That’s how we lost Khlebnikov. I was very upset about this because Khlebnikov had been a quiet man, very similar to me in character. He was the only one in the squadron who owned a samovar. On days when there was a break in the fighting, the two of us drank hot tea. We were rattled by the same passions. Both of us looked upon the world as a meadow in May over which women and horses wander.
…”The Story of a Horse,” from Isaac Babel‘s Red Cavalry, which, and I say this with complete honesty, is among the two or three most astonishing, most blinding, most important things I’ve ever read in my life.