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<h1> TARAS BULBA AND OTHER TALES </h1>
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<h2> By Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol </h2>
<h3> Introduction by John Cournos </h3>
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<h2> INTRODUCTION </h2>
<p>Russian literature, so full of enigmas, contains no greater creative
mystery than Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol (1809-1852), who has done for the
Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian poetry.
Before these two men came Russian literature can hardly have been said to
exist. It was pompous and effete with pseudo-classicism; foreign
influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there was an
over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them the two
friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the debris which
made for sterility and erected in their stead a new structure out of
living Russian words. The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and
wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it
enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack
blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete
body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its
nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.</p>
<p>More than that. The nomad and romantic in him, troubled and restless with
Ukrainian myth, legend, and song, impressed upon Russian literature, faced
with the realities of modern life, a spirit titanic and in clash with its
material, and produced in the mastery of this every-day material, commonly
called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense with beauty. A clue to all Russian
realism may be found in a Russian critic’s observation about Gogol:
“Seldom has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so masterly in
portraying all that is unromantic in life.” But this statement does not
cover the whole ground, for it is easy to see in almost all of Gogol’s
work his “free Cossack soul” trying to break through the shell of sordid
to-day like some ancient demon, essentially Dionysian. So that his works,
true though they are to our life, are at once a reproach, a protest, and a
challenge, ever calling for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us. And
they have all the joy and sadness of the Ukrainian songs he loved so much.
Ukrainian was to Gogol “the language of the soul,” and it was in Ukrainian
songs rather than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little
contemptuous, that he read the history of his people. Time and again, in
his essays and in his letters to friends, he expresses his boundless joy
in these songs: “O songs, you are my joy and my life! How I love you. What
are the bloodless chronicles I pore over beside those clear, live
chronicles! I cannot live without songs; they... reveal everything more
and more clearly, oh, how clearly, gone-by life and gone-by men.... The
songs of Little Russia are her everything, her poetry, her history, and
her ancestral grave. He who has not penetrated them deeply knows nothing
of the past of this blooming region of Russia.”</p>
<p>Indeed, so great was his enthusiasm for his own land that after collecting
material for many years, the year 1833 finds him at work on a history of
“poor Ukraine,” a work planned to take up six volumes; and writing to a
friend at this time he promises to say much in it that has not been said
before him. Furthermore, he intended to follow this work with a universal
history in eight volumes with a view to establishing, as far as may be
gathered, Little Russia and the world in proper relation, connecting the
two; a quixotic task, surely. A poet, passionate, religious, loving the
heroic, we find him constantly impatient and fuming at the lifeless
chronicles, which leave him cold as he seeks in vain for what he cannot
find. “Nowhere,” he writes in 1834, “can I find anything of the time which
ought to be richer than any other in events. Here was a people whose whole
existence was passed in activity, and which, even if nature had made it
inactive, was compelled to go forward to great affairs and deeds because
of its neighbours, its geographic situation, the constant danger to its
existence.... If the Crimeans and the Turks had had a literature I am
convinced that no history of an independent nation in Europe would prove
so interesting as that of the Cossacks.” Again he complains of the
“withered chronicles”; it is only the wealth of his country’s song that
encourages him to go on with its history.</p>
<p>Too much a visionary and a poet to be an impartial historian, it is hardly
astonishing to note the judgment he passes on his own work, during that
same year, 1834: “My history of Little Russia’s past is an extraordinarily
made thing, and it could not be otherwise.” The deeper he goes into Little
Russia’s past the more fanatically he dreams of Little Russia’s future.
St. Petersburg wearies him, Moscow awakens no emotion in him, he yearns
for Kieff, the mother of Russian cities, which in his vision he sees
becoming “the Russian Athens.” Russian history gives him no pleasure, and
he separates it definitely from Ukrainian history. He is “ready to cast
everything aside rather than read Russian history,” he writes to Pushkin.
