Red Cavalry is an ambiguous and unstable literary text, an oneiric and mystifying reconstruction in which reality as it was lived by the author/narrator goes through several distorting prisms. The reader has to experience the same feeling of disorientation as Isaac Babel experienced during the Polish campaign in 1920. The War experience is translated into an experience of otherness. Lioutov, the narrator of Red Cavalry and Babel’s alter ego, is the “absolute stranger”: he is a Jew among Cossacks, an Intellectual among Soldiers, and a Bolshevik among Hasids. He looks at the world with external eyes, which prevents him from recognition and from subjection to identitarianism. The outsider’s look is a way of renewing perception, which is, according to Viktor Shklovsky, one of the main principles of the “defamiliarization” as a narrative technique that achieves singularity. Here we are talking about the irreducible singularity of the subject who is thinking of himself as an outsider and, consequently, resists all kinds of social determinism and normative forms of power and knowledge.