“Total destruction… the orchard, apiary, destruction of hives, bees buzzing despairingly, the men blow up hives with gunpowder… attack the hives, a wild orgy…I feel sick about it all,” [Isaac Babel] wrote in the diary, and one Red Calvary story begins: “I mourn for the bees…We defiled untold hives… There are no more bees in Volhynia.” Is this the same fate in store for the Jews? Babel wondered in his diary. “Can it be that ours is the century in which they perish?”
–Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty:
Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
photo by Natalie Long
