Though I enjoyed the Zamyatin excerpts, I much preferred the Babel readings, “The Rabbi’s Son” and “My First Goose”. Though each one is quite short and only allows an in medias res snapshot of a moment, both works demonstrate a raw dedication to specifically Lenin’s works as well as a desolate sense of masculine existence.

In “The Rabbi’s Son”, we watch a young man die on a “wretched mattress”, the victim of gruesome war and subject to his gender. As a man, he was forced to leave his mother’s side: “When there’s a revolution on, a mother’s an episode,” (193). The concept of drafting young men into threatening certain-death warzones is depressing, especially in this story. The rabbi’s son is beaten down, slowly dying, dishonorable and weak amidst his Lenin leaflets and Hebrew texts. Reduced to a fading light, masculinity killed “my brother”.

Similarly, in Babel’s “My First Goose”, we see the protagonist’s affected mask of masculinity, battling with his glasses, as he interacts with his new crowd of soldiers, gruffly establishing himself among them. The most interesting interaction of gender roles, I thought, was between the man and the Landlady. When he asserts himself over her, even in the gruesome slaying of a goose (“The goose’s head burst under my boot and its brains spilled out”), she seems numbly unshaken: “Comrade… I could kill myself,” (208). The interaction proves to me a desolate desensitized regard for gender roles in the throes of war.