“The Story of My Dovecote” by I. Babel: New Commentary

The article supplements existing commentary on the first part of I. E. Babel’s autobiographical diptych, “The Story of My Dovecote”. The story itself, dedicated to the events that took place in October 1905 in Nikolaev, was written on the twentieth anniversary of the first Russian Revolution, the October Manifesto of Nicholas II, and the subsequent Jewish pogroms. As in most of Babel’s stories, the narrative is told in the first person, and the plot is largely based on real events from the author’s life, but these events are shifted forward by a year compared to Babel’s biography. As always, the writer uses an extraordinary combination of fact and fiction, shifting dates and topography, within a limited space of text. This can be fully applied to the characters in “The Story of My Dovecote”. One of the vivid characters in the story is Pyatnitsky, the assistant trustee, who attends the narrator’s entrance exam for the first grade of the gymnasium and shows sympathy for the Jewish boy. In the article, it is revealed that Pyatnitsky is a real person: Konstantin Aleksandrovich Pyatnitsky, who worked in the field of education, lived in Nikolaev at that time. However, he was not an assistant trustee but an inspector of public schools in the 5th district of the Kherson province, which included Nikolaev. We do not have any information about Pyatnitsky’s life. He is known for a short correspondence with A. P. Chekhov in April 1903, which was related to a request for help in treating a rural schoolteacher suffering from tuberculosis in Yalta. In July 1929, in Odessa, Pyatnitsky wrote a short memoir about Chekhov, consisting of two parts: a commentary on their correspondence and a recording of a story told by Pyatnitsky’s former colleague, a graduate of the Taganrog Gymnasium, I. F. Aldyrev, about Chekhov as a student. At the end of the article, two letters are provided in full.