During his seven-year stay in St. Petersburg (1829-36) Gogol zealously
gathered historical material and, in the words of Professor Kotlyarevsky,
“lived in the dream of becoming the Thucydides of Little Russia.” How
completely he disassociated Ukrainia from Northern Russia may be judged by
the conspectus of his lectures written in 1832. He says in it, speaking of
the conquest of Southern Russia in the fourteenth century by Prince
Guedimin at the head of his Lithuanian host, still dressed in the skins of
wild beasts, still worshipping the ancient fire and practising pagan
rites: “Then Southern Russia, under the mighty protection of Lithuanian
princes, completely separated itself from the North. Every bond between
them was broken; two kingdoms were established under a single name—Russia—one
under the Tatar yoke, the other under the same rule with Lithuanians. But
actually they had no relation with one another; different laws, different
customs, different aims, different bonds, and different activities gave
them wholly different characters.”</p>
<p>This same Prince Guedimin freed Kieff from the Tatar yoke. This city had
been laid waste by the golden hordes of Ghengis Khan and hidden for a very
long time from the Slavonic chronicler as behind an impenetrable curtain.
A shrewd man, Guedimin appointed a Slavonic prince to rule over the city
and permitted the inhabitants to practise their own faith, Greek
Christianity. Prior to the Mongol invasion, which brought conflagration
and ruin, and subjected Russia to a two-century bondage, cutting her off
from Europe, a state of chaos existed and the separate tribes fought with
one another constantly and for the most petty reasons. Mutual depredations
were possible owing to the absence of mountain ranges; there were no
natural barriers against sudden attack. The openness of the steppe made
the people war-like. But this very openness made it possible later for
Guedimin’s pagan hosts, fresh from the fir forests of what is now White
Russia, to make a clean sweep of the whole country between Lithuania and
Poland, and thus give the scattered princedoms a much-needed cohesion. In
this way Ukrainia was formed. Except for some forests, infested with
bears, the country was one vast plain, marked by an occasional hillock.
Whole herds of wild horses and deer stampeded the country, overgrown with
tall grass, while flocks of wild goats wandered among the rocks of the
Dnieper. Apart from the Dnieper, and in some measure the Desna, emptying
into it, there were no navigable rivers and so there was little
opportunity for a commercial people. Several tributaries cut across, but
made no real boundary line. Whether you looked to the north towards
Russia, to the east towards the Tatars, to the south towards the Crimean
Tatars, to the west towards Poland, everywhere the country bordered on a
field, everywhere on a plain, which left it open to the invader from every
side. Had there been here, suggests Gogol in his introduction to his
never-written history of Little Russia, if upon one side only, a real
frontier of mountain or sea, the people who settled here might have formed
a definite political body. Without this natural protection it became a
land subject to constant attack and despoliation. “There where three
hostile nations came in contact it was manured with bones, wetted with
blood. A single Tatar invasion destroyed the whole labour of the
soil-tiller; the meadows and the cornfields were trodden down by horses or
destroyed by flame, the lightly-built habitations reduced to the ground,
the inhabitants scattered or driven off into captivity together with
cattle. It was a land of terror, and for this reason there could develop
in it only a warlike people, strong in its unity and desperate, a people
whose whole existence was bound to be trained and confined to war.”</p>
<p>This constant menace, this perpetual pressure of foes on all sides, acted
at last like a fierce hammer shaping and hardening resistance against
itself. The fugitive from Poland, the fugitive from the Tatar and the
Turk, homeless, with nothing to lose, their lives ever exposed to danger,
forsook their peaceful occupations and became transformed into a warlike
people, known as the Cossacks, whose appearance towards the end of the
thirteenth century or at the beginning of the fourteenth was a remarkable
event which possibly alone (suggests Gogol) prevented any further inroads
by the two Mohammedan nations into Europe. The appearance of the Cossacks
was coincident with the appearance in Europe of brotherhoods and
knighthood-orders, and this new race, in spite of its living the life of
marauders, in spite of turnings its foes’ tactics upon its foes, was not
free of the religious spirit of its time; if it warred for its existence
it warred not less for its faith, which was Greek. Indeed, as the nation
grew stronger and became conscious of its strength, the struggle began to
partake something of the nature of a religious war, not alone defensive
but aggressive also, against the unbeliever. While any man was free to
join the brotherhood it was obligatory to believe in the Greek faith. It
was this religious unity, blazed into activity by the presence across the
borders of unbelieving nations, that alone indicated the germ of a
political body in this gathering of men, who otherwise lived the audacious
lives of a band of highway robbers. “There was, however,” says Gogol,
“none of the austerity of the Catholic knight in them; they bound
themselves to no vows or fasts; they put no self-restraint upon themselves
or mortified their flesh, but were indomitable like the rocks of the
Dnieper among which they lived, and in their furious feasts and revels
they forgot the whole world. That same intimate brotherhood, maintained in
robber communities, bound them together. They had everything in common—wine,
food, dwelling. A perpetual fear, a perpetual danger, inspired them with a
contempt towards life. The Cossack worried more about a good measure of
wine than about his fate. One has to see this denizen of the frontier in
his half-Tatar, half-Polish costume—which so sharply outlined the
spirit of the borderland—galloping in Asiatic fashion on his horse,
now lost in thick grass, now leaping with the speed of a tiger from
ambush, or emerging suddenly from the river or swamp, all clinging with
mud, and appearing an image of terror to the Tatar....”</p>
<p>Little by little the community grew and with its growing it began to
assume a general character. The beginning of the sixteenth century found
whole villages settled with families, enjoying the protection of the
Cossacks, who exacted certain obligations, chiefly military, so that these
settlements bore a military character. The sword and the plough were
friends which fraternised at every settler’s. On the other hand, Gogol
tells us, the gay bachelors began to make depredations across the border
to sweep down on Tatars’ wives and their daughters and to marry them.
