Taras Bulba and Other Tales

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz.

Taras Bulba and Other Tales

By Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Introduction by
John Cournos

Taras Bulba
St. John's Eve
The Cloak
How the Two Ivans Quarrelled
The Mysterious Portrait
The Calash

INTRODUCTION

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.

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."

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.

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."

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."

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. . . ."

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."

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."

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?

[1] Everyman's Library, No. 726.

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.

JOHN COURNOS

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.

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.

LIVES, etc.: (Russian) Kotlyarevsky (N. A.), 1903; Shenrok (V. I.),
Materials for a Biography, 1892; (French) Leger (L.), Nicholas Gogol,
1914.

TARAS BULBA

CHAPTER I

"Turn round, my boy! How ridiculous you look! What sort of a priest's
cassock have you got on? Does everybody at the academy dress like
that?"

With such words did old Bulba greet his two sons, who had been absent
for their education at the Royal Seminary of Kief, and had now
returned home to their father.

His sons had but just dismounted from their horses. They were a couple
of stout lads who still looked bashful, as became youths recently
released from the seminary. Their firm healthy faces were covered with
the first down of manhood, down which had, as yet, never known a
razor. They were greatly discomfited by such a reception from their
father, and stood motionless with eyes fixed upon the ground.

"Stand still, stand still! let me have a good look at you," he
continued, turning them around. "How long your gaberdines are! What
gaberdines! There never were such gaberdines in the world before. Just
run, one of you! I want to see whether you will not get entangled in
the skirts, and fall down."

"Don't laugh, don't laugh, father!" said the eldest lad at length.

"How touchy we are! Why shouldn't I laugh?"

"Because, although you are my father, if you laugh, by heavens, I will
strike you!"

"What kind of son are you? what, strike your father!" exclaimed Taras
Bulba, retreating several paces in amazement.

"Yes, even my father. I don't stop to consider persons when an insult
is in question."

"So you want to fight me? with your fist, eh?"

"Any way."

"Well, let it be fisticuffs," said Taras Bulba, turning up his
sleeves. "I'll see what sort of a man you are with your fists."

And father and son, in lieu of a pleasant greeting after long
separation, began to deal each other heavy blows on ribs, back, and
chest, now retreating and looking at each other, now attacking afresh.

"Look, good people! the old man has gone man! he has lost his senses
completely!" screamed their pale, ugly, kindly mother, who was
standing on the threshold, and had not yet succeeded in embracing her
darling children. "The children have come home, we have not seen them
for over a year; and now he has taken some strange freak--he's
pommelling them."

"Yes, he fights well," said Bulba, pausing; "well, by heavens!" he
continued, rather as if excusing himself, "although he has never tried
his hand at it before, he will make a good Cossack! Now, welcome, son!
embrace me," and father and son began to kiss each other. "Good lad!
see that you hit every one as you pommelled me; don't let any one
escape. Nevertheless your clothes are ridiculous all the same. What
rope is this hanging there?--And you, you lout, why are you standing
there with your hands hanging beside you?" he added, turning to the
youngest. "Why don't you fight me? you son of a dog!"

"What an idea!" said the mother, who had managed in the meantime to
embrace her youngest. "Who ever heard of children fighting their own
father? That's enough for the present; the child is young, he has had
a long journey, he is tired." The child was over twenty, and about six
feet high. "He ought to rest, and eat something; and you set him to
fighting!"

"You are a gabbler!" said Bulba. "Don't listen to your mother, my lad;
she is a woman, and knows nothing. What sort of petting do you need? A
clear field and a good horse, that's the kind of petting for you! And
do you see this sword? that's your mother! All the rest people stuff
your heads with is rubbish; the academy, books, primers, philosophy,
and all that, I spit upon it all!" Here Bulba added a word which is
not used in print. "But I'll tell you what is best: I'll take you to
Zaporozhe[1] this very week. That's where there's science for you!
There's your school; there alone will you gain sense."

[1] The Cossack country beyond (za) the falls (porozhe) of the
Dnieper.

"And are they only to remain home a week?" said the worn old mother
sadly and with tears in her eyes. "The poor boys will have no chance
of looking around, no chance of getting acquainted with the home where
they were born; there will be no chance for me to get a look at them."

"Enough, you've howled quite enough, old woman! A Cossack is not born
to run around after women. You would like to hide them both under your
petticoat, and sit upon them as a hen sits on eggs. Go, go, and let us
have everything there is on the table in a trice. We don't want any
dumplings, honey-cakes, poppy-cakes, or any other such messes: give us
a whole sheep, a goat, mead forty years old, and as much corn-brandy
as possible, not with raisins and all sorts of stuff, but plain
scorching corn-brandy, which foams and hisses like mad."

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