标题: WSJ’s Book Review on ‘Red Cavalry’ [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 9-2-2015 19:17 标题: WSJ’s Book Review on ‘Red Cavalry’ Sam Sacks, A Masterpiece Worth Revisiting. In 1920 the Jewish Babel was assigned to serve with the Red Army’s Cossacks. It was like a black man joining the Ku Klux Klan. Wall Street Journal, Aug 31, 2015 http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-ma ... visiting-1440966707
("Isaac Babel was 26 when he was attached as a political propagandist to the Red Army’s First Cavalry division in 1920. * * * Babel was a middle-class Jew. * * * the First Cavalry were Cossacks, who had a proud tradition of murderous anti-Semitism”)
Note:
(a) "The stories follow the Cossacks’ campaign against the Poles in what is today Western Ukraine. Though Babel takes factual license, altering geography and compressing time for dramatic effect, the stories broadly convey the progress of the war, depicting the Red Army’s early triumphs and later chaotic retreats."
(b) "Their narrator is the autobiographical Lyutov, who serves as a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper. Like Babel, he’s a bookish Jew in spectacles, and many of the stories involve his despairing attempts to fit in with his Cossack comrades."
(i) "Their" refers to: of the stories (in the book: Red Cavalry).
(ii) The narrator in the book is Lyutov, who is a not-so-subtle avatar of Isaac Babel .
(c) "The most chilling reminder of their brutality is found in the devastated Jewish shtetls where the horsemen routinely quarter. These were the homes of the war’s greatest victims, the Jews of the Pale of Settlement murdered by Poles and Russians alike ('Jew’s guilty in everyone’s eyes, yourn and ourn,' a peasant says in the story 'Zamość')."
(i) revulsion
(A) revulsion (n): "a strong, often sudden, feeling of dislike or disgust <Most of us feel only revulsion from such crimes>"
dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/revulsion
(B) revulsion (n):
"1 : a strong pulling or drawing away : WITHDRAWAL
2 * * *
b : a sense of utter distaste or repugnance
<a growing revulsion to war>" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/revulsion
(ii) shtetl (n):
"a small Jewish town or village formerly found in Eastern Europe "www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shtetl
(iii) yourn (possessive pronoun): "regional or archaic form of yours" www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/yourn作者: choi 时间: 9-2-2015 19:34
(d) “The movements of the Galician and Volynian Jew are violent, jerky and offensive to good taste"
Volynia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volhynia
("According to some historians, the region is named for the former city of Volyn or Velyn" somewhere in present-day western Ukraine "whose name may come from the Proto-Slavic root *vol/vel- 'wet' ")
(e) " 'Red Cavalry' is stamped by disparate influences: Yiddish folklore, the great French ironists Flaubert and Maupassant and the Russian tradition of Cossack tales, especially Gogol’s 'Taras Bulba' which straddles romantic myth and grim reality. But what makes the collection is its language. Babel was awake to the creative ferment of the European avant garde. He drew on movements like Cubism and Expressionism, reveling in phantasmagorical similes"
(i) ironist (n): "one who uses irony especially in the development of a literary work or theme" www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ironist
(ii) Taras Bulba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Bulba
(iii) Cubism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism
(Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture; section 9 Cubism in other fields)
(iv) Expressionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionism
(v)
(A) phantasmagoria (n;from Old French fantasme) + -agorie (perhaps from Greek agora assembly)
(B) French English dictionary
fantasme (noun masculine):
"1 : (chiefly sexuality) fantasy
2 : (dated) hallucination https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fantasme
(C) The Wiki page for phantasmagoria is not helpful, which does mention “magic lantern” of old times. You can go to the Wiki page to have a look at “magic lantern.” That is it. Then go to images.google.com to search with (phantasmagoria “magic lantern”), which is a sort fo projection.
(vi) simile (n; Latin for comparison) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/simile