“Owing to this co-mingling, their facial features, so different from one
another’s, received a common impress, tending towards the Asiatic. And so
there came into being a nation in faith and place belonging to Europe; on
the other hand, in ways of life, customs, and dress quite Asiatic. It was
a nation in which the world’s two extremes came in contact; European
caution and Asiatic indifference, niavete and cunning, an intense activity
and the greatest laziness and indulgence, an aspiration to development and
perfection, and again a desire to appear indifferent to perfection.”</p>
<p>All of Ukraine took on its colour from the Cossack, and if I have drawn
largely on Gogol’s own account of the origins of this race, it was because
it seemed to me that Gogol’s emphasis on the heroic rather than on the
historical—Gogol is generally discounted as an historian—would
give the reader a proper approach to the mood in which he created “Taras
Bulba,” the finest epic in Russian literature. Gogol never wrote either
his history of Little Russia or his universal history. Apart from several
brief studies, not always reliable, the net result of his many years’
application to his scholarly projects was this brief epic in prose,
Homeric in mood. The sense of intense living, “living dangerously”—to
use a phrase of Nietzsche’s, the recognition of courage as the greatest of
all virtues—the God in man, inspired Gogol, living in an age which
tended toward grey tedium, with admiration for his more fortunate
forefathers, who lived in “a poetic time, when everything was won with the
sword, when every one in his turn strove to be an active being and not a
spectator.” Into this short work he poured all his love of the heroic, all
his romanticism, all his poetry, all his joy. Its abundance of life bears
one along like a fast-flowing river. And it is not without humour, a calm,
detached humour, which, as the critic Bolinsky puts it, is not there
merely “because Gogol has a tendency to see the comic in everything, but
because it is true to life.”</p>
<p>Yet “Taras Bulba” was in a sense an accident, just as many other works of
great men are accidents. It often requires a happy combination of
circumstances to produce a masterpiece. I have already told in my
introduction to “Dead Souls” (1) how Gogol created his great realistic
masterpiece, which was to influence Russian literature for generations to
come, under the influence of models so remote in time or place as “Don
Quixote” or “Pickwick Papers”; and how this combination of influences
joined to his own genius produced a work quite new and original in effect
and only remotely reminiscent of the models which have inspired it. And
just as “Dead Souls” might never have been written if “Don Quixote” had
not existed, so there is every reason to believe that “Taras Bulba” could
not have been written without the “Odyssey.” Once more ancient fire gave
life to new beauty. And yet at the time Gogol could not have had more than
a smattering of the “Odyssey.” The magnificent translation made by his
friend Zhukovsky had not yet appeared and Gogol, in spite of his ambition
to become a historian, was not equipped as a scholar. But it is evident
from his dithyrambic letter on the appearance of Zhukovsky’s version,
forming one of the famous series of letters known as “Correspondence with
Friends,” that he was better acquainted with the spirit of Homer than any
mere scholar could be. That letter, unfortunately unknown to the English
reader, would make every lover of the classics in this day of their
disparagement dance with joy. He describes the “Odyssey” as the forgotten
source of all that is beautiful and harmonious in life, and he greets its
appearance in Russian dress at a time when life is sordid and discordant
as a thing inevitable, “cooling” in effect upon a too hectic world. He
sees in its perfect grace, its calm and almost childlike simplicity, a
power for individual and general good. “It combines all the fascination of
a fairy tale and all the simple truth of human adventure, holding out the
same allurement to every being, whether he is a noble, a commoner, a
merchant, a literate or illiterate person, a private soldier, a lackey,
