chinese Western, Swordsmen in Double Flag Town. Then you will see how I feel about horses, and maybe you will understand how I feel about Isaac Babel.”
The DVD was inserted into somebody’s laptop and projected onto a big screen. The sound didn’t work. Yellow dunes flashed silently by, a desert, the galloping legs of a horse, a row of Chinese characters. “Swordsmen in Double Flag Town!” cried the director, flinging out one arm. These were the first words he had spoken in English.
Later that night, Matej and I met at the picnic tables outside the housing complex. The world had changed two years’ worth since the biography class. I had moved from the apartment across from the Safeway to a studio on campus. Matej now bought his Winston Lights from Australia, instead of from the American Indians. Matej had brought four bottles of beer—three for him and one for me—and I told him my story about the two Chinese, about their gratitude for having met scholars from all over the world, and the universe. “I think I saw one of them this afternoon,” Matej said. “I saw one scholar, who was from the world, talking to another scholar, who was from elsewhere in the universe.”
The subject of interplanetary visitors reminded me to tell Matej about Cooper’s plan to simultaneously resolve the West Coast population boom and the Sputnik crisis by exporting Californians to the moon.
“What—like Nikolai Fyodorov?” Matej riposted.
I had forgotten all about Nikolai Fyodorov, the influential Russian philosopher who declared the future tasks of mankind to be the abolishment of death, the universal resurrection of all dead people, and the colonization of outer space (so the resurrected people would have somewhere to live).
Fyodorov published almost nothing in his lifetime. He worked as a librarian in Moscow, where his visitors included both the aging Lev Tolstoy and the teenage Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who, in 1903—the year of Fyodorov’s death—mathematically proved the possibility of spaceflight. Tsiolkovsky went on to become the “grandfather of Soviet cosmonautics,” and Soviet cosmonautics was Cooper’s bête noire: “So there really is a path from Fyodorov to Cooper!” I concluded.
“If there wasn’t, you would find one anyway,” Matej replied. “You remind me of a Croatian proverb: the snow falls, not in order to cover the hill, but in order that the beast can leave its tracks.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, it’s kind of an enigmatic proverb.”
We talked then about Matej’s current object of study: something called “the problem of the person.” The problem, Matej explained, was that personhood is revealed and constituted by action, such that the whole person is always present in every action—and yet the person isn’t “exhausted” by any single action, or even by the sum of all her actions. The action of writing “My First Goose,” for example, expresses Babel’s whole person (it isn’t the case that only part of Babel wrote “My First Goose,” while part of him remained uninvolved); nonetheless, neither “My First Goose,” nor even the sum total of Babel’s writings, express everything about him as a person.
“One way of putting it is like this,” Matej said. “When you’re in love with someone, what exactly is it you love?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“That’s just it, you see—you love . . . the person.”
The person is never exhausted by his actions: there is always something left over. But what is that precious remainder—where do you find it?
Reflecting upon the problem of the person, I was brought to mind of a novel I had always liked, but never quite understood: Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859), the story of a man so incapable of action or decision-making that he doesn’t get off his sofa for the whole of part 1. In the first chapter, Oblomov receives various visitors who are active in different spheres of human activity. In all these forms of activity, Oblomov deplores the absence of “the person.” A socialite rushes in, talks of balls, dinner parties, and tableaux vivants, and then rushes away, exclaiming that he has ten calls to make. “Ten visits in one day,” Oblomov marvels. “Is this a life? Where is the person in all this?” And he rolls over, glad that he can stay put on his sofa, “safeguarding his peace and his human dignity.”
The second visitor, a former colleague from the civil service, tells Oblomov about his recent promotion to department head, his new privileges and responsibilities. “In time he’ll be a big shot and reach a high rank,” Oblomov muses. “That’s what we call a career! But how little of the person it requires: his mind, his will, his feelings aren’t needed.” Stretching out his limbs, Oblomov feels proud that he doesn’t have any reports to write, and that here on the sofa there is “ample scope both for his feelings and his imagination.”
I saw now that the problem of the person was the key to Oblomov’s laziness. So loath is Oblomov to be reduced to the mere sum of his actions that he decides to systematically not act—thereby to reveal more fully his true person, and bask in it unadulterated.
Oblomov’s third visitor, a critic, arrives in rapture over the invention of literary realism. “All the hidden wires are exposed, all the rungs of the social ladder are carefully examined,” he gushes. “Every category of fallen woman is analyzed—French, German, Finnish, and all the others . . . it’s all so true to life!” Oblomov not only refuses to read any realist works, but becomes almost impassioned. “Where is the person in all this? . . . They describe a thief or a prostitute, but forget the person, or are incapable of depicting him . . . The person, I demand the person!” he shouts.
Thinking over the problem of the person in the context of literary realism, I remembered a sentence from Babel’s diary that I had initially taken as a joke: “What is this gluttonous, pitiful, tall youth, with his soft voice, droopy soul, and sharp mind?” It wasn’t a joke—the question was where, in these characteristics, was the person? What was the person? In a speech in 1936, Babel described a change in his view of literary production: formerly, he had believed that the events of their time were so unusual and so surprising that all he had to do was write them down and “they would speak for themselves,” but this literature of “objectivism” had turned out “uninteresting.” “In my work there had been no person,” Babel concluded. “The person had escaped himself.” Three years later, the NKVD took him in, and didn’t let him finish. The person had escaped for good.