children of both sexes, beginning at an age when a child begins to love a
fairy tale—all might read it or listen to it, without tedium.” Every
one will draw from it what he most needs. Not less than upon these he sees
its wholesome effect on the creative writer, its refreshing influence on
the critic. But most of all he dwells on its heroic qualities, inseparable
to him from what is religious in the “Odyssey”; and, says Gogol, this book
contains the idea that a human being, “wherever he might be, whatever
pursuit he might follow, is threatened by many woes, that he must need
wrestle with them—for that very purpose was life given to him—that
never for a single instant must he despair, just as Odysseus did not
despair, who in every hard and oppressive moment turned to his own heart,
unaware that with this inner scrutiny of himself he had already said that
hidden prayer uttered in a moment of distress by every man having no
understanding whatever of God.” Then he goes on to compare the ancient
harmony, perfect down to every detail of dress, to the slightest action,
with our slovenliness and confusion and pettiness, a sad result—considering
our knowledge of past experience, our possession of superior weapons, our
religion given to make us holy and superior beings. And in conclusion he
asks: Is not the “Odyssey” in every sense a deep reproach to our
nineteenth century?</p>
<p>(1) Everyman’s Library, No. 726.<br/></p>
<p>An understanding of Gogol’s point of view gives the key to “Taras Bulba.”
For in this panoramic canvas of the Setch, the military brotherhood of the
Cossacks, living under open skies, picturesquely and heroically, he has
drawn a picture of his romantic ideal, which if far from perfect at any
rate seemed to him preferable to the grey tedium of a city peopled with
government officials. Gogol has written in “Taras Bulba” his own reproach
to the nineteenth century. It is sad and joyous like one of those
Ukrainian songs which have helped to inspire him to write it. And then, as
he cut himself off more and more from the world of the past, life became a
sadder and still sadder thing to him; modern life, with all its gigantic
pettiness, closed in around him, he began to write of petty officials and
of petty scoundrels, “commonplace heroes” he called them. But nothing is
ever lost in this world. Gogol’s romanticism, shut in within himself,
finding no outlet, became a flame. It was a flame of pity. He was like a
man walking in hell, pitying. And that was the miracle, the
transfiguration. Out of that flame of pity the Russian novel was born.</p>
<p>JOHN COURNOS</p>
<p>Evenings on the Farm near the Dikanka, 1829-31; Mirgorod, 1831-33; Taras
Bulba, 1834; Arabesques (includes tales, The Portrait and A Madman’s
Diary), 1831-35; The Cloak, 1835; The Revizor (The Inspector-General),
1836; Dead Souls, 1842; Correspondence with Friends, 1847; Letters, 1847,
1895, 4 vols. 1902.</p>
<p>ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS: Cossack Tales (The Night of Christmas Eve, Tarass
Boolba), trans. by G. Tolstoy, 1860; St. John’s Eve and Other Stories,
trans. by Isabel F. Hapgood, New York, Crowell, 1886; Taras Bulba: Also
St. John’s Eve and Other Stories, London, Vizetelly, 1887; Taras Bulba,
trans. by B. C. Baskerville, London, Scott, 1907; The Inspector: a Comedy,
Calcutta, 1890; The Inspector-General, trans. by A. A. Sykes, London,
Scott, 1892; Revizor, trans. for the Yale Dramatic Association by Max S.
Mandell, New Haven, Conn., 1908; Home Life in Russia (adaptation of Dead
Souls), London, Hurst, 1854; Tchitchikoff’s Journey’s; or Dead Souls,
trans. by Isabel F. Hapgood, New York, Crowell, 1886; Dead Souls, London,
Vizetelly, 1887; Dead Souls, London, Maxwell 1887; Dead Souls, London,
Fisher Unwin, 1915; Dead Souls, London, Everyman’s Library (Intro. by John
Cournos), 1915; Meditations on the Divine Liturgy, trans. by L. Alexeieff,
London, A. R. Mowbray and Co., 1913.</p>
<p>LIVES, etc.: (Russian) Kotlyarevsky (N. A.), 1903; Shenrok (V. I.),
Materials for a Biography, 1892; (French) Leger (L.), Nicholas Gogol,
1914.</p>
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